A fair amount of energy

Becca Pizzi is the mother of an 8-year-old daughter. She also she runs a day-care center in Belmont, MA and manages an ice cream shop. She is 35 and has tons of energy. She is the first American woman to run seven marathons on seven continents in seven days. She ran in Antarctica, Chile, Miami, Spain, Morocco, Dubai and Sydney, Australia.

A good one

Autism and Dating

Questions for a debate?

Andrew Bacevich would ask the presidential candidates the following:

1. The War on Terror: Nearly 15 years after this “war” was launched by George W. Bush, why hasn’t “the most powerful military in the world,” “the finest fighting force in the history of the world” won it? Why isn’t victory anywhere in sight?
2. Nuclear Weapons: Today, more than 70 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, what purpose do nukes serve? How many nuclear weapons and delivery systems does the United States actually need?
3. Energy Security: Given the availability of abundant oil and natural gas reserves in the Western Hemisphere and the potential future abundance of alternative energy systems, why should the Persian Gulf continue to qualify as a vital U.S. national security interest?
4. Assassination: Now that the United States has normalized assassination as an instrument of policy, how well is it working? What are its benefits and costs?
5. Europe: Seventy years after World War II and a quarter-century after the Cold War ended, why does European security remain an American responsibility? Given that Europeans are rich enough to defend themselves, why shouldn’t they?
6. Debt: Does the national debt constitute a threat to national security? If so, what are some politically plausible ways of reining it in?

A vulture flies for Israel

The vulture lived in an Israeli nature reserve but, when it landed in Lebanon, was equipped with an Israeli identification ring and location transmitter. The vulture (P98) was captured by residents of a Lebanese town.

It seems as though Israel does like to use animals as spies. In 2015 Hamas captured a dolphin equipped with video cameras for an Israeli spying mission. In 2011, Saudi media reported the capture of a vulture carrying a GPS transmitter and an identification ring from Tel Aviv University. In 2010, Egypt reported Red Sea sharks linked to to Israel’s Mossad.

Recognizing the dead

People die every day. Most have a family or friends to recognize and, perhaps, commemorate a death. Some do not; at the moment of their death they are alone. They met and knew many people, but for a period of time they have been alone. They may be homeless. They have not seen their family in a long time. They are poor. Students at a prep school, Roxbury Latin, in Boston have decided to acknowledge these unknowns. They have volunteered to be pallbearers for these people. Their most recent service was for a man who died alone in September, and for whom no next of kin was found. He's being buried in a grave with no tombstone, in a city cemetery.

The students read the following at the grave site as the man was being interred.

"Dear Lord, thank you for opening our hearts and minds to this corporal work of mercy. We are here to bear witness to the life and passing of Nicholas Miller. He died alone with no family to comfort him. But today we are his family, we are here as his sons We are honored to stand together before him now, to commemorate his life, and to remember him in death, as we commend his soul to his eternal rest."

This activity is so rare that NPR had an article about it.

More F-35 bad news

Help or jail for drug addicts

Last spring Leonard Campanello, the police chief of Gloucester, Mass., made the following Facebook post, “Any addict who walks into the police station with the remainder of their drug equipment (needles, etc.) or drugs and asks for help will NOT be charged. Instead we will walk them through the system toward detox and recovery and send them for treatment “on the spot.” Thus was born the Angel program. It is now being used 56 police departments in 17 states.

In less than a year, 391 addicts have turned themselves to the Gloucester police department. About 40 percent are from the Gloucester area; the rest come from all over the country. All have been placed in treatment. Some have had relapses but as Chief Campanello has said addicts in his program were always welcomed back, no questions asked.

The program has helped reduce police department costs; the department spends an average of $55 for each addict compared with $220 spent to arrest, process and hold an addict in custody for a single day. The cost reduction is due largely to the Police Assisted Addiction and Recovery Initiative, which was founded for this specific purpose.

Did you know that more people die from drug overdoses than car accidents, homicides or suicides. In 2014 47,055 people nationwide died.

Will Obama return his Nobel Peace Prize?

I guess Obama is worried that we don't have enough nuclear weapons. We only have close to 5,000. He wants to increase this capacity by 1,000 new missiles with adjustable nuclear capacity, 100 new long-range bombers, and a new fleet of nuclear-armed submarines. If he does, it can only begin another nuclear arms race. This time China will be in the race.

