Protesters in Wisconsin and ISIS

How were those mealworms?

Camren Brantley-Rios, a student at Auburn, has just completed a 30-day diet of eating insects three times a day. His favorites were mealworms, waxworms and crickets. He has tried scrambled eggs with waxworms, bug-burgers with cheese and creole crickets. Conservation and sustainability were his goals as insects consume fewer resources than mammals to produce the same amount of protein. He is not alone as more than two billion people worldwide include insects in their regular diet, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.

He is particular. He always made sure the insects have been fed on an organic diet and only bought species he knows are safe to eat.

How does he do it?

Editing of the photography has to help




From our Plymouth, Mass. correspondent

What does this chart tell you?

It might tell you that putting more people in jail has lowered the crime rate. However, as you can see the crime rate has been going down but the incarceration rate has continued to rise. In 36 states, the prison population has more than tripled as a share of state population since 1978. 

The chart and a lot of other significant analysis told the Brennan Center for Justice that while rising incarceration rates helped reduce property and violent crime rates in the 1990s, the effect was much smaller than some other studies have suggested, accounting for 0-10 percent of the total decline over the decade. Since 2000, rising incarceration rates account for less than 1 percent of the decline in crime rates.

7 important words

Chicago fights terrorists and other serious criminals

This is one of those posts where you question the veracity of the source. I think it is true, largely because it is based on a series - not just one article - by The Guardian. Plus, the Chicago police department did not respond to the Guardian’s questions about the facility. The thrust of the series is that the Chicago police force is breaking the law as it violates the constitution.

The force works in secret at a place known as Homan Square. Here are some of the things that go on at Homan Square:

• Keeping arrestees out of official booking databases. 
• Beating by police, resulting in head wounds. 
• Shackling for prolonged periods. 
• Denying attorneys access to the “secure” facility. 
• Holding people without legal counsel for between 12 and 24 hours, including people as young as 15.

Chicago's anti-terror group is not alone at Homan Square. Several special units operate outside of it, including the anti-gang and anti-drug forces.

The following video summarizes the experience of one person who spent time at the Square.
 

Repeating 2008?

This is from a post of mine from August 2013:

One of the major causes of the Great Recession was the failure of the ratings agencies (S&P, Moody's, Fitch) to properly rate securities.  In order to secure business the agencies did not publish unbiased ratings; they gave AA ratings to securities that should have been unrated or D.  It looks like this practice is starting to return.   

Well, the practice has definitely returned. One measure is the number of analysts who have moved from the credit-reporting agencies to investment bankers.  SEC records show more than 300 have done so since 2008. That's in a universe of 4,000 analysts. So, about 7.5% of credit-reporting analysts have gone to the companies who issued the securities these analysts rated. And, it looks like the number is increasing as 80 moved in 2014.

Since there is no rule establishing a waiting period for analysts moving to a company you were rating, the question becomes: can credit analysts be impartial about grading bonds while looking for employment at banks that underwrite them?

A study by some academics found that "when an analyst is hired by one of the top 20 banks, rankings rise by 0.35 level on average compared with an average 0.18 grade increase for all analysts switching positions. If that bump-up elevates the bond to investment grade from a speculative, or junk, rating, the borrower would save $85 million in interest over the life of a $1 billion 10-year bond, according to data compiled by Bloomberg."

Facebook is bad for prisoners...

...at least in South Carolina. In 2012 the Department of Corrections (SCDC) made “Creating and/or Assisting With A Social Networking Site” a Level 1 offense [PDF], a category reserved for the most violent violations of prison conduct policies, such as murder. 

The department is really serious about these Facebook violations. It doesn't matter why you might be accessing Facebook or another social network. If you commit a Level 1 offense, you can find yourself in solitary confinement for years or deprived of virtually all privileges, including visitation and telephone access. There have been more than 400 cases of Level 1 violations using Facebook. In 16 cases, inmates were sentenced to more than a decade in what’s called disciplinary detention, with at least one inmate receiving more than 37 years in isolation.

The average punishment length for a “social networking” case was 512 days in disciplinary detention, and the average length of lost privileges was even longer.  

The sentences are so long because SCDC issues a separate Level 1 violation for each day that an inmate accesses a social network. An inmate who posts five status updates over five days, would receive five separate Level 1 violations, while an inmate who posted 100 updates in one day would receive only one.

