It's strange that a 7-year-old American plays the bagpipes

My bet for president

Crawfish, Crawfish has filed his candidacy for president of the United States with the Federal Election Commission. It is running as an independent (“One Nation Under Claws”). It has yet to raise the $5,000 needed to be considered an official candidate, but it does have 27,000 likes on Facebook.

Guessing the future

Communicating in an emergency

Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) spent more than $5 billion for the purchase of radio equipment by public-safety agencies from fiscal 2012 through 2014. However, the RFP specified that federal, state and local agencies “should” not must meet the voluntary standards worked out over more than a decade by government and industry officials. 

As a result, we still have situations like that of 9/11 where more than 100 firefighters didn’t hear an order to evacuate the South Tower of the World Trade Center and lost their lives when it collapsed.  

Grad PLUS

Grad PLUS is a federal program which gives professional and graduate-school students unlimited access to below-market-rate loans from the government. It's done well since enacted in 2006. Of the government’s $1.1 trillion student loan portfolio, 40 percent of the money is owed by graduate and professional school students — who make up only 16 percent of all student-loan borrowers.

It has been a big seller among law schools. Law-student indebtedness grew from an average of $66,000 for public institutions in the 2005 academic year to $88,000 in 2012. The figures for private law schools were $102,000 in 2005 and $127,000 in 2012. More than half of law students use Grad PLUS. Maybe Grad PLUS has not worked so well here as only about 60 percent of the Class of 2013’s law degrees landed immediate employment.

Medical Funders

I'd never heard of medical funders until I read this article on Reuters. What these funders do is purchase medical bills at a deep discount from physicians, hospitals and others who have provided care to patients involved in personal injury litigation. They may also loan the litigants travel and expense money at a high rate of interest. It can be a lucrative business. When a patient’s lawsuit settles, the medical funder stakes a claim to part of the settlement by placing a lien for the full amount of the surgical bill. The funder’s profit lies in the difference between what it pays the medical provider to buy the bill and what it is able to recover from the patient’s settlement.

It's a pretty good business that has become very good. In the past most funders bought bills owed by uninsured or underinsured patients with slip-and-fall, car accident and workers compensation suits. But now the money is in funding surgeries for patients involved in mass litigation over drugs and medical devices. 

And the really hot area is in operations to remove pelvic implants from women suing device makers. Now there are about 100,000 suits in state and federal courts. The cases so far have gone in favor of the women, who have won multimillion-dollar verdicts in 10 of the 13 suits that have gone to trial against manufacturers since 2012.

You can't manage what you don't measure

The Center for Disease Control (CDC) measures the number of people killed by guns in the U.S. each year. One problem is that it takes a while to publish the numbers; the most recent year for which numbers have been published is 2011. 

It's also a difficult task as agencies do not categorize data in the same way. Gun deaths can include suicides, homicides, accidental firearms discharges, and  legal killings. However, the number does not include county-level deaths because of privacy concerns. And who knows what the number of police shootings are. No one has a number that can be considered complete.

Supposedly, the number of people killed by firearms is greater than those killed in car accidents. Although, we again have a data problem. Deaths by car are as of 2012 and total 33,561; deaths by guns are as of 2011 and total 32,251. Part of the reasoning for this claim is that the number of fatalities on the roads in the United States has been going down for years as fewer young people drive, car safety technology improves, and gas prices climb.

Have a burger

Consumer Reports studied hamburgers, i.e. ground beef which can make us sick , particularly when it’s cooked at rare or medium-rare temperatures under 160° F. The CDC estimates that“Up to 28 percent of Americans eat ground beef that’s raw or undercooked.” 

Some numbers from the article

Between 2003 and 2012, there were almost 80 outbreaks of E. coli O157 due to tainted beef, sickening 1,144 people, putting 316 in the hospital, and killing five. Ground beef was the source of the majority of those outbreaks. 

The CDC thinks that very few cases of food poisoning are actually reported; it thinks only 4% are. Ground beef is more likely to cause food poisoning than basic beef. Bacteria can get on the meat during slaughter or processing. In whole cuts such as steak or roasts, the bacteria tend to stay on the surface, so when you cook them, the outside is likely to get hot enough to kill any bugs. But when beef is ground up, the bacteria get mixed throughout, contaminating all of the meat.

