Will an underground ice wall work at Fukushima?

The wall will consist of frozen dirt 100 feet deep and be nearly a mile in length. It is intended to halt an unrelenting flood of groundwater into the damaged reactor buildings since the disaster five years ago. The plan is to seal off the reactor buildings within a vast, rectangular-shaped barrier of man-made permafrost; the frozen soil will act as a dam to block new groundwater from entering the buildings. It will also help stop leaks of radioactive water into the nearby Pacific Ocean, which have decreased significantly since the calamity but may be continuing.

Over a hundred a day

That's the number of deaths by automobile in the U.S. in 2015.  The National Safety Council estimates that 38,300 people lost their lives in automobile accidents, while over 4,000,000 were seriously injured.

How many died from terrorist attacks worldwide?

Murder in Chicago

467 murders so far this year; more than NYC and LA combined.
Its murder rate from 2010 to 2014 is almost 4 times the national average.
On track for doubling the number of murders in 2016 compared to 2015.
African-Americans: a third of the population, 75% of the killings.
Last weekend saw 11 murders.

Mass Death in Norway

I'm talking about 323 reindeer killed by a lightning storm. Officials think this is the first time death of reindeer has occurred on this scale. Dead animals were found lying on top of each other, many with their antlers entangled, after the thunderstorm on the Hardanger plateau in southern Norway on Friday. Hardanger was extremely wet which helped conduct lightning.

He really has a problem

Lunch with kids

Thanks to our Wakefield correspondent

Lunch with doctors

Pricing drugs in America

Bacevich again

This time it's an article in Foreign Affairs, 'Ending Endless War'. He introduces here the role of the people in our war-making endeavors. That's something you don't see very much. He brings up something I've have been advocating - restore the draft. Bacevich modifies this so that there are fewer exemptions. He introduces the idea of increasing taxes to pay for the cost of wars we enter in the future.

Governor LePage of Maine speaks

“Mr. Gattine, this is Gov. Paul Richard LePage,” a recording of the governor’s phone message says. “I would like to talk to you about your comments about my being a racist, you (expletive). I want to talk to you. I want you to prove that I’m a racist. I’ve spent my life helping black people and you little son-of-a-bitch, socialist (expletive). You … I need you to, just friggin. I want you to record this and make it public because I am after you. Thank you.”

Gattine is a Democratic State Representative whom LePage thinks called him a racist.

Subsequently, LePage was reported saying to a reporter,“When a snot-nosed little guy from Westbrook calls me a racist, now I’d like him to come up here because, tell you right now, I wish it were 1825. And we would have a duel, that’s how angry I am, and I would not put my gun in the air, I guarantee you, I would not be (Alexander) Hamilton. I would point it right between his eyes, because he is a snot-nosed little runt and he has not done a damn thing since he’s been in this Legislature to help move the state forward.”

Would President Trump act similarly?

Another War on Drugs

Look carefully and..

...you will see human hands holding on to the toilet.

A friend of Cato Berntsen Larsen, a 20 year-old Norwegian, dropped his phone down the toilet while urinating. So, Larsen climbed feet-first into the facility to rescue it. While he could get into the toilet, he could not get out. He was stuck for an hour. He had company in the toilet as he was bitten more than once. He also hurt his upper arms.

He did not retrieve the phone but the toilet was destroyed by the authorities.

One more protest

Let me see your DNA

When you fly into Kuwait, not only will you have to present your passport. You will also stop at a center at Kuwait International Airport to have a DNA sample taken. The sample will be stored in a government data base. The government will also collect DNA samples from citizens and expatriates. It's all in the name of making Kuwait safe.

Come to Proxima b

Scientists say their investigations of the closest star, Proxima Centauri, show it to have an Earth-sized planet orbiting about it. What is more, this rocky globe is moving in a zone that would make liquid water on its surface a possibility.

An opponent of the F-35

None other than Chuck Yaeger.  He thinks it's a waste of money.   See this article. 

From our Florida correspondent

Gotta make the sales

Why else would pharmaceutical companies pay physicians for consulting and other activities? It doesn't matter much whether the doctors are in good standing with government agencies. ProPublica did a study of disciplinary records between August 2013 and December 2015 for doctors in five states, California, Texas, New York, Florida and New Jersey. It discovered that 400 pharmaceutical and medical device makers made payments to at least 2,300 doctors after they were disciplined by their state medical boards.

While many doctors were sanctioned for minor offenses such as failing to attend required continuing medical education courses, hundreds were disciplined for more severe offenses, including providing poor care, inappropriately prescribing addictive medications, bilking public insurance programs, and even sexual misconduct. At least 40 physicians had their licenses revoked or surrendered them, in most cases permanently. More than 180 had their licenses temporarily suspended or restricted. Almost 250 were placed on probation.

How much have things changed?