This is absolutely insane

First, that there is a web site, Rivals.com, devoted to recruiting college athletes. Second, they do not recruit only high school athletes. They recruit kids from grammar school, the most recent being two kids in the sixth grade. The kids are 11-years-old. One at 5'11", 167 pounds is huge, the other is normal at 5'2". Both are in the high school class of 2021.

There is something very wrong here.

Overseeing Charter Schools

Charter schools are private schools funded by taxpayers. They are not subject to the same rules applied to regular public schools. The supervising agencies for charter schools are known as authorizers. They are charged with making sure the charter schools can be trusted with kids and with public money. 

But one has to wonder how these authorizers are chosen. For example, Minnesota’s largest authorizer, overseeing 32 charter schools, is a nonprofit that rehabilitates birds. In Ohio in 2013 authorizers had approved more than a dozen charter schools that received state funding and then either collapsed in short order or never opened at all. In Philadelphia an investigation found lavish executive salaries, conflicts of interest and other problems at more than a dozen charter schools.

It seems that there are few hard-and-fast rules for how the regulators charged with overseeing charter schools are supposed to do the job. Furthermore, many authorizers lack the resources and expertise to do the proper job.

Clouds over Grand Teton National Park

Using rain water

Seems like a strange deal to me

As part of the Defense Authorization Act we are trading four square miles of Tonto National Forest in Arizona to Resolution Copper, a joint venture of the two largest mining companies in the world, Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton, for an unspecified piece of property. 

We don't know what the final price is for the the 1.6 billion metric tons of copper that lie underground. At the current price of copper the 1.6 billion tons is worth more than $130 billion. The value of the land traded to us will be determined by an appraiser, who must be approved by Resolution Copper. If the value is less than that of our land, Resolution copper will have to pay the difference in cash.

This deal seems strange to me for a couple of reasons: 
How does this figure in the Defense Authorization Act? What military purpose does it serve? 
Why trade it? Why not auction it off or solicit some competition? 
Why get rid of the copper at all? Many nations have government-owned mining companies.

This really is the Canadian Parliament

Quoting FOMC

Pam Martens has some quotes from the minutes of the last meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). As you can see from this batch of quotes it looks as though the economy is doing poorly. 

 “Real private expenditures for business equipment and intellectual property appeared to decelerate in the fourth quarter. Nominal orders and shipments of nondefense capital goods, excluding aircraft, declined in November and December.” 

 “Real federal government purchases appeared likely to have decreased sharply in the fourth quarter, reversing much of the surprisingly strong increase in the third quarter.” 

“Over the 3 months ending in December, the total CPI [Consumer Price Index] decreased at an annual rate of 2-1/2 percent, reflecting recent declines in consumer energy prices…” 

 “Inflation in the advanced foreign economies declined sharply at the end of last year, amid rapidly falling energy prices…” 

 “The price of mortgage credit for qualified borrowers declined again over the intermeeting period, with interest rates on 30-year fixed-rate mortgages reaching levels close to their all-time lows.”

Yet, here is their conclusion:
“In their discussion of monetary policy for the period ahead, members judged that information received since the FOMC met in December indicated that economic activity had been expanding at a solid pace…”

What are they drinking?

Another Snowden revelation

A SIM card is a very important - perhaps, the most important - part of your cell phone. It is used to authenticate users and relay key information to the network on which the phone is operating. The largest manufacturer of these cards is a Dutch company, Gemalto. Its customers include ATT, T-Mobile and many more. 

Well, come to find out, we and England worked together in order to hack into Gemalto's computer systems and are now able to access highly-guarded encryption codes and, thus, the global cell phone communications of anyone using the cards.

With these stolen encryption keys, intelligence agencies can monitor mobile communications without seeking or receiving approval from telecom companies and foreign governments. Possessing the keys also sidesteps the need to get a warrant or a wiretap, while leaving no trace on the wireless provider’s network that the communications were intercepted. Bulk key theft additionally enables the intelligence agencies to unlock any previously encrypted communications they had already intercepted, but did not yet have the ability to decrypt.