The adjustable nuclear capacity means that the missiles could be used to deliver either conventional or nuclear payloads. If an air defense controller in another country sees one incoming on radar, he or she would have no way of knowing whether it was armed to destroy a building or an entire city. The temptation to launch nuclear retaliation could be irresistible.

Besides costing us about a trillion dollars, more nuclear weapons increases the possibility that one will fall into the hands of terrorists.

They're enjoying the snow

Snow and a CCRC

CCRC stands for Continuing Care Retirement Community. I live in one. Duncaster is located in Bloomfield, Ct, which is not scheduled to get the storm of the century. We expect maybe 5 inches. My son who lives in Brooklyn had 6 inches when we spoke 4 hours ago. He expects snow throughout the day and night. It looks like New York City will get a bad storm, but not the storm of the century. Here's how it looked in Prospect Park in Brooklyn a few hours ago.

Here at Duncaster, I have really little concern about the storm. I no longer have a snow shovel as Duncaster does all the shoveling and it will clean off my car if the snow reaches 3 inches. If the electricity fails, a generator will click in and keep things going. I don't have to run to the supermarket to buy food, the regular Saturday night dinner will be served in the Dining Room. Tomorrow, a dance troupe will perform for us. If I need medical help, I simply call the on-site clinic.

All-in-all not a bad deal.

The big boys love derivatives

Derivatives were one of the major causes of the Great Depression. They still loom large. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency reports that, as of September 30, 2015, insured U.S. commercial banks and savings associations had exposure to $192.2 trillion notional (face amount) of derivatives. Perhaps even more frightening only four banks hold 90.8 percent of all derivatives: Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America.

More about the Task Force for Business and Stability Operations

A couple of months ago I wrote about this task force which was active in Afghanistan.  My article focused on a a $43,000,000 natural gas station. But that was only part of the $800,000,000 the task force spent. The Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing on the task force yesterday, but could find out very little. A couple of other weird expenditures:

• $6 million spent to bring nine blond goats from Italy and building a farm in an attempt to launch a thriving cashmere industry.
• Defense Department employees went to carpet trade shows in Europe and made jewelry-related trips to India?

A little exercise

Courtesy of a Duncaster correspondent

More Picture Taking

Mary Anne Grady Flores, a 59-year-old peace activist and grandmother, was sentenced to jail for six months for violating  an order of protection forbidding protesters from approaching the home or workplace of Col. Earl Evans, a commander of the Air National Guard. Col. Evans happens to be in charge of Hancock Field Air National Guard Base near Syracuse, New York. The base is where the US trains pilots to launch drone strikes in the Middle East and Ms. Flores is against the drone strikes. She was photographing a protest outside the base and unintentionally stepped onto a road that belongs to the base, thus violating the order of protection.

Does this sound overly harsh to you?

Taking pictures

How safe are drones?

There's been a lot of talk about throwing open American skies to drone traffic. Before expanding drone traffic we should look at some of the crashes of military drones. Since 2001, the U.S. military has had a problem with drones crashing around the world. More than 400 large U.S. military drones have crashed in major accidents around the world; that's more than two a month. 237 of these crashes destroyed the aircraft or caused at least $2 million in damage.

Another nutter or two at work

Some idiot is enjoying him or herself making threatening calls to schools across the country. Schools from New Jersey, Massachusetts, Delaware, Iowa, Arizona, Florida and New Hampshire have been threatened with bombs or mass shootings.

What water is drinkable in Iowa?

Richard Manning doesn't think much is. This is largely due to the role of industrial agriculture and its ability to bypass federal regulations. In the past decade or two nitrogen fertilizers from industrial agriculture rendered that water undrinkable. The fertilizers traveling from the Corn Belt down the Mississippi River have killed a Connecticut-size stretch of the Gulf of Mexico that is now called the Dead Zone. Iowa occupies less than 5 percent of the land in the Mississippi basin, but it contributes 25 percent of the nitrate pollution responsible for the Dead Zone, almost all of which is attributable to farming.

Farming includes raising hogs and chickens.There are about 21 million hogs in Iowa, and almost all of them live in hog factories. Each hog produces the waste of about 2.5 people, meaning Iowa bears the shit equivalent, from hogs alone, of about 45 million people, some fifteen times its human population. Iowa has 52 million laying chickens, 50 million of which are in concentrated animal-feeding operations (CAFOs) that hold more than 100,000 birds. These birds likewise produce more manure than all the people in the state. Almost none of it passes through a sewage-treatment plant or even a septic tank before making its way through drainage pipes to the public waterways and drinking water.

