Seinfeld and Obama talk

It's one of Seinfeld's "Comedians Getting Coffee" shows. There are some ads, but you might slightly modify your opinion of the President as he seems quite relaxed.

Click here. 

So, who are we supporting?

Dancing at his daughter's wedding

What is a retrocession?

Webster's defines it as a going back. The Financial Times defines it as “kickbacks, trailer or finders fees.” The SEC says that JPMorgan Chase received retrocessions from hedge funds in which it had invested money from its wealthy private-banking clients and did not tell these clients that the bank was getting a kickback.

It cost JP $307 million. Plus it must tell its clients.

Politics Today

Wages and Productivity

Taxes decreasing for the Top 400

An expert witness?

Capital One and debt collection

The company brings more of its cardholders to court than any other credit card company, even for as small an amount as $1,000, an amount which is about a third of what other issuers sue for. In one year the company brought more than 500,000 suits, although the company is only the fourth largest credit card company. It's fairly obvious why. It is the country’s largest subprime lender as their market is those with poor credit.

Capital One offers cards with a credit line often as low as a few hundred dollars to customers with poor credit. On the bank’s website, the cards carry annual interest rates as high as 25 percent. 

We fought a war for this

Man of the Year

Words That Change The World

That's the title of a 400-page book of "prophetic" quotes by Vladimir Putin. It includes 19 speeches by Putin, and highlights key quotes in bold that the introduction says "predicted and preordained" world events. It was given as a gift to about 1000 insiders.

You can't be too sure

In the 21st century American colleges have begun using criminal background checks as another way to evaluate applicants. In fact, 66% of colleges and universities conduct background checks as part of the admissions process. I guess I can understand why, in our age of over-sensitivity to crime, colleges want their campuses to be safe. However, the people doing the checking often have no idea as to how such a background check should be done or interpreted.In fact, 40%  of the schools doing checks do not train their staffs on how to conduct the checks. So, are some applicants unfairly rejected?

Want to live longer?

Okay, so it's 2000+ pages

That's the length of the spending bill passed by our leaders last week. You can't expect them to read the whole thing. How could they possibly catch the fact that the legislation bars the IRS from making new rules relative to 501(c)(4) organizations, the so-called Super PACS which have become a secret treasure trove for politicians and their friends.

61 years later

From McClatchy

Police Killings Year to Date

It doesn't sound real

A school district that operates homeless shelters for their students, runs food banks, has a system in place to provide whatever clothes kids need, offers regular access to pediatricians and mental health counselors, makes washers and dryers available to families desperate to get clean. That's whats happened in Jennings, MO, since Tiffany Anderson became superintendent in 2012.

She did it by getting the people of the area to become truly involved in the process of making it possible for poor kids to eliminate the barriers that seemed endemic. As a result the district has gone from one of  the lowest-performing school districts in Missouri to reached full accreditation for the first time in more than a decade as academic achievement, attendance and high school graduation rates have improved since Anderson’s arrival.

Some of Anderson's innovations:

Saturday school, a college-prep program that offers an accelerated curriculum beginning in sixth grade, and a commitment to paying for college courses so students can earn an associate’s degree before they leave high school.
Restored music, dance and drama programs that had been cut.
Obtained new grants and many philanthropic contributions.
Went from a deficit of $2 million to a balanced budget.
Teachers are expected to give weekly assessments to measure student progress, and principals meet monthly with Anderson to discuss whether their schools are on track to meet goals for academic achievement and attendance. 

Adding up time

Close the schools. The kids may become Muslims.

That was one way of interpreting the decision to close all the schools in Augusta County in Virginia. The decision was made by the Superintendent when a brouhaha broke out because high school students in a geography class had an assignment of copying calligraphy which read “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the prophet of God”.

This class is part of a geography-class unit on world religions, which also includes Hinduism and Buddhism. And it was not the first time this task was done; it is part of a teacher workbook. Granted it was truly stupid to ask students to write the basic creed of any religion. But it's just another indication that we live in fear.