2006 Redux?

Letterman has a powerful hearing ability

The Postal Service and its Retirees

In 2006 Congress passed a law mandating that the Postal Service pre-fund 75 years of retiree costs within a ten-year period. No other government agency or company has to do this. The Postal Service has to pay now for employees who are not even born yet. Furthermore, since 1970 the Postal Service is required to break even, while being unable - per Congressional mandate - to raise rates without Congressional approval, enter new lines of business or take other steps to help it raise revenue. This 2006 law requires the Service to come up with $8 billion each year. 

The GAO has also looked at the effects of this law. While it agrees that there should be some pre-funding of any unfunded retiree health benefit liability, it believes that the maximum annual commitment should not be a finite number; the commitment should be to the maximum extent that its finances permit. 

Happy Year of the Sheep

Today is Chinese New Year 

A Climate Change Primer

Another accident on a railroad carrying oil tankers

This one was in West Virginia on Monday. A train carrying more than 100 tankers of crude oil derailed in a snowstorm. Fifteen or so tankers caught fire or exploded. One tanker went into the river. A fireball was blasted into the sky. The water supply of nearby residents was threatened; two water treatment plants were closed. Hundreds of families were evacuated.

The Cyborg Beast

That's the name of a prosthetic for people who have lost fingers or never had them in the first place. A volunteer non-profit organization, E-Nable, creates prosthetic hands and fingers using 3-D printers. Unlike a normal prosthetic, the Cyborg Beast is created in about 24 hours using materials they may cost as much as $50. This is quite a contrast from a conventional prosthetic that takes weeks or months to build and costs in the thousands. 

The Beast does not look like a typical prosthetic. It's colorful and looks like a limb from a Transformer. It is not made to be hidden; they can have a variety of eye-catching fluorescent colors, or even glow in the dark. There are no patents, all designs are in the public domain.

Tobacco around the world

Colors of the sun

The Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) celebrates its 5th anniversary since it launched on February 11, 2010. This time-lapse video captures one frame every 8 hours starting when data became available in June 2010 and finishing February 8, 2015. The different colors represent the various wavelengths.

Reprimanding Students

Is this what happened to you for being late to school or not conforming to the dress code? 

Where the money is for the NY Times

It's in their T magazine. This week they introduce Spring fashions. It takes almost 250 pages to do so, but, perhaps 200 of them are ads, usually full-page ads. If they got only $50,000 per ad, they would gross $10,000,000.

I wonder how much they got from the 54 page Magazine. It has certainly shrunk over the past few years. And the quality is not as good. Let's see how the new version does next Sunday.

Now the Pope is going after the money

I guess the accounting and financial management at the Vatican have not been up to par. Its new secretary of the economy reports that the Vatican has more than $1.5 billion in assets it didn’t previously know it possessed. Also, the Vatican’s real estate holdings may be undervalued by a factor of four.

Francis is doing his darnedest to improve the Church.

Snow isn't always white

At least in Russia so says the NY Times. They have experienced blue, orange, black and yellow snow. But the article fails to say whether the snow is colored as it is falling or it becomes colored when on the ground.

There is an explanation for all of the colors. A food manufacturer said that the blue snow was the result of powdered dye leaking into the ventilation system which caused it to escape into the air. The orange and yellow snow is caused by the winds carrying sand from the Mediterranean area. The black snow was caused by pollution from a local power plant.

You ain't seen nothing yet

We need more space

From TreeHugger

How Big Pharma spends it money

From The Big Picture

Restraining children

I don't know whether or not restraining school children in utility closets, storage closets,and cell-like spaces has increased over the years but I think we are paying more attention to the issue. For example, Connecticut has established the Office of the Child Advocate (OCA), which recently issued a report on "Seclusion and Restraint in Connecticut Schools". 

The report found that, over the past three years, there were more than 90,000 instances of restraint and seclusion in the state's public schools and more than 1,300 injuries – at least two dozen of them serious. The report found one child was restrained more than 700 times over the course of a year. Three-fourths of these children had physical, emotional, or intellectual disabilities. 

Furthermore, the report found that many schools are not following the law, and are often providing insufficient reasons for the intervention and otherwise failing to adequately document them.

Will he be known as an aircraft designer and builder one day?