Consumer Reports looked at 458 pounds of beef. They found

• bacteria that signified fecal contamination (enterococcus and/or nontoxin-producing E. coli), which can cause blood or urinary tract infections. 
• Almost 20 percent contained C. perfringens, a bacteria that causes almost 1 million cases of food poisoning annually. 
• Ten percent of the samples had a strain of S. aureus bacteria that can produce a toxin that can make you sick. That toxin can’t be destroyed—even with proper cooking. 
• Just 1 percent of our samples contained salmonella. 

And now it's a beak

Tieta, a Brazilian toucan, lost part of its beak. Scientists used 3-D printing to create a prosthetic beak. Life for Tieta is back to normal.

Before

After

Using our money to lobby

Lockheed Martin runs Sandia National Labs for a fee of $2.4 billion a year. The world’s largest defense contractor was worried that the contract would not be renewed. So, naturally, the company hired a lobbyist and used government money to pay for the lobbying.  

The fine is $4.7 million.

Paying banks interest

Okay, most of us do. But the Fed does also. It paid the banks $25.2 billion in interest on reserves from 2008 to 2014. This interest is paid on the money the banks have at the Fed. They are required to have 10 percent of the value of  their loans parked at the Fed. Some have more. The rate is small - .25 percent - but the payment of any interest on funds held at the Fed did not come about until 2006, although the Fed was founded almost 100 years earlier.

Oliver on LGBT

Hearing Colors

The Connecticut River

Today is a day of wonder

The Pinellas County School Board abandoned integration in 2007. Was that the cause of this absolutely devastating article in the Tampa Bay Times.  Here are some excerpts: First a look at the situation in general.

• At the five schools where the population is mainly African-American children have been shoved, slapped, punched or kicked more than 7,500 times since 2010 — the equivalent of eight times a day, every day, for five years straight.
• Last year, there were more violent incidents at the five elementary schools than in all of the county’s 17 high schools combined. 
• Incidents at the schools have more than doubled since 2010, even as other schools in Pinellas saw a drop in violence.
• For years, district leaders gave the schools the same number of employees to handle eight times the amount of violence faced at other elementary schools. Teachers at the schools describe calling for help in their classrooms only to be ignored because no one was there to respond.
• Teachers are overwhelmed. Many said they had little training and no idea how to get students under control. More than half the teachers at the schools requested transfers in 2014. Several have been taken away in ambulances after suffering panic attacks or being injured by their students. 
• Until recently, district officials under-reported serious incidents to a state clearinghouse that tracks dangers in the classroom — an apparent violation of state law that made the schools seem safer than they really were.

And now for some individual examples:

• At Campbell Park, a second-grader threatened to kill and rape two girls while brandishing a kitchen knife he carried to school in his backpack. 
• At Fairmount Park, a 9-year-old hit a pair of kindergartners in the head with a souvenir baseball bat. 
• At Maximo, a group of kindergartners pinned a classmate down on the playground, pulled off her pants and fondled her.
• At Maximo in 2012, an 11-year-old repeatedly harassed a female classmate, telling her he wanted to have sex with her. Then he threatened to kill them both so they “could be married in hell,” according to a police report. 
• The next year, at the same school, a 10-year-old was slapped, punched, choked, body-slammed, stomped and kicked in the face in a cafeteria fight over a Lego action figure. 
• At Campbell Park in 2010, a second-grader took a 6-inch, serrated kitchen knife to school and told classmates he was going to stab a girl in the back because she liked another boy.

Do you believe it or not?

It being a study by Adam Lankford, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Alabama, which will be presented at 110th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association this week. Lankford concludes that although the U.S. only makes up 5 percent of the global population, the country has seen 31 percent of global public mass shootings between 1966 and 2012. He concluded this based on "data from the New York City Police Department's 2012 active shooter report, the FBI's 2014 active shooter report, and multiple international sources." The report does not include gang related crime, drive-by shootings, hostage situations and robberies.

Return to the ideals of Jefferson

William Astore is a retired military officer and also taught at the Air Force Academy. He has some profound things to say about our military and our attitude toward it. His article is based on two quotes from Jefferson that appear on the walls of West Point:

• "The power of making war often prevents it, and in our case would give efficacy to our desire of peace." 
• "I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us that the less we use our power, the greater it will be." 

