An Old-Fashioned Mayor

Quotes from Pope Francis

• "When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything. But that is not so."
• “He created human beings and let them develop according to the internal laws that he gave to each one so they would reach their fulfillment."
• “The Big Bang, which today we hold to be the origin of the world, does not contradict the intervention of the divine creator but, rather, requires it."
• “Evolution in nature is not inconsistent with the notion of creation, because evolution requires the creation of beings that evolve.”

From a talk at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences

Baby turtles

The Red Cross: PR or Charity

In the past several years, I've written a number of posts about the Red Cross. They have not been favorable: the lack of transparency, problems with its handling of blood, fines, rapid turnover of presidents, etc.  ProPublica has a scathing indictment of the Red Cross handling of the storms Isaac and Sandy. The essential point is that the organization is more focused on public relations than helping people.

The report uses a number of documents internal to the Red Cross to make its point. One internal document admits that the organization “diverted assets for public relations purposes,” and that distribution of relief supplies was “politically driven.”

One of the assets most commonly used for PR was emergency vehicles, which were often used as backdrops for press conferences rather than ferrying supplies. The whole matter of supplies was another issue. According to interviews and documents, the Red Cross lacked basic supplies like food, blankets and batteries to distribute to victims in the days just after the storms. Sometimes, even when supplies were plentiful, they went to waste. In one case, the Red Cross had to throw out tens of thousands of meals because it couldn’t find the people who needed them.

They probably also lost a lot of volunteers. Some were ordered to stay in Tampa long after it became clear that Isaac would bypass the city. After Sandy, volunteers wandered the streets of New York in search of stricken neighborhoods, lost because they had not been given GPS equipment to guide them. Some volunteers were too old or not well prepared for disaster relief. The “ biggest challenge,” one top Red Cross official said in the December 2012 meeting, is the “skillset that is possessed by our workforce.” Another was even more stark: The “ caliber of the people is a major issue (this is not a training issue),” according to the meeting minutes. The Red Cross acknowledges that nearly two-thirds of the volunteers responding to Sandy had never before provided relief after a large disaster.

They made conditions more unsafe. Red Cross officials are supposed to track sex offenders who come to shelters and confer with law enforcement. But staff “didn’t know/follow procedures,” the presentation notes. There was an additional problem with “ unrelated adults showering with children.”

The PR campaign did pay off. Last year the Red Cross received more than $1 billion in donations. 

Auditing the Postal Service

A recent audit by the Inspector General of the Postal Service revealed that there were nearly 50,000 requests last year from law enforcement agencies and the Postal Services' internal inspection unit to secretly monitor the mail of Americans for use in criminal and national security investigations. When a request is approved, postal workers record names, return addresses and any other information from the outside of letters and packages before they are delivered to a person’s home.

In many cases the Postal Service approved requests to monitor an individual’s mail without adequately describing the reason or having proper written authorization. Furthermore, the audit revealed that many requests were not processed in time and computer errors caused the same tracking number to be assigned to different surveillance requests.

Orwell's 1984 is here once more this year.

Electing Judges

In Massachusetts where I grew up all judges are appointed. I have never voted for a judge; however in 38 states judges are elected. And some judges do raise campaign funds. It used to be that not much money needed to be raised. But that was in the old days. In 2010 the money spent on judicial elections nationwide had increased to $38.7 million. In 2012 this number had increased by almost 50% to $56.4 million.

Is this a good thing? Don't we expect judges to be impartial? What would they do if a large contributor had a case before the judge?

There is even an organization that tracks this money. It's called Justice at Stake. In the eyes of its executive director, “We are seeing money records broken all over the country. Right now, we are watching big money being spent in Michigan. We are seeing the same thing in Montana and Ohio. There is even money going into a district court race in Missouri. This is the new normal.”

It is a non-profit, after all

Many non-profits need volunteers in order to meet their goals. Naturally, the NFL is looking for volunteers for this year's Super Bowl in Arizona. They only need a few - like 10,000.

The league drives a hard bargain with cities that host the Super Bowl. Here's what its getting from Minneapolis, site of the 2018 Super Bowl:

    every cent of ticket revenue 
 · 35,000 free parking spaces 
 · Free ads in local newspapers and on radio stations, and lots of free billboards 
· All ATMs at the stadium must be those with NFL-approved credit cards 
 · Free presidential suites in the top hotels 
 · If cellphone reception isn't quite good enough around and about, then Minneapolis has to build the NFL sufficient new cellphone towers 
 · The NFL even unsuccessfully tried to demand the right to select the only vendors at the airport — the public airport — who could sell NFL merchandise.

