Dreaming

Funny but incisive and comprehensive

An Oscar Winner

TV advertising of health products and services

Near the end of the day I often watch television. I am struck by the number of ads for drug companies in that half-hour or so. Many of the ads are for conditions of which I am totally unaware. The list of potential problems from the drug are spoken of at a high rate of speed while a peaceful scene is shown. It looks as though the drug companies are trying to sell expensive drugs. There is nothing wrong with this attempt, but many viewers are unaware that there are cheaper drugs available for the condition advertised. The process must be profitable as television advertising for prescription drugs has increased 30 percent to $4.8 billion a year in the past 3 years.

The United States and New Zealand are the only two countries that allow consumer advertising for drugs. I wonder why.

"Save every drop, or drop dead"

Aabid Surti, a resident of Mumbai is worried about the availability of water in the city, which for the past few years has received inadequate rains resulting in a water shortage.  He thought that if one drop fell per second from a leaking tap, each month 1,000 litres went down the drain. Almost ten years ago he started the Drop Dead Foundation, which is a one-man show. so, each week he goes around Mumbai with a plumber and another volunteer. The purpose of this outing is to visit houses which have a leaking faucet. If the tenants agree, the plumber will fix the leak. He thinks his efforts have helped save millions of litres of water.

Trying to solve problems, not just talk about them

Larry Schwartz has listed countries which have addressed some of the problems we have been talking about for years:

1. Peru: free solar-powered electricity for the poor
2. Iceland: white-collar criminals go to jail
3. France: stop throwing away food
4. Sweden: the six-hour workday
5. Portugal: decriminalize drugs
6. Ireland: drug addiction is a health issue.
7. Japan: make children self-sufficient
8. Sweden (again!): we are all feminists
9. Israel: water can be managed
10. England: Domestic abuse isn’t always physical.

Understanding the risks in testing

It looks like the testers were afraid to tell candidates the risks.

The winner of the Smithsonian's 2015 photo contest

An alternative way for dealing with drug users

Bees and butterflies are in danger of extinction.

The UN has come out with a report summarizing about 3,000 scientific papers and has concluded that 40 percent of invertebrate pollinator species—such as bees and butterflies, not birds and bats—are facing extinction. Some have translated this to mean that one in three bites of food that we eat is at risk. Others have said that almost 90 percent of flowering plants needing pollination across the world are on shaky ground and thus potentially endangering the wildlife that depend on them for food. Furthermore, 16 percent of vertebrate pollinators, including a number of species of bats and birds, are also threatened with extinction.

To quote a UN official, "Their decline is primarily due to changes in land use, intensive agricultural practices, and pesticide use, alien invasive species, diseases and pests, and climate change."

How do they find the person?

Courtesy of a Duncaster correspondent

When will DOD be auditable?

In August of 2006 (almost ten years ago) I noted that the Department of Defense could not be audited. It's still the case, as this report from GAO spells out. The major impediments to decent financial management according to the GAO are:

(1) serious financial management problems at DOD that prevented its financial statements from being auditable,
(2) the federal government’s inability to adequately account for and reconcile intragovernmental activity and balances between federal entities, and
(3) the federal government’s ineffective process for preparing the consolidated financial statements.

You really should read the report.

Almost a year in space

Detaining migrants can be good business....

...for those companies, such as Corrections Corporation of America, our largest private prison and detention company. But it is not only American companies that are doing well; it is a multi-million dollar international industry. The United Nations estimates that one in every 122 people on the planet is displaced.  These are the people placed in these centers, although most of them are not criminals in any way; many are children.

Our Congress supports these centers. They mandate that at least 34,000 people be housed daily in detention centers.

We should look more to government-controlled detention centers as private immigration detention centers are more crowded than state-run ones, and detainees in them have less access to educational programs and quality medical care. This means mental health care, outdoor activities and healthy food are far less available in private detention centers than at those run by the government.

You won't believe this

From our Plymouth, MA correspondent

Defending ourselves

It's pretty costly. We spend the equivalent of $3,300 for each working citizen on defense. This works out to about half of the dollars globally spent on the military.

Thanks, Bill

Just a reminder of three major events under President Clinton. 

1. Repeal of Glass-Steagall.
2. Enactment of the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act of 1994, which allowed bank holding companies to acquire banks anywhere in the nation and invalidated the laws of 36 states which had allowed interstate banking only on a reciprocal or regional basis.
3. Enactment of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which allowed trillions of dollars of OTC derivatives on Wall Street to escape regulation, 

These led to today's world. The number of FDIC-insured commercial banks has declined from 14,417 to 6,172. The 6,172 banks hold a total of $15.9 trillion in assets; just four banks (JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citibank) hold 41 percent of those assets.