Want to buy an Earthship house?

Masters of the Photograph in 2015

Truth or Fiction?

Feeding the kids

Lead in the water

Earlier this year I wrote about problems Flint, MI was having with its water supply. The problems have gotten worse. The proportion of infants and children with above-average levels of lead in their blood has nearly doubled since the city switched from the Detroit water system to using the Flint River as its water source, in 2014. The mayor has declared a state of emergency. The problems are caused by lead in the water, which according to the World Health Organization, “affects children’s brain development resulting in reduced intelligence quotient (IQ), behavioral changes such as shortening of attention span and increased antisocial behavior, and reduced educational attainment. Lead exposure also causes anemia, hypertension, renal impairment, immunotoxicity and toxicity to the reproductive organs. The neurological and behavioral effects of lead are believed to be irreversible."

Shades of 2007?

Pam Martens thinks so. This month has seen a junk bond mutual fund, The Third Avenue Focused Credit Fund, and a hedge fund, Stone Lion Capital Partners, suspend withdrawals of investors’ money. Another hedge fund,  LionEye Capital is going out of business at the end of December.

A German supermarket at Christmas

Outsourcing

Attack of the turkeys

Good News

On Saturday by chance I watched CNN, something I hadn't done in ages. The show playing was called "CNN Heroes. I thought it would another canonization of war veterans. I was about to change the channel when the story of one of the heroes began. She was not a war veteran or a soldier of any kind; she was simply using her life to help others. And she was not the only hero that night; there were a total of ten, men and women, young and old. Here are some of them:

• a former babysitter from New Jersey fell in love with a country halfway around the world, Nepal, and used her babysitting savings to start a home and school for women and children.
• Dr. Jim Withers has taken his medical practice to the streets of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, offering free, quality health care to the homeless.
• Monique Pool has dedicated herself to helping wild animals in the South American country of Suriname. Pool has rescued, rehabilitated and released hundreds of sloths and other mammals back to the rainforest.
• In rural Conetoe, North Carolina, Richard Joyner has brought a bounty of food to what was a nutritional desert. Joyner, a local pastor, started a community garden after watching many of his parishioners die from preventable diseases. "Diabetes, high blood pressure -- when we first got started, we counted 30 funerals in one year," Joyner said.
• Iraq and Afghanistan combat veteran Sean Gobin's nonprofit, Warrior Hike, has a unique way to help combat vets process their troubling war experiences. Gobin calls it, "walking off the war."
• His nonprofit, Sustainable Innovations, created a rainwater harvesting system that now provides life-changing, safe drinking water to more than 10,000 people across six villages in the driest region of India.

It would be nice if some of the media reported on some of these people.

Goodbye, Red Cross?

I've been writing about the Red Cross for almost ten years. ProPublica just released an article entitled "The Corporate Takeover of the Red Cross". It documents the decline of the organization under the woman who has been CEO since 2008, Gail McGovern. Basically, it seems as though she has decimated many of the local chapters and alienated many of the volunteers. An internal survey of Red Cross employees found just 35 percent responded favorably to the statement, “I trust the senior leadership of the American Red Cross.”

Like any modern corporation, McGovern has set goals to secure the organization’s financial future and improve its delivery of disaster services. Yet, these goals have seldom, if ever, been met. 

Experiencing death

The president of a Korean company had an idea, "Our company has always encouraged employees to change their old ways of thinking, but it was hard to bring about any real difference. I thought going inside a coffin would be such a shocking experience it would completely reset their minds for a completely fresh start in their attitudes." So, that's what the employees do.

They dress in white robes, sit at desks and write final letters to their loved ones. Some cry. They are shown videos of people in adversity - a cancer sufferer making the most of her final days, someone born without all her limbs who learned to swim. All this is designed to help people come to terms with their own problems, which must be accepted as part of life. Finally, they rise and stand over the wooden coffins laid out beside them, pause, get in and lie down. They each hug a picture of themselves, draped in black ribbon.