That's the kind of support most non-profits get. Right?

He's 88

When do you let go?

A year or so ago a young Israeli moved to Berlin primarily because of the high cost of living in Israel. He took advantage of a German practice that makes passports available to any Jews whose parents or grandparents were German. 

Recently, he decided that other Israelis should come to Berlin and used his Facebook page to make his case. His post featured a shopping receipt and asked Israelis to compare what they would have spent on a similar shopping outing. The page was a big hit, attracting 1,000,000 views in just four days. 

Some Israelis were upset. A former Israeli Finance Ministry director general, Doron Cohen, said “Those who want to leave Israel, and pick Berlin of all places, descend to the lowest possible moral level. This website wants to ruin the reputation of our country. I don’t think there is anything more abominable than that.” There were many other negative reactions as some see the idea as appearing to cast relocating to Berlin as moving to the promised land.

Granted the Holocaust was evil and inhuman. But WWII has been over for 69 years. It's a different Germany. Should this posting be the most abominable thing in today's world?

Boston and the Sea

Boston was lucky that Hurricane Sandy did not do much damage. In fact, there was a good side to Sandy for Boston. It got them thinking about the predicted rise in sea level of up to 6 feet by 2100. 

One of their thoughts is to build a network of canals, ala Venice or Amsterdam. The canals would criss-cross the streets of the Back Bay - a neighborhood which was actually a tidal bay before it began to be filled in and built on 150 years ago. The hope is that the network would make the historic district even more attractive, if it works. 

The planners do not have their heads in a barrel. They know that Boston has a much larger range in tides that Venice or Amsterdam. Thus, "the canals would be either high part of the time or low part of the time. So we would have to decide whether they would be really deep or tidal." They are also looking at a more conventional solution by shoring up the foundations of Back Bay houses and make sure important infrastructure, such as electrical and mechanical equipment, was lifted up above the likely level of any flooding.

A vision of Clarendon Street

Truly A Gilded Age

New York City is a special place. You can pay tens of millions for an apartment but still have to pay for such 'amenities' as a storage space ($75,000 for a 35-square-foot storage space), wine cellars (more than $100 a bottle), a maid's room (almost $3,000,000), and an underground parking spot for $1 million. In most of these cases you are licensing the amenity, not buying it. The license is for 100 years, but terminates if you sell your apartment.

Delaware, the corporation's state

Most major corporations incorporate in Delaware. Now the Delaware Supreme Court has given them another reason to do so. Now, a company can adopt, without shareholder approval, bylaws requiring investors who file lawsuits against it to pay the company’s legal fees if the suit is unsuccessful. Many legal experts say that this fee-shifting will result in fewer shareholder actions and less accountability.

Although the Court ruled in May, already more than two dozen companies have added fee-shifting language to their governing documents. Some have adopted new bylaws requiring that shareholders pay legal costs; others have simply disclosed the fee-shifting requirement in initial public offering statements.

The IRS and Civil Forfeiture

Earlier this month I posted a John Oliver segment on civil forfeiture; it focused on local police efforts to seize money from innocent people. Today the NY Times has an article about the IRS work in this area. Here, the focus is on deposits you make in your bank.

If you deposit $10,000 or more in your account, the government must be informed as it is possible these funds have been obtained illegally via drugs, terrorist financings or other criminal means. But our ever-vigilant government is also on the alert for some deposits under $10,000. The deposit might have been kept under $10,000 so that an official report need not be filed. However, the government is still interested. In fact, they took these deposits in 639 cases in 2012 (this is up from 114 in 2005). The money can be taken without the government filing a criminal complaint; the depositors are left to prove their innocence. Most of the takings do not reach the courts; in only 20% of the cases does the government bring the depositor to court.

Declining Education

Nicholas Kristof devotes today's column to an analysis of an OECD study of education around the world. While the title of the report is Education at a Glance 2014, the report is over 500 pages long. Nonetheless it has some interesting charts. Unlike years ago, we are not at the top of any chart.

One of the most interesting charts to me is A1.2. It categorizes secondary school education into general orientation, vocational orientation and no distinction by orientation. We rate twelfth but have no distinction by orientation. A good deal of our problem is the inequality that has become a definition of the U.S. today. Rich areas have better schools.