Medical costs are no way near uniform

Noise from outer space?

NASA has just released a video with sounds that may be from outer space. The sounds, which lasted an hour, were heard in May 1969 by the Apollo 10 astronauts as they circled the Moon. NASA says the sounds could not have been alien music.They likely came from interference caused by radios that were close to each other in the lunar module and the command module.

The world should smarten up re drugs

So says Kofi Annan. The current policies have not worked.  The drug market is owned by the criminals of the world. And it is a lucrative market with annual sales estimated to be $330 billion. His proposals for a smarter policy:

• decriminalize personal drug use.
• accept that a drug-free world is an illusion.
• look at regulation and public education rather than the total suppression of drugs, which we know will not work.
• recognize that drugs must be regulated precisely because they are risky.

Wasting chickenfeed

Are 3 arms better than 2?

Beyond the Hubble

Building skyscrapers in NYC in the 1930s

From a Duncaster correspondent

Netanyahu's view of Western journalists

The NY Daily News does not like Trump

The doctor will see you now

Unfortunately, he has never been to medical school nor graduated from college. He did have a lab coat and a stethoscope and worked out of a medical office. And he did examine people. What the 18-year-old Malachi A. Love-Robinson didn’t have is a medical degree. You see he's only 18 years-old. This is not the first time he has acted as though he was a doctor. Last October, he was arrested after he was accused of spending about three weeks practicing medicine without a license at New Directions, a treatment office specializing in addiction recovery, in Boynton Beach, Fla.

Take Five - with strings

Today the string quartet from the Hartford Symphony gave its monthly concert here at Duncaster. Most of the music was new to me except "Take Five" by Dave Brubeck. Today's version didn't sound much like the version below.

Believing in America Again

In these depressing days of the 21st century I was surprised to read some good news about this country. James Fallows and his wife, Deborah, over the past three years have spent a fair amount of time visiting smaller cities and towns across the country such as Duluth, Minnesota; San Bernadino, California; Sioux Falls, South Dakota; Greenville, South Carolina; Burlington, Vermont; Louisville, Kentucky; Bend, Oregon; Davis, California; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and Columbus, Ohio. They learned a lot about this country and have summarized their thoughts in an article in The Atlantic, "How America Is Putting Itself Back Together". It is truly a worthwhile read. 

He thinks that these are signs that a city will succeed:

Divisive national politics seems a distant concern.

You can pick out the local patriots.

"Public-private partnerships" are real.

People know the civic story.

They have a downtown.

They are near a research university.

They have, and care about, a community college.

They have unusual schools.

They make themselves open.

They have big plans.

They have craft breweries.

Another visitor to the seven continents

Irene Robinson plans to play the bagpipes on every continent within 50 days. Thus far, she has played in Antarctica, Europe, North America and South America. She hopes to raise £50,000 for charity.

An amendment to the Constitution

Wasting our money

Voting for your neighbor

Tennessee is not alone.

Turning the tables

A Kentucky legislator thinks the sex lives of men should be as much a matter of legislation as that of women. Therefore, she has introduced a bill that that someone seeking Viagra, Cialis, Levitra or Avanafil must “make a sworn statement with his hand on a Bible that he will only use a prescription for a drug for erectile dysfunction when having sexual relations with his current spouse.” The man must also visit a doctor twice and get a note from his wife.

Some truths about terrorism

Joseph S. Nye, Jr., a former US assistant secretary of defense and chairman of the US National Intelligence Council, has some sensible comments:

Terrorism is a form of theater. Terrorists are more interested in capturing attention and putting their issue at the forefront of the agenda than in the number of deaths they cause per se.

Terrorism is not the biggest threat facing people in advanced countries. It kills far fewer people than auto accidents or cigarettes. One is likelier to be struck by lightning than to be killed by a terrorist.

Global terrorism is not new. It often takes a generation for a wave of terrorism to burn out.

Terrorism is like jiu jitsu. The smaller actor uses the larger actor’s strength to defeat it.

Nye concludes:Smart power is needed to defeat terrorism. Smart power is the ability to combine hard military and police power and the soft power of attraction and persuasion. That is why attention to narrative and how US actions play on social media is as important and as necessary as precision air strikes

Honoring Scalia

Note that the video ends abruptly at 5:27.