Micheal Lewis discusses the bank bailout

Towed into port in less than a month

The USS Milwaukee was commissioned in Milwaukee on November 21. Over the weekend it was towed into port for repairs as it had a “complete loss of propulsion.” Being a ship of the future it only cost us $362,000,000.

Raising the perfect child

I think parenting in the U.S. is different today from what it was in the 1960s and '70s when we were raising kids. Today, there seems to be the belief that one's children can be perfect or damn close to it. We never expected our kids to be perfect athletes for example, but today parents spend thousands of dollars to perfect their kid's athletic abilities. We didn't hire tutors for our kids unless they needed them; today people hire tutors for their B students in prestigious private schools. And the story goes on.

The latest chapter is about kids being given drugs for adults, mainly those for psychosis, depression and adhd. None of these drugs have been studied for use by kids. Many doctors worry that these drugs, designed for adults and only warily accepted for certain school-age youngsters, are being used to treat children still in cribs despite no published research into their effectiveness and potential health risks for children so young. It seems certain that the brains of children less than one year old have brains that are still developing and in unknown ways; using these drugs can profoundly influence the child's growth. 

Breeding dogs

Return of the Great Depression?

Pam Martens thinks that bank regulators are doing virtually nothing to prevent the return of the Great Depression. The chart below shows that the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) sees credit risks today even lesser than before the Great Depression and issued a warning yesterday that credit risks are rising at banks.

The Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) – the coalition of all the bank and Wall Street regulators that huddle together regularly in secret – said the following in its annual report

“Thirty percent of commercial loan products reflected increased credit risk, compared with 27 percent in 2014. Over the next 12 months, examiners expect credit risk to increase in 50 percent of commercial loan products, and examiners expressed concern with this anticipated level of risk in 73 percent of the products.” 

In a recent survey, the OCC found that only 32 percent of the banks in its survey (which includes the largest 19 banks in the U.S.) are considered to have “conservative” underwriting standards" .

And what is being done by the regulators?

Handicapped?

EDITORS' PICKS

Suspension from school

It seems as though suspending students from school occurs quite often. A February 2015 report from UCLA's Civil Rights Project found nearly 3.5 million children—about six out of every 100 public school students—were suspended at least once during the 2011-12 school year, with close to half of those (1.55 million) suspended multiple times.

We even suspend preschoolers. Nearly 8,000 preschoolers were suspended from school in the same year, often for relatively minor disruptions and misbehaviors. 
Black children accounted for 18 percent of preschool enrollment but almost half (48 percent) of the children suspended more than once; in contrast, white children were 43 percent of preschoolers, but only 26 percent were subjected to repeated suspensions. Likewise, boys comprised 54 percent of children in preschool programs, yet represented the vast majority of pre-K students suspended either once or multiple times.

Melting Glaciers: Urban Flooding

China may have more glaciers than any other country. In one region alone it has 46,000. But the glaciers are melting and causing flooding. From 2008 to 2010, 62 percent of Chinese cities had floods; 173 had three or more. The glaciers are vital to more than a billion people in China, Vietnam, Myanmar and Bangladesh. But they are receding at a faster pace than ever. For example, from 2005 to 2014, the Mengke Glacier retreated an average of 54 feet a year, while from 1993 to 2005, it retreated 26 feet a year.

Red Alert

Beijing declared a "red alert" yesterday because the smog was so bad. he municipal air quality index read 308, rated “hazardous” by United States standards — a level at which people should not set foot outdoors. The red alert resulted in the closing of schools, banning driving and shutting down factories. Here's how the city looked at 4 p.m.