We are also weak in the number of 3-year-olds being educated. Other OECD countries educate an average of 70 percent of their 3-year-olds; we educate 38 percent. Our teachers work longer hours than most but make less money compared to other college-educated workers.

2 Interesting Charts

By Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman via the Washington Post

Does the IRS need a shake-up?

That's what some of its employees and ex-employees say. They say that, despite their being an IRS Whistleblower Office, the IRS bosses "intentionally undermined the authority" of it. Furthermore, the bosses are accused of "deliberately" facilitating multibillion-dollar tax giveaways avoid taking action "in cases involving billions in corporate taxes due." As a result, they claim that the large corporate taxpayers are favored over everybody else.

They are asking Congress to audit the IRS.

UNC comes clean

Over the past few years, there have been more than a few claims that athletes at UNC received favorable treatment. In fact, the treatment was so favorable, that the athletes did not have to go to class. An administrator created a paper world which showed athletes attending and passing courses. Surprisingly, this went on for 18 years and at least 3,100 students benefited from these paper classes.

Thus far, four employees have been fired and five more disciplined because of their roles. 

This is another indication of the primacy given to college athletics rather than to college education.

Another Secret Service Faux Pas

It looks as though that some members of the  Secret Service feel a strong pull to defend a fellow employee, so strong that they have to leave the White House. Sometime in 2011 an agency employee was in a dispute with a neighbor. The neighbor was arrested and the employee took out a protective order. She also told one of the higher-ups in the agency about her problem. The higher-up did help her by sending two agents to her home. Unfortunately, these agents were at work protecting the President and/or the White House. These agents visited the neighbor on at least five days, one of these visits lasted eight hours. The neighbor did not live next door to the White House. Her home was "a 50-minute drive (without traffic) from the White House". 

What's going on in Canada?

On Monday, two soldiers were run over in a suburb of Montreal. One died. Today, the Parliament in Ottawa was attacked by at least one gunman and another soldier was killed.

Have the terrorists concluded that Canada is more vulnerable than the U.S.? If so, Canada will soon correct them of their wrong conclusion.

Some photographs

The Natural History Museum of London has an annual Wildlife Photographer of the Year Competition. Here are some of the winners:

 The Grand Winner

Courtesy of Business Insider

Cluster Bombs

You never stop learning. Today, I learned about cluster bombs, which appear to be especially destructive weapons. Basically, the cluster bomb is made up of many bombs - it could be hundreds - combined into one package. The package breaks up before it hits the ground so that the individual bombs explode over areas as large as a football field. But not all of the bombs do explode; some essentially become land mines.

They have been used since WWII; the U.S. used them in Iraq and Afghanistan. 114 countries have signed a 2008 treaty banning cluster munitions. China, India, Israel, Pakistan, Russia, and the United States have refrained from signing the treaty.

Terrorism in America

The beheadings performed by ISIS are considered particularly gruesome. Yet. similar crimes by Americans against Americans seldom hit the front page. Micah Zenko believes that "We treat "terrorism" in the common vernacular differently because it is ascribed to foreigners who are unlike us, whereas similarly savage behavior conducted by fellow Americans is a reflection of us."

He talks about three particularly heinous crimes that occurred recently in this country: a beheading in Oklahoma, a grandfather in Florida killing his daughter and all six of her children (ages 11, 9, 8, 5, 4, and 3 months), and a technician in Illinois who selectively severed data and communications cables, destroyed computer equipment, and wrapped gasoline-soaked towels around additional cables and set them on fire resulting in an estimated loss in economic activity of $123 million.

The greatest threats by country

Vox has summarized a recent Pew survey in which people in 44 countries were asked what they considered "the greatest threat in the world" from a list of five possible answers: religious and ethnic hatred, inequality, AIDS and other diseases, nuclear weapons, and pollution/the environment.

First, they presented the countries where each of the five categories above were considered the greatest threat.

Then they listed all of the countries they surveyed. We, the US, are pretty evenly split between seeing religious and ethnic hatred, inequality, and nuclear weapons as the biggest threats.

The nose can be related to the spine

In 2010 Darek Fidyka was paralyzed from the chest down in a knife attack. He now can walk after scientists transplanted cells from his nasal cavity into his spinal cord. The secret is that some cells in the nose regenerate throughout our adult life. The scientists moved some of these cells from his nose to his spine.