George Mel is only 23 and lives in South Sudan, which is still in the throes of civil war. He has always wanted to become an aircraft engineer. Despite having to leave high school because of his father's death and has a lot of time taken by his role as the supporter of his family, he still works almost constantly on building a plane. 

His research center is his bedroom. He scoured metal workshops to piece together an aluminum airframe, and imported two small engines to power it. Using a garden chair for the pilot's seat, he put the aircraft together with information he found in old textbooks and on the internet.

He has yet to test whether the plane will fly as the authorities have refused him permission to test-fly his ultra-light, restricting him to taxiing the aircraft in his yard. Still, this is a huge accomplishment for a 23-year-old kid in the backwaters of Africa.

Traveling to Italy

What may seem to be dots is actually people. The people are refugees rescued by the Italian Navy in June of last year. The photo won a silver medal in the World Press Photo Contest.

Meet some cyborgs

Trying to save the Monarch

Since the late 1990s the population of monarch butterflies has fallen 90%. In the last century the population peaked at roughly 1 billion. Now the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Wildlife Federation and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation will be spending $3.2 million to save the habitat of the butterfly. The monarch is a traveling butterfly; it  has migrated thousands of miles over many generations from Mexico, across the United States to Canada, and then back again. But their habitat has gotten smaller because of farming and urban sprawl. The organizations will attempt to restore the habitat by planting native milkweed and nectar plants, which the butterfly depends on for food and breeding.

The Far Side of the Moon

Has HSBC reached the limit?

I've written often about HSBC, the second largest commercial bank in the world, and its shenanigins. 60 Minutes has another story about the bank.  

This one is about the bank's efforts to help criminals. A former employee made off with computer files with more than 100,000 names tied to Swiss bank accounts at HSBC. These records are quite complete and show that the bank did business with a collection of international outlaws: tax dodgers, arms dealers and drug smugglers. The records are quite detailed; they contain names, nationalities, account information, deposit amounts plus detailed notes revealing the private dealings between HSBC and its clients. The notes show that the bank offered products that help depositors evade taxes.

The French were the first country to have access to the records. They have already reclaimed $250 to $300 million from penalties in back taxes. Since 2010, billions of dollars have been recovered worldwide. 4,000 Americans, with more than $13 billion in HSBC accounts, used HSBC. How much will we be able to collect?

Doctors and Drugs

Norman conserves

The FDA is a trusting organization

The FDA classifies medicaI devices into three groups. Devices, like pacemakers, that are implanted or sustain or support life and could put patients at serious risk are put in Class I. Devices that are similar to what is on the market are put into Class II. Everything else — bandages, dental floss, forceps and the like — are put into Class I, which means that the devices don't require approval by the FDA because they present a low risk. 

OtisMed decided that its OtisKnee guide fell into Class I. So, the company registered the device with the FDA as Class I and began selling it. From 2006 to 2009 they sold 18,000 devices.

In 2009 the FDA informed the company that it had not demonstrated that the guides were safe. The notice said that the OtisKnee was a Class III device and that OtisMed's submission was missing data about how patients had fared, raising concerns about failure rates. The company then applied for FDA approval as a Class III device. They did not receive approval as the FDA determined that the company failed to show that the product was safe and effective. Yet, the CEO of OtisMed continued to have the device distributed.

The Justice Department went after the company and the CEO. The company settled for $80,000,000. The now former CEO pleaded guilty and is awaiting final sentencing.

The question in my mind is why the FDA allows companies that sell devices that are placed inside our bodies to determine what class the device falls in.

How we spend our money

Remember the Crusades and other violence committed by Christians

Obama's talk at the National Prayer Breakfast yesterday aggravated a fair number of true believers. They were upset because of these comments by Obama: “Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”

Some responses:

From Jim Gilmore, the former Republican governor of Virginia: “The president’s comments this morning at the prayer breakfast are the most offensive I’ve ever heard a president make in my lifetime. He has offended every believing Christian in the United States.”

Bill Donohue, the president of the Catholic League, said in a statement that Mr. Obama was trying to “deflect guilt from Muslim madmen.” He said the president’s comparisons were “insulting” and “pernicious.”

And, of course, Rush Limbaugh and Fox News had a field day.

Bill Moyers had a quite different response. He talked about a lynching of Jesse Washington, a black man in Waco in 1916. 