Texas oil wells

The EPA believes that there is a "significant possibility” that recent earthquakes in North Texas are linked to oil and gas activity. The state regulators won’t say one way or the other. Texas has thousands of injection and disposal wells that dot state oilfields — underground resting places for millions of gallons of toxic waste from fracking and other drilling activities. It is the third-most at-risk state for man-made earthquakes, according to the U.S. Geological Survey — behind only Oklahoma and Kansas.

Inequality

The Congressional Budget Office published the following chart. Note that distribution among the nation’s families was more unequal in 2013 than it had been in 1989.

Charter Schools Have a Problem

It's not looking good

Dahr Jamail has a survey article about climate change around the world. Read it and be frightened. 

His comments after having spent the summer in Alaska:

I've yet to have a conversation with national park rangers, glaciologists or simply avid outdoors-people that has not included a story of disbelief, amazement and often shock over the impacts of anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD) across their beloved state. Whether it is rivers causing massive erosion after being turbo-charged by rapidly melting glaciers, dramatically warmer temperatures throughout the year, or the increasingly rapid melting and retreat of the glaciers themselves, everyone who is out there, seeing the impacts firsthand, has a grave experience to share.
Glaciers are losing in excess of 75 billion tons of ice annually.
The temperature has reached 85 degrees.
The permafrost underneath the highway continues to melt at an ever-quickening pace, large fissures, cracks and bulges are causing it to break apart.
Given that there is no way to know what other kinds of deadly bacterium remain frozen in the Arctic's permafrost, we will find out only as the ice melts the bacteria, which will then re-animate as it did in Russia.

Something more upbeat

From our Pembroke correspondent

Something else to worry about

How valid is this thesis? I don't know but sinkholes are appearing in the news more often. Thanks to our Pembroke correspondent.

What is your answer?

Delinquent loans

The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve has released its second quarter delinquencies and charge-off data for all commercial banks. Loans are considered delinquent when they’re 30 days or more past due.

The only place delinquencies are declining is with real estate. Consumer loan delinquencies are up 10% from a year ago to $26.8 billion. Credit card loans are up 11% from a year ago to $13.8 billion. Delinquencies of commercial and industrial loans are $29.6 billion, up 150% from Q4 2014.

Aleppo August 2016

Should rich colleges give more to poor students?

I think you'd agree that $500,000,000 is a lot of money. Interestingly, in 2013, 138 universities each (about 3.6% of all colleges and universities) had more than that in endowment assets. This amounted to about 75% of all postsecondary endowment wealth. Yet, nearly half of these institutions are in the bottom 5% nationally for their enrollment of first-time, full-time Pell Grant recipients. And, nearly 4 in 5 of these wealthy institutions have an annual net price for low-income students that exceeds 60 percent of their annual family income.

Bees vs. Jet

Defense Budgets Around the World

From The Big Picture

Protecting cars

Rats in the Chinese city of Nanning like the inside of cars, especially the wiring and, so, they have moved in en masse. Drivers have developed makeshift, wraparound shields, some fashioned from fabric and chicken wire, others using bamboo, to keep the rats out.

Concurrent Development is Stupid

When will the Volcker Rule become effective

The rule was part of Dodd-Frank, which was passed by Congress in 2010. The rule is aimed at reducing risks, such as proprietary trading. The big banks want to postpone implementation of the rule another six years. The way things are going we'll probably see another financial disaster by then. 

Cruise the world

From our Pembroke correspondent

Dishonest insurance companies

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Even the Wall Street Journal

The conclusion of an op-ed in the Journal on Sunday:

 “If they can’t get Mr. Trump to change his act by Labor Day, the GOP will have no choice but to write off the nominee as hopeless and focus on salvaging the Senate and House and other down-ballot races. As for Mr. Trump, he needs to stop blaming everyone else and decide if he wants to behave like someone who wants to be President — or turn the nomination over to Mike Pence.”

Tasers in schools

It is estimated that at least 15% of our public schools provide Tasers to their school policemen. At least 84 times since September 2011 children have been Tasered or shot with a stun gun by a school police officer. But no one knows how many more times students have been Tasered as not every incident is reported and there is no tracking by the government as to how often children are zapped at schools. 

Taser International itself recommends that officers avoid stunning children. Using a Taser on a child “could increase the risk of death or serious injury,” according to an instruction manual for the tool. Plus, the jolts of electricity puts them at greater risk for cardiac arrest and can also traumatize a child psychologically.

More waste

A Focus Group

The group are either very good actors or real Trump supporters.

An appropriate song for the season

Want to move to Norilsk?

A blue lobster caught off Plymouth, Ma

a 1 in 2 million chance

Analyzing one of our fears

Some tips for us

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.

Source: Alternet

71 years ago today

Is Citibank headed for another fall?

Pam Martens of Wall Street on Parade thinks so. And the culprit is the same as it was in the Great Recession - credit default swaps. "Citigroup now has $2.08 trillion in Credit Derivatives (the vast majority of which are Credit Default Swaps). Only JPMorgan is bigger with $3.1 trillion in credit derivatives. Equally frightening, the vast majority of these are private contracts between financial institutions (Over-the-Counter) where regulators lack the granular details of the deals."