It's true that he cannot walk without aid; he uses something called a frame in England. It took about three months before Fidyka began to notice changes in his body as his left thigh began putting on muscle. Three months later he took his first steps along parallel bars, using leg braces and the support of a physiotherapist. Two years after the treatment, he can now walk outside the rehabilitation center using a frame. He has also recovered some bladder and bowel sensation and sexual function. He works hard: he exercises five hours per day, five days a week.

Janet Yellen provides some numbers of inequality in America

From a speech at the Boston Fed:

“The wealthiest 5 percent of American households held 54 percent of all wealth reported in the 1989 survey. Their share rose to 61 percent in 2010 and reached 63 percent in 2013;"

“The lower half of households by wealth, held just 3 percent of wealth in 1989 and only 1 percent in 2013. To put that in perspective…the average net worth of the lower half of the distribution, representing 62 million households, was $11,000 in 2013.”

“This $11,000 average is 50 percent lower than the average wealth of the lower half of families in 1989, adjusted for inflation.”

A “major source of wealth for many families is financial assets, including stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and private pensions…the wealthiest 5 percent of households held nearly two-thirds of all such assets in 2013…”

The Rhetoric of Terrorism

Tomis Kapitan reminds us that words have consequences. A word that is particularly popular these days is "terrorism". The way it is used prevents a considered, thoughtful analysis of the reasons underlying a particular terror. For example, the President has said that ISIS "is a terrorist organization, pure and simple. And it has no vision other than the slaughter of all who stand in its way.” While ISIS has done some inhumanly disgusting things, do they really have no goal other than killing people? Would it not be wise to find out what their goals really are? Might this knowledge not enable us to 'fight' them better and more rationally? Without such knowledge are we not aggravating the situation?

Should we also not look at ourselves? Is our bombing of residential districts, schools and hospitals in the name of fighting terrorism not itself terrorism, when most of the victims are innocent civilians? 

Kapitan's conclusion:

In condemning terrorism, we think of it as something to be eliminated at all costs. Yet, in sanctioning the use of modern weaponry to achieve this end, regardless of its impact upon civilian populations, we are effectively advocating the very thing we condemn, and this is closer to doublethink than we should ever wish to be.

Fulfilling our obligations

Embezzling from the Vatican Bank

Monsignor Nunzio Scarano was a top accountant at the Vatican Bank. He is now on trial for money laundering in what he says was an attempt to help a friend. He also helped himself while at the Bank; an Italian judge calculated Monsignor Scarano’s wealth at more than $8.2 million, though the Vatican paid the priest just $41,000 a year. He owned a 17-room, $1.7 million house in Salerno.

But, as we know, the Vatican Bank has not exactly been a paragon of virtue. Pope Francis has replaced most of the executives and staff at the Bank.

Head of the Charles Regatta

The weather was perfect yesterday and the photos of the river and Cambridge are delightful.  This is the biggest two-day rowing event in the world. It attracts 11,000 athletes and 400,000 spectators.

A Liberian Point of View re Ebola

The UN speaks out against bulk surveillance

Ben Emmerson QC, the UN’s special rapporteur on counter-terrorism, has issued a report detailing how much monitoring the UK and US do via their bulk surveillance programs. As we know, bulk surveillance indiscriminately swallows up digital or telephonic communications data. Emmerson feels that this technology violates people's right to privacy.

Emmerson also castigates security programs which take “secret control over servers in key locations” and by impersonating websites “inject unauthorized remote control software into the computers and Wi-Fi-enabled devices of those who visit the clone site”.

Mistakes in dealing with ISIS?

Steven Walt lists what he thinks are the major mistakes we are making re ISIS:

Mistake No. 1: Exaggerating the Threat
ISIS is a regional problem, yet many of our leadership talk about their atacking us tomorrow.

Mistake No. 2: Squandering U.S. Leverage
"A recurring problem in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy has been the insistence that no problem can be solved if Uncle Sam isn't leading the charge. The more Washington promises to do for them, the less our local partners will do for themselves."

Mistake No. 3: Failure to Set Clear Priorities
"Is it more important to defeat IS, remove Bashar al-Assad from power in Syria, or keep Iran isolated and halt its nuclear program forever? Because these goals are inherently contradictory"

Mistake No. 4: Assuming Others Share Our Worldview and Our Interests 
"A perennial failure of U.S. diplomacy is the tendency to think our interests and our worldview are unquestionably correct and that only our worst enemies are going to disagree with us."