Supporting 9/11 First Responders

The Daily Show with Trevor Noah
Get More: The Daily Show Full Episodes,The Daily Show on Facebook,The Daily Show Video Archive

Killed by a gun

Being killed with a gun here:	Is about as likely as Dying of ________ in the U.S.	Deaths per mil.
El Salvador	Heart attack	446.3
Mexico	Pancreatic cancer	121.7
United States	Car accident*	31.2
Chile	Motorcycle accident	14.3
Israel	Building fire	7.5
Canada	Alcohol poisoning	5.6
Ireland	Drowning in a lake, river or ocean	4.8
Netherlands	Accidental gas poisoning	2.3
Germany	Contact with a thrown or falling object	2.1
France	Hypothermia	2.0
Austria	Drowning in a swimming pool	1.9
Australia	Falling from a building or structure	1.7
China	Plane crash	1.6
Spain	Exposure to excessive natural heat	1.6
New Zealand	Falling from a ladder	1.5
Poland	Bicycle-car crash	1.1
England	Contact with agricultural machinery	0.9
Norway	Accidental hanging or strangulation	0.9
Iceland	Electrocution	0.6
Scotland	Cataclysmic storms	0.5
South Korea	Being crushed or pinched between objects	0.4
Japan	Lightning strike	0.1

Note: Rates are 2007-12 averages; car accidents includes car occupants only; not van, truck, motorcycle or bus accidents

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Small Arms Survey

More wise words from Andrew Bacevich

I think Mr. Bacevich has been saying truths for several years.  Here's an excerpt from his latest.

For at least the past 35 years -- that is, since well before 9/11 -- the United States has been "at war" in various quarters of the Islamic world. At no point has it demonstrated the will or the ability to finish the job. Washington's approach has been akin to treating cancer with a little bit of chemo one year and a one-shot course of radiation the next. Such gross malpractice aptly describes US military policy throughout the Greater Middle East across several decades. While there may be many reasons why the Iraq War of 2003 to 2011 and the still longer Afghanistan War yielded such disappointing results, Washington's timidity in conducting those campaigns deserves pride of place. That most Americans might bridle at the term "timidity" reflects the extent to which they have deluded themselves regarding the reality of war.

In comparison to Vietnam, for example, Washington's approach to waging its two principal post-9/11 campaigns was positively half-hearted. With the nation as a whole adhering to peacetime routines, Washington neither sent enough troops nor stayed anywhere near long enough to finish the job. Yes, we killed many tens of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans, but if winning World War IV requires, as Cohen writes, that we "break the back" of the enemy, then we obviously didn't kill nearly enough. Nor were Americans sufficiently willing to die for the cause. In South Vietnam, 58,000 G.I.s died in a futile effort to enable that country to survive. In Iraq and Afghanistan, where the stakes were presumably much higher, we pulled the plug after fewer than 7,000 deaths.

In other words, waging World War IV would require at least a five-fold increase in the current size of the US Army -- and not as an emergency measure but a permanent one. Such numbers may appear large, but as Cohen would be the first to point out, they are actually modest when compared to previous world wars. In 1968, in the middle of World War III, the Army had more than 1.5 million active duty soldiers on its rolls -- this at a time when the total American population was less than two-thirds what it is today and when gender discrimination largely excluded women from military service. If it chose to do so, the United States today could easily field an army of two million or more soldiers.

here's the ultimate irony: even without the name, the United States has already embarked upon something akin to a world war, which now extends into the far reaches of the Islamic world and spreads further year by year. Incrementally, bit by bit, this nameless war has already expanded the scope and reach of the national security apparatus. It is diverting vast quantities of wealth to nonproductive purposes even as it normalizes the continuing militarization of the American way of life. By sowing fear and fostering impossible expectations of perfect security, it is undermining American freedom in the name of protecting it, and doing so right before our eyes.For a rich and powerful nation to conclude that it has no choice but to engage in quasi-permanent armed conflict in the far reaches of the planet represents the height of folly. Power confers choice. As citizens, we must resist with all our might arguments that deny the existence of choice. Whether advanced forthrightly by Cohen or fecklessly by the militarily ignorant, such claims will only perpetuate the folly that has already lasted far too long.