Sheila Bair, former head of the FDIC, had this to say about Citi during the crisis: 

Its losses were not attributable to uncontrollable ‘market conditions’; they were attributable to weak management, high levels of leverage, and excessive risk taking…It was taking losses on credit default swaps entered into with weak counterparties, and it had relied on unstable volatile funding – a lot of short-term loans and foreign deposits. If you wanted to make a definitive list of all the bad practices that had led to the crisis, all you had to do was look at Citi’s financial strategies…What’s more, virtually no meaningful supervisory measures had been taken against the bank by either the OCC or the NY Fed…Instead, the OCC and the NY Fed stood by as that sick bank continued to pay major dividends and pretended that it was healthy.”

The Decay of American Politics

Andrew Bacevich has a scathing article on how far our politics have descended in the past sixty years. For example:

• In 1956, each of the major political parties nominated a grown-up for the highest office in the land. In 2016, only one has. 
• In 1956, both parties nominated likeable individuals who conveyed a basic sense of trustworthiness. In 2016, neither party has done so. 
• In 1956, Americans could count on the election to render a definitive verdict, the vote count affirming the legitimacy of the system itself and allowing the business of governance to resume.

Like many of us, he doesn't like either candidate. "So while a Trump presidency holds the prospect of the United States driving off a cliff, a Clinton presidency promises to be the equivalent of banging one’s head against a brick wall without evident effect, wondering all the while why it hurts so much."

Money has played a big role in our decline. "Political life has increasingly become a pursuit reserved for those like Trump who possess vast personal wealth or for those like Clinton who display an aptitude for persuading the well to do to open their purses, with all that implies by way of compromise, accommodation, and the subsequent repayment of favors."

But we have contributed. “The American citizen lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality, where the image has more dignity than its original. We hardly dare to face our bewilderment, because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly iridescent, and the solace of belief in contrived reality is so thoroughly real. We have become eager accessories to the great hoaxes of the age. These are the hoaxes we play on ourselves.”

We the People and Our Republic

Buy or Invest

More listed companies are buying their competitors rather than investing in growing their business internally. The number of publicly listed companies traded on U.S. exchanges has been cut in half in the past 20 years -- from about 7,300 to 3,700. According to the World Bank, the number of listed companies on all global exchanges -- currently 44,000 -- has flatlined since 2006, with a recent two-year decline. 

Buying competitors - i.e., getting rid of competition - usually doesn't improve the company's growth although it may enable them to increase prices, as in healthcare. What often happens is  layoffs, shutdowns, product consolidations, etc. The only certainty is that management does well by the transaction.

Trump the brat

Frank Bruni thinks The Donald is a toddler. This is the first time I've seen that description of Trump. But it's something I've thought for a while, although I prefer the term 'spoiled brat'. 

Will you see the movie?

A foreign country

The United Nations Special Rapporteur On The Rights To Freedom Of Peaceful Assembly And Of Association published a report of a recent trip he made to study how well the country has conformed to the rights of Peaceful Assembly And Of Association. The country didn't do too well. Some of his findings:

• racial, social and economic inequality
• Productivity and economic output has grown, but the benefits of these have gone primarily to the wealthiest, as the wages of average people have stagnated. 
• declining union membership in a context of laws and practices which make it difficult for workers to organize, increasing corporate power, and a free market fundamentalist culture that actively discourages unionization. growing intimidation by law enforcement.
• Undocumented migrants face tremendous challenges in exercising their right to freedom of association. 
• The role that Customs plays in enforcing immigration laws, often in collaboration with local police and in disregard of the labor disputes that may be the cause of retaliation by the employer.


Have you guessed the country?

It's us.

Hospitals in Syria

McCarthyism and Trumpism

Harold Pollack of the University of Chicago has an incisive article in today's Washington Post which argues that Trump's scuffle with the Kahns will likely lead to the same result as McCarthy's scuffle with Joseph Welch, a Boston attorney. McCarthy's question, "Have you no decency, sir?" sank one demagogue. Will Khan's do the same? The following video covers McCarthy's attempt to label a junior lawyer in Welch's office as a Communist.

Lying to Ourselves: Dishonesty in the Army Profession

That's the title of an article by Dr. Leonard Wong and Dr. Stephen J. Gerras, two professors at the Army War College. It was published in the latest issue of the newsletter of the Strategic Studies Institute, a part of the college. I was surprised that such an article would appear in an Army publication. Here is their Brief Synopsis: 

Untruthfulness is surprisingly common in the U.S. military even though members of the profession are loath to admit it. Further, much of the deception and dishonesty that occurs in the profession of arms is actually encouraged and sanctioned by the military institution. The end result is a profession whose members often hold and propagate a false sense of integrity that prevents the profession from addressing—or even acknowledging—the duplicity and deceit throughout the formation. It takes remarkable courage and candor for leaders to admit the gritty shortcomings and embarrassing frailties of the military as an organization in order to better the military as a profession. Such a discussion, however, is both essential and necessary for the health of the military profession.