Mistake No. 5: Overpromising and Underachieving
"Here's one big lesson we might draw from our past follies: Most people don't like being told what to do and how to live by a well-armed and heavy-handed foreign invader, especially when that invader doesn't speak their language, doesn't understand their culture, and when its invasion has killed some of their relatives, disrupted their economy, and destroyed existing political institutions. Under these conditions, some of those angry people will organize resistance, and because it's their country, they are likely to fight both fiercely and effectively, even if they are badly outgunned. A second lesson: An armed force is a crude instrument that can destroy but not build, and it is no substitute for effective governance.

Finally, if our primary concern is U.S. security, Washington ought to direct the billions we are currently spending on bombing IS to making sure its recruits can't return home to cause trouble here."

What is NNT?

It stands for the number needed to treat. It was developed in the 1980s by a trio of epidemiologists to weigh the benefits of a specific treatment. It describes how many people would need to take a drug for one person to benefit.

For example, it would take 2000 people to have a daily baby aspirin for one (nonfatal) heart attack to be prevented. The NNT here is 2000. Is it worth taking the aspirin? The doctors behind the NNT have a web site, TheNNT.com, that can be accessed to start answering the question. There is even a color-coding system to help you: Green for when a treatment makes sense, yellow for when more study is needed, red for when the harms and the benefits cancel each other out, and black when the harms outweigh the benefits.

The evangelists for NNT want doctors to base their treatments on good scientific evidence, not tradition, hunch, and the fear that patients will see them as doing nothing. The NNT can tell doctors when to do something and when something is not likely to be useful—or can even be harmful. "Once we, patients and families and doctors alike, get our heads around the idea that we shouldn’t always expect a drug or a procedure, we can begin to expect the right level of medicine and not just medicine for medicine’s sake."

Wasting Time

I guess judges in Lenoir City, Tn. don't have much to do. Perhaps, there is no crime there or maybe there are too many judges. Anyway, one judge sentenced a woman to five days in jail because she did not maintain a neat and orderly yard.

“With my husband going to school and working full time, me with my job, with one vehicle, we were trying our best,” said Karen Holloway. 

Perhaps, she should have hired a gardener or quit her job to mow the lawn.

Talk about wasting government resources!

You do forget

Reading a review by Aryeh Neier of a book about the burglary of an FBI office by protesters in 1971 reminded me of some of the un-American activities of the FBI under Hoover. Here are some of the activities Neier lists: 

• In November 1969, for example, a New York City–based organization, the Fifth Avenue Peace Parade Committee, chartered hundreds of buses to take opponents of the war to a large demonstration in Washington, D.C. A clerk in the bank where the committee kept its account revealed that the FBI came to the bank to photograph the checks of those who reserved places on the buses so as to identify participants in the demonstration. 
• One way that protesters were punished in that era was that young men who took part in antiwar demonstrations were reclassified by their draft boards to accelerate their call-up to perform military service. 
• It was also a period in which Americans found out that other agencies of the federal government were engaged in political surveillance. More than a year before the burglary in Media, Pennsylvania, Captain Christopher Pyle revealed that the United States Army had deployed more than a thousand soldiers full-time to conduct domestic political surveillance, focusing on opponents of the war.

The following were discovered in the burglary:

• An FBI newsletter advised agents to “enhance the paranoia” and “get the point across there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox.” 
• A directive by J. Edgar Hoover ordered that “all BSUs [Black Student Unions] and similar organizations organized to project the demands of black students” were to be targets of surveillance; another ordered the creation of a dossier on every black student at nearby Swarthmore College, where the bureau’s informants included a campus security officer, the local chief of police, the postmaster, the secretary to the college registrar, and a college switchboard operator. 
• A student at the college who was the daughter of Henry Reuss, a representative from Wisconsin who spoke out against the Vietnam War, was targeted for surveillance; and 
• a routing slip in the files used the then-unfamiliar term “COINTELPRO,” with no explanation of its meaning.

We learned that COINTELPRO was a program launched by the FBI in 1956 to “expose, disrupt and otherwise neutralize” a large number of organizations—old and new left, anti-war, black activist, American Indian, and others—by such means as creating and fostering personal conflicts and arousing suspicions about sexual misconduct and financial irregularities. 