Despite all this, the federal government subsidizes the growing of corn by about $7 billion a year. Not all of the subsidy goes to corn as food; 40^% of corn goes to gas tanks. In Iowa, corn and soybeans cover 23 million of the state’s 24 million acres of cropland.

An appropriate cartoon for today

From McClatchy

A setup?

If so, there is still an element of reality and of sadness here.

Where's the driver?

Spin

Larry Schwartz reminds us of the use of numbers in the ads by drug companies and others. You may remember that almost all the numbers you hear are percentages stating how much the particular drug makes things better, such as "50% less risk". Such a number is probably true, but it is largely irrelevant as the ad doesn't mention the number of actual occurrences. For example, an ad might claim an improvement of 100%, but the actual improvement is from two in a million to one in a million occurrences. Schwartz has a number of interesting examples.

The title says it all

The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) has issued another report. It is titled "Afghanistan’s Oil, Gas, and Minerals Industries: $488 Million in U.S. Efforts Show Limited Progress Overall, and Challenges Prevent Further Investment and Growth."

I've summarized most of them. It's really sad reviewing this chronicle of waste.

A different kind of church

I would assume that you have not seen many churches like the above. It was built by the local government in a tourist area of Taiwan. It is different in ways other than its shape. It will not be used for regular services; it's aimed at the wedding crowd.  And as a spokesman said, "There will be 100 female-oriented features in the church like maple leaves, chairs for lovers, biscuits and cakes."

Why is it even called a church?

Take it for a drive

Credit Rating Agencies Again

The SEC issued its annual report on credit rating agencies last month. And it's not good. It does not seem as though the agencies have changed their way of working very much. For example, the report says that two of the larger companies “failed to adhere to their ratings policies and procedures, methodologies, or criteria, or to properly apply quantitative models.”

We all make mistakes, but the agencies don't tell anyone about theirs or their implications. And then some agencies outright lie. They do not accurately describe the methodology used to determine some of its official grades. Statements made in rating publications directly contradict internal rating records. Management has a say in the final rating, sometimes it is to change the original rating by the staff. Of course, is there anything wrong when the agency gives an unsolicited rating to an issuer?

The agencies really helped create the Great Depression. It looks like they are trying to repeat.

Helping Ammon Bundy & Co,

Women in the Service

15 Trends per Pew Research

1. Just 19% of Americans say they can trust the federal government always or most of the time.
2. The American middle class is shrinking. 
3. For the first time since the 1940s, more immigrants from Mexico are leaving the U.S. than coming into the country. 
4. There’s a substantial rise in the share of Americans who say the country needs to continue making changes to give blacks equal rights with whites. 
5. Millennials surpassed Baby Boomers in sheer numbers to become the largest U.S. generation. 
6. For news about politics and government, social media may be for the Millennial generation what local TV is for the Baby Boomer generation. 
7. For American teens, it’s not just a Facebook and Instagram world. 
8. People in countries with significant Muslim populations express overwhelmingly negative views of ISIS. 
9. Islam will grow faster than any other major religion in the world over the next four decades. 
10. Christians are declining as a share of the U.S. population, while the number of U.S. adults who do not identify with any organized religion is growing. 
11. Nearly 59 million immigrants have arrived in the U.S. in the past fifty years, after the passage of a landmark 1965 bill that rewrote U.S. immigration policy. 12. Multiracial Americans account for 6.9% of adults, and they are growing at a rate three times as fast as the population as a whole. 
13. Scientists and the American public are often far apart when it comes to views about science-related issues. 
14. A global median of 54% consider climate change a very serious problem. 
15. Reporters for niche outlets now fill more seats in the Senate press gallery than do journalists who work for daily newspapers.

Sometimes what is not counted is as important as what is counted

There is a fair amount of positive press about last week's employment report. Unemployment, according to the report is now 5%. But, as Dean Baker points out, things are not as good as they seem. In the first place workers are only counted in the data as being unemployed if they have looked for work in the last month. So, the guy who has been out of work for months and may have given up is not unemployed unless he looked for a job last month?

Then there is the issue of pay. Real wages for most workers are only slightly above their pre-recession level, and have risen by just over 7% since the turn of the century.  Those with a job are likely concerned about the job market as quit rates remain near recession levels. 

Safety in Schools

Students at a couple of hundred NY City schools go through a metal detector every day at school. They first have to remove their shoes, jackets, gloves and belts, and send their backpacks through an x-ray machine. School safety agents stand nearby, poised to step in if the alarm bleats. It so happens that black and Hispanic students in high school are nearly three times more likely to walk through a metal detector than their white counterparts.