Here are some of his concluding remarks:

Can we connect this behavior to the faults of the service academies? Careerism. Parochialism. Technocratic tendencies. Elitism. A focus on image rather than on substance. Lots of busywork and far too much praise for our ascetic warrior-heroes, results be damned. A tendency to close ranks rather than take responsibility. Buck-passing, not bucking the system. The urge to get those golden slots on graduation and the desire for golden parachutes into a lucrative world of corporate boards and consultancies after "retirement," not to speak of those glowing appearances as military experts on major TV and cable networks.
America's military academies are supposed to be educating and developing leaders of character. If they're not doing that, why have them? America's senior military leaders are supposed to be winning wars, not losing them. (Please feel free to name one recent victory by the U.S. military that hasn't been of the Pyrrhic variety.) So why do we idolize them? And why do we fail to hold them accountable?

These are more than rhetorical questions. They cut to the heart of an American culture that celebrates its military cadets as its finest young citizens, a culture that lauds its generals even as they fail to accept responsibility for wars that end not in victory but - well, come to think of it, they just never end.

The way forward: I don't have to point the way because Thomas Jefferson already did. Just read his quotations in the West Point library: we need to become a peace-loving nation again; we need to act as if war were our last resort, not our first impulse; we need to recognize that war is corrosive to democracy and that the more military power is exercised the weaker we grow as a democratic society.

Jefferson's wisdom, enshrined at West Point, shouldn't be entombed there. We need a new generation of cadets - and a few renegade generals of my generation as well - who want to serve us by not going to war, who know that a military is a burden to democracy even when victorious, and especially when it's not. Otherwise, we're in trouble in ways we haven't yet begun to imagine.

Stacking the deck

Academics are under a lot of pressure to publish. But, as we've seen, sometimes this pressure causes some to try to ensure that their article will be published in the right journal. The latest episode of this is the retraction of 64 articles by one of the world’s largest academic publishers, Springer, because the peer reviews related to these articles were linked to fake e-mail addresses. Fake peer reviews have generated the founding of a number of services selling names and contact information for made-up experts guaranteed to give an expedited, positive review.

There's something wrong in academia.

It's a dog's life

JFK Airport is building what it calls "the ARK". Perhaps the name was chosen with reference to Noah's Ark for it is a 178,000-square-foot terminal exclusively for animals; the initial estimate of cost is $48,000,000.

The most common customers are expected to be dogs. They will have a 20,000-square-foot luxury "resort" run by the company Paradise 4 Paws with flat-screen TVs, a bone-shaped swimming pool, massage therapy, and "pawdicures." 

Cats will get their own trees to climb; horses, cows, and other animals will have their own specially customized areas with private stalls and showers.  There will be a holding pen for goats, pigs, and sheep, as well as a space dedicated to giving penguins "mating privacy". There are even webcams in the suites where owners can maintain some contact with their pets.

More Red Cross questionable actions

The latest is an attempt to kill a GAO inquiry into Red Cross activity. Gail McGovern, the president of the Red Cross, wrote the following to the Congressman who had initiated the inquiry, “I would like to respectfully request that you consider us meeting face-to-face rather than requesting information via letter and end the GAO inquiry that is currently underway.” This despite an earlier statement from her lauding the organization's transparency, “we made a commitment that we want to lead the effort in transparency.” Plus, the fact that the GAO is explicitly empowered to investigate the group.

Will they ever smarten up?

Doing God's Work

Come visit West Texas

From our Pauling correspondent

Relax with John Pizzarelli

More waste

This time it's Afghanistan and an electrical plant we paid for. The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction says that the plant, Tarakhil, which cost $335,000,000, is at risk of ‘catastrophic failure’. It does not run very much, it's at less than 1% of its capacity. Because it does not run constantly, the plant “has resulted in more frequent starts and stops, which place greater wear and tear on the machinery.” Strangely, the plant can only run on diesel fuel, which is expensive and and dangerous to transport in Afghanistan.

Who said this?