• As part of the program, the FBI sent “poison pen” letters to break up marriages; there were incitements by the FBI to gang warfare; and members of a violent group were falsely labeled as police informers. 
• The bureau attempted to persuade the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.—the target of what seems to have been COINTELPRO’s most sustained campaign—to commit suicide just before he traveled to Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. 
• Some COINTELPRO activities were carried out by the FBI through burglaries, the method the antiwar activists used to expose the bureau’s practices.

Storing eggs

The eggs I'm talking about are those in a woman's body. Some Silicon Valley companies, including Apple and Facebook, are offering up to $20,000 to finance the procedure to extract the eggs and store them. This will allow women to put off pregnancy in a more certain way. This is being done because of the fierce competition for talent in the Valley.

I do believe in birth control but I think this goes a little bit too far. It just sounds weird to me.

Another cost of the war in Iraq

It appears that we used a fair amount of depleted uranium (DU) munitions in our rifle rounds and tank shells. As a result, many Iraqi doctors are reporting sharp rises in a number of illnesses, particularly congenital birth defects and cancer. The incidence of cancer has gone from 40 per 100,000 people in 1991 to 1600 per 100,000 in 2005 and it's still increasong. Plus, diseases that were never seen in Iraq - such as new illnesses in the kidney, lungs and liver, as well as total immune system collapse - are now there. 

Congenital birth defects are particularly strange, for example, children being born with two heads, children born with only one eye, multiple tumors, disfiguring facial and body deformities, and complex nervous system problems. Some have calculated the rate of birth defects to be 33 times that of Europe.

Military Strategy

Beer Barrels

Barrel Aging at Allagash from Allagash Brewing on Vimeo.

Ebola vs. ISIS

Where should we spend our money? It looks as though we choose ISIS. The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments estimates annual costs to bomb ISIS could be as high as $6.8 billion. That's without boots on the ground, which could add another $22 billion a year if we had 5,000 troops there.

Obama has allocated $1 billion to fight Ebola, much of which will go to the 3,200 US military personnel to build Ebola Treatment Units (ETUs) in Liberia in an effort to contain the spread of the disease, meaning these troops will be exposed to the virus in the process. But,since 2010, we have cut budgets for the CDC and NIH by $1 billion. 

Greenhouse gas emissions

By state

Learn About Tableau

Per Capita

Learn About Tableau

Early days of a possible medical solution

Clostridium difficile, as its name suggests, is a bacterial infection that affects the intestines. It kills 14,000 people in this country each year. The only successful treatment is the transplantation of feces in liquid form from healthy people to patients with stubborn infections. Antibiotics are not very helpful.

But fecal transplants are not easy. The procedure requires delivery of a fecal solution via the rectum or a tube inserted through the nose. As with colonoscopies, patients must flush their bowels first. And it is not easy to find donors. Nor is it cheap.

Researchers at Mass. General Hospital have developed a capsule that in a very small trial worked wonders. The capsule contains human feces — strained, centrifuged and frozen. Those in the trial took it for two days and almost all of them reported improvements.

Funding police departments

The Washington Post has a wonderful article about police seizure of assets, typically cash, from people like us without a warrant of any kind. Many of these seizures are made when stopping drivers on the road. 2001 was when the Justice Department started to really emphasize its Equitable Sharing Program, which allows police to take cash and property without proving a crime has occurred.

The police have seized $2.5 billion dollars under this program since 2001. They get to keep 80% of it, the feds get the remainder. Although the law was meant to decimate drug organizations, it has become a routine source of funding for law enforcement at every level. The money can be used for overtime pay, training, building construction and improvements and equipment — everything from file cabinets and fitness gear to automatic weapons, surveillance systems and cars. They also can use proceeds to buy food and drinks at conferences or during disaster operations. For almost 500 departments these funds have amounted to 20% or more of their budget since 2008.

Justice does not do much to ascertain the funds are being spent on valid legal purposes. They conduct four audits a year although more than 5,000 police departments have received funds under the program.

More than taking care of balls

I thought a football ball boy simply took care of balls. A former ball boy for the Chicago Bears says that's not the case. 

He carried smelling salts which were needed when a player came off the field after a big hit. The salts revived the player; at least he was once more alert. The ball boy also went on the field to pick up shattered fragments from exploded helmets. He also sorted through postgame laundry, putting uniforms whose girdles were filled with blood and feces in a special bin for disposal.