The metal detectors were installed in the 1990s when crime rates were much higher; the crime rate has fallen 48 percent over the past 10 years. Crime in schools in the last year alone has fallen 11 percent. The detectors don't detect much. In the approximately three million scans conducted in the first two months of this school year, only a tiny number (less than 200) of contraband items were discovered. 

Movie Hype

Those behind "The Big Short" have done a good job promoting the movie. It's even been mentioned as an Oscar candidate. I question the category - documentary or regular movie - as it was both in my opinion. Although I must say that it wasn't much as a regular movie; there was no real story line. I also wonder whether the main characters are as odd in real life as portrayed in the movie.

Texas has a traffic problem

It's not what you would expect - delays. It's lives. Every day for the past fifteen years at least one person has been killed in a traffic accident; most days it's closer to ten deaths. In that time period more than 50,000 lives have been lost in traffic accidents. And the accident rate continues to grow; it was up 3.7% in 2014 over 2013. The police blame drunk driving and failure to use seat belts.

California has about 50% more people but fewer traffic accidents per year than Texas.

A Free Press

Jonathan Peters argues that the government - federal, state and local - is our biggest threat to a free press, at least that was in the case in 2015. He gives these examples:

A township sued a citizen who requested public records to obtain relief from its duty to respond—and even asked for attorney’s fees.

State lawmakers tried to kill a program designed to help citizens resolve FOI disputes without litigating.

Other lawmakers used Sunshine Week to propose bills to make it more difficult for citizens to record police activity.

A police chief prohibited a citizen from photographing public records as he reviewed them.

The federal government paid The Blade of Toledo, Ohio, a financial settlement after detaining two of the paper’s journalists and deleting some of their pictures, all because they photographed the exterior of a military manufacturing plant—capturing only what was plainly visible from the public street.

States continued to keep secret their capital-punishment protocols.

City police stonewalled requests for records related to Freddie Gray’s death.

St. Louis County prosecutors charged journalists in connection with their Ferguson newsgathering.

State university employees interfered with journalists as they tried to document campus protests.

Bundy & company are getting a good deal

From FiveThirtyEight

PR and Reality

The National Football League (NFL) donated $30 million - which it termed an “unrestricted gift - to the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to fund research on concussion and brain trauma. Questions have been raised as to how unrestricted the donation is. It looks like must get the NFL's agreement on the “research concepts” that will be addressed, as well as on “timeline, budget, and specific milestones to accomplish the research.” 

Nuclear Arms in Peacetime

In light of North Korea's claim to have a hydrogen bomb, it might be interesting to take a quick look at what happens to the people who build and work with these weapons. 

A lot of bad things have happened to them. Of those who worked in our nuclear weapons plants since 1945, 107,394 workers contracted cancer and other serious diseases. Of these people, some 53,000 judged by government officials to have experienced excessive radiation on the job received $12 billion in compensation under the federal government’s Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program. 

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services found that, between 1951 and 1963 alone, the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons—more than half of it done by the United States—killed 11,000 Americans. Many lived in towns and cities located near U.S. nuclear testing sites and, thus, were contaminated by deadly clouds of nuclear fallout carried along by the wind.

The U.S. Public Health Service and the National Institute for Public Safety and Health conducted studies of uranium miners that discovered alarmingly high rates of deaths from lung cancer, other lung diseases, tuberculosis, emphysema, blood disease, and injuries. In addition, when the uranium mines were played out or abandoned for other reasons, they were often left as open pits, thereby polluting the air, land, and water.

A glimpse into the future

The Committee on Openers (COO) has announced that the 2025 Opener World Olympics (OWO) will be held on the campus of the School for Openers (SFO) in Bloomfield, Connecticut. Boo Radley, a major winner in the first OWO and a graduate of SFO, will lead the ribbon-cutting ceremonies. As usual, there will be five events: glass bottles, plastic bottles, medicine bottles, tin cans and paper containers. Each event will be divided into two parts, opening without aid and opening using appropriate devices. 

It is appropriate that the Opener Olympics are being held in Bloomfield, as the movement for easier opening of containers originated here at Duncaster, a Continuing Care Retirement Community. The difficulty senior citizens had in opening the typical array of containers available in 2015 caused them to look for an easier solution than calling their grandchildren to help them out. This led to the beginning of the Opener Olympics, as enterprising innovators saw an untapped market and began a series of competitions which resulted first in the opening of SFO and, then, the first Olympics in 2021.