Attacks against American Muslims

From Wall Street on Parade: 

According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), mosques in 31 states in America have been the targets of firebombs, arson, acid attacks, gunfire, hate speech or other forms of religious intolerance since 2005. In Joplin, Missouri, a mosque’s sign was torched in 2008. Four years later, its roof was set on fire with the perpetrator caught on a surveillance video. One month later, in August 2012, the mosque was burned to the ground.
 In 2008, Chris Rodda, reporting for the Huffington Post, wrote about Muslim babies and children being gassed in an attack on a mosque in Dayton, Ohio during the same week that a DVD of the race-baiting, anti-Muslim documentary Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West was mailed to thousands of households in Ohio and inserted into newspapers around the state. 

21st century American government

From McClatchy

Transplanting everything

Within a year surgeons from Johns Hopkins expect to transplant a penis. It will   be taken from a deceased donor and put into the body of a wounded soldier. Our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have caused genital wounds in about 1,500 soldiers. The doctors expect it to start working in a matter of months, developing urinary function, sensation and, eventually, the ability to have sex.

This will be the first penis transplant performed in this country. It has been attempted twice before; it failed in China but succeeded in South Africa.

Amateur Theatrics

Last night I saw Fiddler on the Roof at the Mandell Community Center in West Hartford. I was pleasantly surprised in that it was really not an amateur production although the cast was made up of amateurs. And it was a complete performance - singing, dancing, acting. Of the cast of about thirty only three were not up to snuff. Tevye was quite good. 

What are the real numbers?

The headlines have blared that there have been 355 mass shootings in the U.S. this year. Clearly,there have been more than 300 shootings so far in 2015. But how are mass shootings defined? 

It seems as though the media thinks that shootingtracker.com, a website built by members of a Reddit forum supporting gun control called GunsAreCool, has the answer, as this is where the 355 number comes from. However, the site aggregates news stories about shooting incidents — of any kind — in which four or more people are reported to have been either injured or killed. In my mind not every shooting in which four people are injured qualifies as a mass shooting.

Mother Jones seems to define the issue better. It does define a mass shooting as one where four or more are killed in public attacks, but it excludes mass murders that stemmed from robbery, gang violence or domestic abuse in private homes.It concludes that there have been four mass shootings here thus far.

Now it's the TFBSO

In 2006 the Defense Department established the Task Force for Business and Stability Operations (TFBSO) to help revive the post-invasion economy of Iraq. In 2009 TFBSO moved into Afghanistan. Well, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan (SIGAR) has some questions about the task force's work in Afghanistan. I wrote about some of these back in November. Here are some new issues.

Housing TFBSO personnel. About 20% of its budget was spent on private housing and private security guards for its U.S. government employees in Afghanistan, rather than live on U.S military bases.

Pretty fancy housing - specially furnished, privately owned “villas” and hired contractors providing 24-hour building security and food services. TFBSO personnel were supplied with queen size beds in certain rooms, a flat screen TV in each room that was 27 inches or larger, a DVD player in each room, a mini refrigerator in each room. 

Good food - “at least 3 stars” meals, with each meal containing at least two entrée choices and three side order choices, as well as three course meals for “Special Events.

Security. TFBSO leadership paid and housed bodyguards for TFBSO staff and visitors traveling in country. 

Why didn't these people live on army bases?

We need a break

And the Painted Bunting is giving New York City bird-watchers one.

Since the bird arrived on Sunday and is the first of its kind to visit Brooklyn it has been watched by many, many bird lovers.

2008-2009 Redux

Junk bonds were one of the major causes of the Great Recession. Pam Martens points out that things in the junk bond market are moving towards another Great Recession. The market is now approximately $1.8 trillion, about double the amount of junk bonds outstanding at the height of the financial crisis in 2008. Yields have skyrocketed. Downgrades to ratings are swamping the number of upgrades. According to the ratings agency, Moody’s, the ratio of upgrades to downgrades is at the worst level since the financial crash in 2008-2009. Junk bond investors have a negative return of 2.2 % – also the worst since the 2008 crisis. According to Standard and Poor’s, on a global basis, companies have defaulted on $95 billion worth of debt this year, making it the largest year of defaults since the height of the credit crisis in 2009.

Midday in China

Scaling the solar system