The writer urges fans to demand that the NFL provides its players with more and better mental health resources.

Why should this man not have a driver's license

That's because he is a Pastafarian and wears a spaghetti strainer on his head. He had a license but the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia determined that the photo could not be used for his license. Countries in Europe don't think the headgear interferes with driving and grant licenses. But B.C. is adamant, despite the question of freedom of religion..

More work on bionic limbs

Bionic hands can now have a sense of touch. Scientists at Case Western attached sensors to the bionic hand and in surgery fitted "cuffs" around the remaining nerves, which were capable of delivering electronic stimulation. Then, they "mapped" these sensations to 19 different locations on the hand, from the palm to the tip of the thumb, and matched the sensors to the different electronic patterns of stimulation. Finally, for now, they did some work with pressure and textures so that the patient knows whether he is handling different materials such as Velcro or sandpaper, even when he is blindfolded.

In Sweden they improved control by anchoring bionic arms directly onto the bone. The arm is wired to send different patterns of electronic stimulation to the nerves. These were interpreted in the brain as different sensations.

Knowing the cost of a medical procedure before you get the bill

Massachusetts has taken the first step in providing costs of medical services to we mere human beings. It recently passed a law requiring that insurers offer real-time prices for those with private health insurance. The law is not perfect:

• Prices are not standard
• Posted prices may or may not include all charges
• Prices seem to change frequently.
• There is no standard list of priced tests and procedures
• The quality information is weak
• There are very few prices for inpatient care.

But it is a first step.

Blood Moon

As seen from Milwaukee

As seen from behind a galleon-shaped weather vane in Miami

From the BBC

Terror-phobia

From Tom Engelhardt. He and I think alike. This is an almost perfect description of America today. (My emphases)

"Let’s be honest.  Post-9/11, when it comes to our own safety (and so where our tax dollars go), we’ve become as mad as loons.  Worse yet, the panic, fear, and hysteria over the dangers of terrorism may be the only thing left that ties us as a citizenry to a world in which so many acts of a destructive nature are being carried out in our name. 

The history of the demobilization of the American people as a true force in their own country’s actions abroad could be said to have begun in 1973, when a draft army was officially put into the history books.  In the years before that, in Vietnam and at home, the evidence of how such an army could vote with its feet and through its activism had been too much for the top brass, and so the citizen army, that creation of the French Revolution, was ended with a stroke of the presidential pen.  The next time around, the ranks were to be filled with “volunteers,” thanks in part to millions of dollars sunk into Mad Men-style advertising. 

In the meantime, those in charge wanted to make sure that the citizenry was thoroughly demobilized and sent home.  In the wake of 9/11, this desire was expressed particularly vividly when President George W. Bush urged Americans to show their patriotism (and restore the fortunes of the airlines) by visiting Disney World, vacationing, and going about their business, while his administration took care of al-Qaeda (and of course, invaded Afghanistan and Iraq). 

In the ensuing years, propaganda for and an insistence that we “support,” “thank,” and adulate our “warriors” (in ways that would have been inconceivable with a citizen’s army) became the order of the day.  At the same time, that force morphed into an ever more “professional,” “expeditionary” and “foreign” (as in Foreign Legion-style) outfit.  When it came to the U.S. military, adulation was the only relationship that all but a tiny percentage of Americans were to be allowed.  For those in the ever-expanding U.S. military-industrial-homeland-security-intelligence-corporate complex, terror was the gift that just kept giving, the excuse for any institution-building action and career enhancement, no matter how it might contravene previous American traditions.    

In this context, perhaps we should think of the puffing up of an ugly but limited reality into an all-encompassing, eternally “imminent” threat to our way of life as the final chapter in the demobilization of the American people.  Terror-phobia, after all, leaves you feeling helpless and in need of protection.  The only reasonable response to it is support for whatever actions your government takes to keep you "safe."

Fixing Fracking?

One of the major problems with fracking is the leaking of methane, which is the primary ingredient in natural gas, and, when it is burned, is considerably less dirty than coal. However, before it is burned if it should get into the atmosphere (which is just about a certainty), it is 84 to 86 times more powerful than carbon dioxide over a 20-year span.

Studies have shown that there are forty separate types of equipment - such as Loose pipe flanges. Leaky storage tanks. Condenser valves stuck open. Outdated compressors. Inefficient pneumatic systems. Corroded pipes. - that can produce methane emissions during the production and processing of natural gas and oil by fracking.