21st century U.S. government

What makes more sense? We are without a full complement of Supreme Court justices for close to two years (it will take at least several months for a new justice to be appointed after the next president is inaugurated) or we start the process now? Whether we start it now or later, the Senate still has the power to reject the nomination. Postponing the nomination is just another case of our government not working.

Ddloitte Touche is not out of the woods yet

In 2013 I had a couple of posts about the ineptitude of Deloitte, Touche. Apparently, the firm has not improved. This time the problem is in Spain. The firm was the auditor for Spain’s two biggest bankruptcies ever, Bankia (2011-2012) and Abengoa (2015-?). 

With Bankia not only did Deloitte audit the books, it also built Bankia’s balances. The firm had to pay a €12 million fine for “seriously” infringing Spain’s auditing laws; yet it still audits the state-owned bank’s books. 

The firm seemed to look the other way with Abengoa; it failed to notice a mountain of debt piling up on the books during the three years that it served as the firm’s auditor.

Another $600,000,000 down the drain

Comments apropos for this election year

A Duncaster friend sent me a couple of comments. The following really apply to this year:

If God wanted us to vote, he would have given us candidates. ~Jay Leno~

When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President; I'm beginning to believe it. ~Clarence Darrow~

Another Weird Lawsuit

Responding to a domestic disturbance call, a Chicago police office killed two people in December, one was a 19-year-old college student, the other the student's neighbor. The neighbor was killed by accident, the student because the cop feared for his life. Now the cop is suing the student's family for $10,000,000 because the shooting of the student traumatized the officer. Doesn't being a police officer means being placed in threatening and difficult situations that could involve responding with deadly force?

Flying inside a plane

Fix our infrastructure

Elizabeth Drew has an excellent article about our inability or unwillingness to maintain our infrastructure. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) gives it a grade of D+. Some excerpts from the article:

The water pipes underneath the White House are said to still be made of wood, as are some others in the nation’s capital and some cities across the country. 
We admire Japan’s and France’s “bullet trains” that get people to their destination with remarkable efficiency, but many other nations have them as well, including Russia, Turkey, and Uzbekistan.
The ASCE says that the estimated need of support for America’s infrastructure by 2020 is $3.6 trillion. Total spending at current levels is estimated by the ASCE to be $253 billion annually and estimated spending between 2013 and 2020, before passage of the highway bill, is estimated at $2 trillion, leaving us $1.6 trillion short.
The ASCE’s 2013 report card said that one in nine bridges was structurally deficient; that as of 2013 the average age of the nation’s 607,380 bridges was forty-two years, while the Federal Highway Administration estimates that “more than 30 percent of existing bridges have exceeded their fifty-year design life.” According to the ASCE, to have safe bridges by 2028, the US needs to invest $20.5 billion per year, but current spending annually on bridges is $12.8 billion.
Inland waterways, which get little attention, are, the ASCE says, “the hidden backbone of our freight network,” carrying “the equivalent of about 51 million truck trips each year.” But the waterways haven’t been updated since the 1950s and because half of the locks, according to the ASCE, are over fifty years old, barges have to be stopped for hours each day, “preventing goods from getting to market and driving up costs.”
32 percent of America’s major roads were “in poor or mediocre condition.
a backlog of nearly $78 billion in maintaining mass transit.
the level of federal investment in fixing the aging electrical grid and the pipelines for distributing energy was leading to an increasing number of power failures and interruptions.
the annual cost of rust to the country at more than $400 billion, or 3 percent of GNP.

The gas tax hasn’t been raised since 1993, when it was set at 18.4 cents per gallon—and wasn’t indexed for inflation. Had inflation been taken into account, the gas tax would now be 30.1 cents per gallon—almost twice what it is now. When the tax was first imposed the price of gasoline was around $1.00 per gallon.

Congress raids the funds held by the Federal Reserve system in case of an emergency need for liquidity in the economy, or to rescue a bank—it’s referred to as the Fed’s “rainy day fund.

Nuclear winter is still with us

Alan Robock and Owen Toon are scientists who have research the topic of nuclear winter for a long time. Their op-ed in today's NY Times reminds that the danger still is with is although the number of nuclear weapons has decreased for 70,000+ in the 20th century to 15,695 today. Some of the results of a nuclear war: smoke from fires ignited by nuclear explosions would be so dense that it would block out the sun, turning the earth cold, dark and dry, killing plants and preventing agriculture for at least a year; global temperatures would go below freezing, even in summer; crops would die and starvation could kill most of humanity. And nuclear weapons may be used by mistake, in a panic after an international incident, by a computer hacker or by a rogue leader of a nuclear nation.