“…our basic trouble was not an insufficiency of capital. It was an insufficient distribution of buying power coupled with an over-sufficient speculation in production. While wages rose in many of our industries, they did not as a whole rise proportionately to the reward to capital, and at the same time the purchasing power of other great groups of our population was permitted to shrink. We accumulated such a superabundance of capital that our great bankers were vying with each other, some of them employing questionable methods, in their efforts to lend this capital at home and abroad. I believe that we are at the threshold of a fundamental change in our popular economic thought, that in the future we are going to think less about the producer and more about the consumer. Do what we may have to do to inject life into our ailing economic order, we cannot make it endure for long unless we can bring about a wiser, more equitable distribution of the national income.”

The speaker was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the subject The Depression.

Are his words relevant today?

Poverty in the U.S.

The Century Fund has published a report, "Architecture and Segregation", that comes to several negative conclusions about America in the 21st century: 

• There was a dramatic increase in the number of high-poverty neighborhoods. The number of people living in high-poverty ghettos, barrios, and slums has nearly doubled since 2000, rising from 7.2 million to 13.8 million. 
• These increases were well under way before the Great Recession began. 
• Poverty became more concentrated—more than one in four of the black poor and nearly one in six of the Hispanic poor lives in a neighborhood of extreme poverty, compared to one in thirteen of the white poor. 
• To make matters worse, poor children are more likely to reside in high-poverty neighborhoods than poor adults. 
• The fastest growth in black concentration of poverty (12.6 percentage points) since 2000 was not in the largest cities, but in metropolitan areas with 500,000 to 1 million persons.

How much has changed in 50 years?

Who is considered unemployed?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics counts as employed someone who works for a family business or farm for at least 15 hours a week. Whether or not the person takes home any money is unimportant. Also the BLS considers employed anyone who works at least one hour pr week and makes at least $20. 

Let's look at the situation from a different point of view - the labor force participation rate, which  refers to the number of people who are either employed or are actively looking for work. The participation rate on Friday's report was at a 38-year low of 62.6 percent. The BLS states that 93,770,000 individuals not in the labor force. That compares with 90,451,000 not in the labor force in July 2014.

Comparing the Gulf War to the Iraq War

That's what former Ambassador Joseph Wilson does in today's Boston Globe. Wilson was our ambassador to Iraq during the 1990-1991 Gulf War. Unlike the Iraq War, the Gulf War was not fought mainly by us; 32 nations contributed troops; 90 percent of the costs of the war were borne by other nations; and 12 resolutions were passed by the UN Security Council. That's because the administration of George H. W. Bush was filled with realists and pragmatists. And the important result of "operating on the basis of international consensus, law, and convention led to our enhancing our national security, strategic position, and prestige."

Contrast that with "Fortunately, unlike today, in the aftermath of the Gulf War we never had to suffer the ignominy of preening political peacocks abusing their congressional power to seek partisan advantage."

Nagasaki

Here's what it looked like before and after "Fat Man" fell.

An excerpt from the official report of the incident by the Nagasaki Prefecture:

Within a radius of 1 kilometer from ground zero, men and animals died almost instantaneously from the tremendous blast pressure and heat; houses and other structures were smashed, crushed and scattered; and fires broke out. The strong complex steel members of the structures of the Mitsubishi Steel Works were bent and twisted like jelly and the roofs of the reinforced concrete National Schools were crumpled and collapsed, indicating a force beyond imagination. Trees of all sizes lost their branches or were uprooted or broken off at the trunk.

Testing Health Insurance Exchanges

The GAO recently did a small test of the exchanges and was not pleased with the results. The exchanges provided subsidized coverage for 11 of 12 fictitious GAO applicants for 2014. A majority of the applications dud not provide all the required information, yet were approved. For 7 of the 11 successful fictitious applicants, GAO intentionally did not submit all required verification documentation to the Marketplace. Also, the supposed in-person assistance provided by the exchanges was not as forthcoming as it should have been.

It sounds like the system needs to be strengthened in some basic ways.

A somewhat rare zinnia with 3 seed pods

Grown by a master gardener residing here at Duncaster

Seems appropriate

Good Bye

More on Homan Square

About six months ago I wrote about Homan Square, a warehouse used by the Chicago Police. The thrust of the article was that at that site the police are breaking the law and violating the Constitution.  My source, The Guardian, has continued to push - via Freedom of Information requests - the police to reveal just what is going on there.