Lowering methane emissions does not require enormously expensive new technology. It can be done with technology that already exists and at fairly minimal cost, perhaps as low as a penny. Furthermore, a 50 percent reduction in methane emissions is the equivalent to closing 90 coal-fired power plants, according to the Environmental Defense Fund.

One state, Colorado, is doing something about it. They have imposed regulations aimed at reducing methane emissions. And industry has gone along with them. Some quotes “we could see the benefit of the rules.” “It really puts a very disciplined process around regular maintenance.”

Wilderness is important in many ways

Oliver on Civil Forfeiture

Recall #74

GM has issued its 74th recall this year and there are still 86 days left. This is a small one, only 61,000. This brings the total worldwide to 30,000,000 cars. The affected cars this time were Cadillac, Pontiac and Chevrolet. 

Counting the fatalities from football

There is an Annual Survey of Football Injury Research produced by the NCAA and related organizations. It goes into a fair amount of detail. One classification is fatalities those that happened when playing football covering the period 1931 - 2013:

Sandlot         180

Semi-Pro        80

High School   686

College           89

Total           1035

Those that were related to football, such as heat stroke, in the same period:

Sandlot         115

Semi-Pro        23 

High School   502 

College         119 

Total             759

That works out to almost 22 deaths per year!

Scalia is not a constructionist

or so says Cenk Uygur

Quick one by Bill Black

How important is a name?

Many Muslims outside of the Middle East are up in arms about the use of the word 'state' when referring to ISIS. Some are so upset that they have formed a Twitter hashtag #NotInMyName. 

While most of the protest seems to be about words, in France it's a different story. There, a Muslim leader called for a protest meeting relative to the beheading of a French mountaineering guide last month. And hundreds of Muslims listened to him and gathered outside the Great Mosque of Paris to express their revulsion over the brutality of a group whose name and ideology, they said, was an insult to Muslims everywhere.

The leader, Ahmet Ogras, vice president of the French Council of the Muslim Faith, went further, “This is not a state; this is a terrorist organization. I call them terrorists because that’s what they are. One has to call a dog a dog." Ogras is worried that the now-common use of the name Islamic State threatened to stigmatize France’s Muslims, Europe’s largest Muslim community. He also said that the name conferred unwarranted legitimacy on a group carrying out killings in the name of Islam.

Defeating ISIS and Company

Nicholas Kristof thinks that ISIS and others have a better long run strategy than we do. Their strategy is to prevent their world from becoming more like ours in education and the empowerment of women. By doing so they encourage the illiteracy, ignorance and oppression of women which are necessary for their kind of extremism to flourish. He believes that a basic truth of their universe is: "Their greatest strategic threat comes not from a drone but from a girl with a book. We need to recognize, and act on, that truth as well."

Kristof thinks we are more focused on the short run (bombing) than on the long run (education, empowerment of women, communications). Our military campaign against ISIS is estimated to cost $2.4 billion a year. How many kids could be educated for that amount of money? We give less to the Global Partnership for Education, a major multilateral effort, in a year than what we spend weekly in Syria and Iraq. We could do more to help the 3,000,000 Syrian refugees get schooling. They got a decent education in Syria; now they're getting an education on a level with the really down-and-out in Africa. Unicef is trying to raise money for these refugees, but they're only at 40% of their goal. If we miss this opportunity, those children will be tinder for future wars and extremism, and we’ll be stuck dropping bombs for generations to come.

Hong Kong Protests

Guess what this shows

The photo below shows 35,000 walruses resting on the shore in Alaska. Normally, they would rest in the ocean, which is the place for them to not only rest but to give birth and to eat. But since 2009 more and more walruses have been seen on the Alaskan shore as the ocean melts more each year.

More uses for 3-D printing

Making food! The videos are boring to a non-cook (me) but do they presage the future ?

Making Ravioli


Making Chicken Nuggets

What's with South Korean ferries?

In April a ferry ran aground and 304 people died. Yesterday a South Korean tourist boat ran aground. All 104 passengers were rescued. One has to question the seafaring abilities of South Korean captains. They may soon give the Secret Service a run for its money in the field of incompetence.

You sure have to wonder

The current version of the Secret Service has to go. In addition to the list of gaffes listed earlier this week, we now learn that two weeks ago the Service allowed an an armed private security guard to ride in an elevator with President Obama. This happened at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.