Why the commotion about gravitational waves?

The following video provides some explanation as to why this is such a big thing.

A shorter life

The AMA has just published a study comparing the life span of Americans with that of other advanced countries. The study concluded that we die at a younger age, about two years younger. The reason seems to be our use of guns, drugs and cars. More than 100,000 Americans die from these causes every year. For each of the three categories, the death rate is far higher in America than in other wealthy countries.

Other countries are stricter with drunk driving; the blood alcohol limit for driving is lower than the U.S. standard of .08 percent. Plus, infrastructure changes such as roundabouts or dividers widely used outside the U.S. prevent head-on crashes and make collisions less lethal.

The report doesn't really get into the question of gun control but advocates better safety habits relatives to storing guns.

Drug deaths may be affected by looser U.S. practices in prescribing opioids; our prescriptions per capita of opioid painkillers exceeded the equivalent of 700 milligrams of morphine in 2013. The figure for the U.K. was 241 mg. In Japan, it was 26 mg.

The Effrontery

The City of Cleveland has filed a claim against the family of Tamir Rice, the unarmed 12-year-old killed by the police. The claim is for $500 "owing for emergency medical services rendered as the decedent's last dying expense under Ohio Revised Code."

Add that to the fact that the police officers were not even indicted. 

Another reason against the TPP

Ice shelves in the Antarctic

They are very big, some larger than most countries and they ring the Antarctic glaciers. They act as a brace, holding back the flow of glaciers. Sometimes they break off and sometimes they collapse. It looks as though some of these shelves are close to collapse. When they do, the seas around the world will become higher.

Abating nuisances

Back in the 1970s New York City had a problem in Times Square, which had become the capital of the sex industry in the city. So, it passed a nuisance abatement law which gave it the power to shut down places that were being used for illegal purposes. Its use has grown since then; there are about 1,000 cases a year, half of which claim that residences are nuisances, largely because of drugs. 

One problem with the way the law is administered is that three-quarters of the cases begin with secret court orders that lock residents out until the case is resolved. The police need a judge’s signoff, but residents aren’t notified and thus have no chance to tell their side of the story until they’ve already been locked out for days. And because these are civil actions, residents also have no right to an attorney. To make matters even worse, residents can be permanently barred from their homes without being convicted or even charged with a crime.

It seems that in most of the cases minorities pay the price. In a survey by ProPublica nine of 10 homes subjected to such actions were in minority communities and only five of the 297 people who were barred from homes were white.

Living your life again but as a youth

Courtesy of a Duncaster correspondent

Prisons for juveniles are dangerous

The Justice Department recently released a report of sex abuse allegations against guards and other staff in state juvenile justice facilities. Between 2007 and 2012, the number of allegations doubled, while as the number of children entering those systems has dropped. 

You have to consider that the report is based largely on allegations filed directly by juveniles to the administrators who detain them. Thus, some allegations may be false. However, those in the field recognize that juveniles put themselves at substantial risk by coming forward against alleged abusers. Roughly 45 percent of the allegations were leveled at staff (the majority of whom were women), the rest at other youngsters in the facilities.

The report indicates that when investigations confirm that staff members sexually abused a youngster, the staff members too often receive no punishment beyond losing their jobs, if that. Only 36 percent of staff members found to have abused children were referred to the authorities for possible criminal prosecution. Only 16 percent wound up arrested. And roughly 20 percent actually kept their jobs.

She came back from the dead

Her husband was told that she was dead. He believed that to be the case, as he had hired some people to kill her and they said they had. So, he had a funeral for her. At the end of the funeral she showed up as the 'killers' decided not to do the job. But to collect their money they told the husband that they had fulfilled the contract.

The husband confessed and is serving nine years in jail.

Count your cards

In Thailand if you have more than 120 playing cards, you are violating the law and can be arrested. I should change 'can' to 'will' as the police recently arrested a number of bridge players because they broke a 1935 law, the Playing Cards Act, which prohibits individuals from possessing more than 120 playing cards. This law is seen as cracking down on corruption even though the players were simply playing for fun, not money. They were released on bail.

US median household income over 40 years

adjusted for inflation

The NY Daily News

Winter in Connecticut

The temperature reached 62 degrees here today and will likely be in the 50s the rest of the week, which we used to call "the dead of winter". Climate change does have some benefits for a period of time. But what about the long term costs?

Locking people up is a growth industry

In the 21st century private companies do a lot of the work in putting people in jail. Here's what they do when someone is charged with a misdemeanor.