He had been sentenced to death for the murder of a white woman. No witnesses saw the crime; he allegedly confessed but the truth of the allegations would never be tested. The grand jury took just four minutes to return a guilty verdict, but there was no appeal, no review, no prison time. Instead, a courtroom mob dragged him outside, pinned him to the ground, and cut off his testicles. A bonfire was quickly built and lit. For two hours, Jesse Washington — alive — was raised and lowered over the flames. Again and again and again. City officials and police stood by, approvingly. According to some estimates, the crowd grew to as many as 15,000. There were taunts, cheers and laughter. Reporters described hearing “shouts of delight.” When the flames died away, Washington’s body was torn apart and the pieces were sold as souvenirs. The party was over.

Between 1882 and 1968 — 1968! — there were 4,743 recorded lynchings in the US. About a quarter of them were white people, many of whom had been killed for sympathizing with black folks

Tukdam

Tukdam is supposedly just one step from becoming a real-life Buddha. The fellow below is in a state of tukdam.

The fellow is a monk who died more than 200 years ago, but some feel that he is "not dead". He is in a state of "very deep meditation". He's a mummy preserved in animal skin. The body was stolen from a cave in the Ulan Bator and was set to be sold on the black market. 

Thanks to our Florida correspondent.

More bank skullduggery re foreclosures

Is ISIS losing supporters?

The burning of the Jordanian pilot has caused an uproar in the Middle East. Most countries have condemned the killings. The head of Sunni Islam’s most respected center of learning said the Islamic State militants merit punishments under Islamic law such as “killing, crucifixion or chopping of the limbs. Islam prohibits the taking of an innocent life.” The secretary general of the largest Muslim political bloc, the 57-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation, strongly condemned the killing as an affront to the faith. He also lamented the “depth of malaise” in parts of the Middle East, along with the “intellectual decay, the political fragmentation and the abuse of Islam, the great religion of mercy.” 

But will these sentiments be converted into action against ISIS?

Changing Shares

Again, the question in my mind is the quality of the research upon which this video is based.

Bernie Sanders Shows How Reagan Destroyed The Middle Class

Meet a different therapy pet

More spin re TPP

Michael Forman, our Trade Representative, appeared before Congress last week to discuss his work. Two quotes from his testimony stand out for me. 

As we know, Obama wants to fast track the TPP, i.e., Congress would only have the capability of voting it up or down. There would be no changes. Here's Forman's comment on that point: "[Fast Track] puts Congress in the driver's seat to define U.S. negotiating objectives and priorities for trade agreements." I wonder how he defines 'driver's seat'.

One of Forman's talking points was the growth in the trade surplus. Vide: "You take all of our FTA partners as a whole, [and] we have a trade surplus. And that trade surplus has grown." But if you rely on the U.S. International Trade Commission, you'd find a $180 billion U.S. goods trade deficit with all free trade agreement (FTA) partners (in 2013, the latest year on record). In manufactured goods, the United States has a $51 billion manufacturing trade deficit with all FTA partners.

I guess Forman does not have a high opinion of Congress.

It's not getting much better

Pam Martens does not agree with the Fed that “economic activity has been expanding at a solid pace” with “strong job gains.” She points out that the following companies have recently announced significant job cuts:  American Express (4,000), Schlumberger (9,000), IBM (at least 2,000), Baker Hughes (7,000), and Coca Cola (1,600 to 1,800). The retail industry is in particularly bad shape. The following have declared bankruptcy: Radio Shack, Wet Seal, C. Wonder, Body Central, Deb Shops, Delia's, Cache. The following have closed many of their stores: Kate Spade, Jones New York, Target Canada, Sears.

Could these announcements be a function of poor demand and low wages?

Basics of TPP

Making Friends In A Novel Way

JPMorgan settles another case

This one cost only $99.5 million. Twelve banks, including JP, have been accused of rigging prices in the foreign exchange market, appropriately known as the Fix.This fine is on top of November's settlements of
roughly $1 billion in civil penalties to resolve related claims by U.S. and European regulators.

The lawyers for the plaintiffs should do well. They expect to get 30% of the settlement.

Do you believe these odds?

I'd feel better about the climate change and other odds if there were better sources used as the basis of this video.