$265 a pound

That was the price for a 441-pound bluefin tuna auctioned off in Tokyo today. A sushi chain paid $117,000 for the tuna. This was almost three times as much as the most expensive fish at last year’s first auction. In 2013 a tuna fetched almost $1.8 million.

Does anyone care about the Foster Farms Bowl?

Of course, it has not always been the Foster Farms Bowl. It was the Fight Hunger Bowl in 2013, the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl from 2010 to 2012, the Emerald Bowl from 2004 to 2009, and the Diamond Walnut San Francisco Bowl from 2002 to 2003. It looks as though it didn't draw very well, as the sponsorship has changed so often. Sponsoring college football bowl games is a 21st century phenomenon. In the old days of the 20th century there were only 20 bowl games, none of which were sponsored; now there are 40 many of which are sponsored. Sponsorship of these games is thought to bring in $100,000,000. 

Is it worth it? Have the fans of the University of Washington’s football team, which played in the Zaxby’s Heart of Dallas Bowl, ever even seen a Zaxby’s, a restaurant chain based in the Southeast. 

Behind the scenes of war

A Digital Magician?

The Crash of 2016?

The year is not starting well for the stock market. The Dow is down 450 now, the S&P over 2% and Nasdaq almost 3%.

One of the biggest leaks of natural gas

Of course, it happened in California. It began on Oct. 23, 2015 in Aliso Canyon, outside of Los Angeles. It probably will not be stopped until this Spring. 

Methane – the main component of natural gas – is a powerful short-term climate forcer, with over 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide in the first 20 years after it is released. Methane is estimated to be leaking out of the Aliso Canyon site at a rate of about 62 million standard cubic feet, per day. The daily leakage has the same 20-year climate impact as driving 7 million cars a day.

Here's an interesting chart developed by the Environmental Defense Fund. 

A True Chameleon

From our Plymouth correspondent

From Tony Judt and Pankaj Mishra

Excerpted from The Guardian:

Unsurprisingly, we witness, as Judt pointed out, “no external inputs, no new kinds of people, only the political class breeding itself”. “The old ways of mass movements, communities organised around an ideology, even religious or political ideas, trade unions and political parties to leverage public opinion into political influence” have disappeared. Indeed, the slightest reminder of this democratic past incites the technocrats of politics, business and the media into paroxysms of scorn.

Having acted recklessly to create their own reality, they have managed to trap all of us in a tawdry nightmare – a male buddy film of singular fatuousness. At the same time, reality-making has ceased to be the prerogative of the American imperium or of the French and British chumocrats, who lost their empires long ago and are still trying to find a role for themselves. Some random fanatic, it turns out, can make their reality far more quickly, coercing the world’s oldest democracies into endless war, racial-religious hatred and paranoia. Such is the great power surrendered by the crappy generation and its epigones. The generations to come will scarcely believe it. 

More or less information?

I don't know about you but I can't say interpreting the financial statements of most companies is a simple task. The Federal Accounting Standards Board (FASB) would like to make it harder. 

FASB wants to change the definition of materiality, which determines what a company must tell investors about its operations and results. Currently, information is deemed material if it can influence decisions made by users of financial statements, a.k.a. current and prospective shareholders or lenders. But, under the FASB proposal, information would be considered material if it was likely to be seen by a reasonable person as significantly altering the total mix of facts about a company.

Advertising in 2016

I've  never watched Downton Abbey, many of my friends have. I do watch PBS regularly and know that Downton is really being pushed there. However, I was surprised when I picked up today's NY Times and did not see the regular New York Times front page but that of the Downton Times. 

The producers of the show bought a four-page advertising spread. It must have been quite costly. I had never seen an ad of this type in any newspaper let alone The Times.

It would be interesting to know the economics behind this.

Maybe something is getting better

421-a: Good for the owners, bad for the workers

New York City has a housing program known as 421-a. The program grants about $1.1 billion in tax breaks each year to owners of some apartment buildings which have 50 or more apartments. The tax breaks are not chickenfeed; they are at least in the hundred thousands. In return for the cut in taxes owners must pay service employees the “prevailing wage” — a rate set by the city comptroller that is benchmarked to union contracts so that non-union workers get comparable pay for similar work. Paying less than the law requires can subject employers to losing their tax break. But most owners have not paid the prevailing wage and the city has done nothing about this non-payment.