Here are some more findings: 

• At least 3,500 Americans have been detained at Homan Square. 82% were black. Only three received documented visits from an attorney.
• The charges are mostly forms of drug possession but also for minor infractions such as traffic violations, public urination and driving without a seat belt. 
• Over two-thirds of the arrests at Homan Square thus far revealed occurred under the tenure of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the former top aide to Barack Obama who has said of Homan Square that the police working under him “follow all the rules”.

70 years later

“The crux of the matter is whether total war in its present form is justifiable, even when it serves a just purpose. Does it not have material and spiritual evil as its consequences which far exceed whatever good might result?” John Hersey

When will Citigroup clean up its act?

In May it pleaded guilty to a felony count of rigging foreign currency trading and was put on a three year probation. 

In July it reached a settlement with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) over charges of bilking its credit card customers. The bank was ordered to return $700 million to 8.8 million customers and pay a penalty of $35 million. It was learned that Citi is also under another criminal money laundering probe by the Justice Department for its Mexican-based Banamex unit.

In August it settled allegations of money laundering with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Commissioner of the California Department of Business Oversight involving its Banamex USA unit. The bank paid a penalty of $140 million and avoided an admission of guilt. CFPB was opening a new investigation into Citigroup’s abuse of student loans held by struggling college students.

What will September bring?

Police on the job in 2015

We need police. Over the past year or so a few policemen apparently feel they don't need us, as there have been many incidents of illegal and immoral police behavior. This video of the Santa Ana police department is especially revolting.

California has elected to allow pot to be sold legally. Some people are doing so without having the necessary permits. Santa Ana, California, police decided that it had too many pot dispensaries operating in the city without a permit. Rather than simply warn or arrest the violators who committed a misdemeanor, the police decided to raid a store. This video records the raid.



The police have filed a lawsuit to prevent Santa Ana Police Department internal-affairs investigators from using the video.

Now, it's pills

Every week it seems as though there is a new 3D printer application. Today, it's a drug developed by Aprecia Pharmaceuticals to control seizures brought on by epilepsy.  With the 3D printer, the drugs can be packaged more tightly in precise dosages, which means that the dose could be customized for individual patients with just a few lines of code.

What's next?

One tree - Forty Fruits

Headlines

From the Columbia Journalism Review

Derivatives are very much alive...

...and the Big 4, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup hold 91.3 percent of all derivatives on the books of all 6,419 insured banks. Put into dollars, these four banks hold $185 trillion in derivatives. Graphically, you could represent this as follows:

I know the above is hard to distinguish but it breaks down derivatives into four types. The last box is the total of all derivatives.

You think there is an element of risk here?

Name that church

Some people have given odd names to their churches. Here are a few:

• Intercourse United Methodist Church
• Flippin Church of God
• Little Hope Baptist Church
• Church of God-Zillah
• Boring United Methodist Church
• Martini Lutheran Church
• Hell for Certain Church
• Half Way Baptist Church
• Scum of the Earth Church
• Solomon's Porch
• Faith Free Lutheran Church
• Matthew's Party
• Salvage Yard Church
• Guts Church

Government by the people

What country is this?

Libations over time

The spinal cord and legs

Dr. V. Reggie Edgerton has spent his career studying how neural networks in the spinal cord can regain voluntary control of movement after paralysis. He's developed something called transcutaneous stimulation, which stimulates the spinal cord. Here's a video showing the results of using this technique on five men who have been paralyzed for years.

Is HAMP working?

HAMP is the Home Affordable Modification Program that was enacted in 2009 to enable borrowers to modify their mortgage and, thus, lower their costs. The special inspector general of the Troubled Asset Relief Program which recently issued a report on HAMP does not think so.

First of all, there are only 887,001 borrowers participating in the program. The banks participating in HAMP have rejected 72% of the four million requests for help. Since there are no standards for processing the requests, banks are calling the shots. A problem in this is that there have been a number of errors made by the banks, such as not realizing a borrower is married, or losing the application data, etc.

Of course, the banks dispute the findings of the report. Surprisingly, the Treasury also has problems with the report.

Who is right?