Another high quality presidential candidate

An odd way to keep the peace

Rodrigo Duerte was elected president of the Philippines in May. He has a strange idea as to how to keep the peace. In 2009, when he was mayor of a major city, he said: "If you are doing an illegal activity in my city, if you are a criminal or part of a syndicate that preys on the innocent people of the city, for as long as I am the mayor, you are a legitimate target of assassination." He publicly encouraged civilians to kill addicts and said he will not prosecute police for extrajudicial executions. He has kept his promise as more than 3,500 alleged drug dealers and addicts have been killed, about a third of them in police operations but the majority by armed vigilante militias.  

His most recent comment, “Hitler massacred three million Jews ... there’s three million drug addicts. There are. I’d be happy to slaughter them.”

Enjoy!

Thanks to our Glastonbury correspondent

Not good days for Samsung

First it was smartphones catching fire and blowing up. Now it's washing machines. Here's the latest Samsung statement about possible damages using their products, "In rare cases, affected units may experience abnormal vibrations that could pose a risk of personal injury or property damage when washing bedding, bulky or water-resistant items". At least one lawyer in the U.S. claims that the company's "top-loading washing machines explode in owners' homes," and has instituted a suit against the company. 

It's not getting better

At a time when atmospheric carbon dioxide is usually at its minimum, the monthly value failed to drop below 400 parts per million. 

 From Climate Central

Priests for rent

Religion is no longer big in Japan.  70% of people don’t identity with a particular religion or consider themselves atheists. However, when it comes to major life events, such as funerals, they do want the services of a priest. Obtaining the services of a priest from the local temple can be expensive; a funeral service can cost as much as $10,000. So, a company established a priest-renting business; the company offered the services of 400 priests on its website. And business was good, in one year they did 12,000 services. Guess what happened next? Amazon Japan now offers Minrevi's service on its website.

Drought in Massachusetts

What are your thoughts about the 'debate'?

The question I have is whether Trump picked up any voters. I doubt he lost any, as he continued to speak and act as usual. Hillary did surprisingly well.

Why doesn't she ask Trump to release his tax return for the year before that for which he is being audited?

A changing world

From The Economist

Another Aleppo victim

A new form of Yoga

Forest Service or Fire Service?

What can he not do?

Projections of Debt based on proposals of Clinton and Trump

Source: Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget

Be wary of surveys

Most surveys of national elections are based on telephone calls. In 1936 the major national survey by the Literary Digest predicted that Alf Landon would handily defeat Franklin Roosevelt. It was quite wrong. Why? Because it was a survey of people who had telephones and eliminated most of the lower class that did not have phones. A friend of mine wonders if a similar condition exists today in the day of the cell phone. Many, many people have only cell phones, for which there is no central directory. So, in 1936 the survey was flawed because of the lack of phones. But, in 2016 will it be flawed because of too many phones?

Ig Nobel Prizes for 2016

The full list of winners announced at Harvard's Sanders Theatre:

Reproduction Prize - The late Ahmed Shafik, for testing the effects of wearing polyester, cotton, or wool trousers on the sex life of rats.

Economics Prize - Mark Avis and colleagues, for assessing the perceived personalities of rocks, from a sales and marketing perspective.

Physics Prize - Gabor Horvath and colleagues, for discovering why white-haired horses are the most horsefly-proof horses, and for discovering why dragonflies are fatally attracted to black tombstones.

Chemistry Prize - Volkswagen, for solving the problem of excessive automobile pollution emissions by automatically, electromechanically producing fewer emissions whenever the cars are being tested.

Medicine Prize - Christoph Helmchen and colleagues, for discovering that if you have an itch on the left side of your body, you can relieve it by looking into a mirror and scratching the right side of your body (and vice versa).

Psychology Prize - Evelyne Debey and colleagues, for asking a thousand liars how often they lie, and for deciding whether to believe those answers.

Peace Prize - Gordon Pennycook and colleagues, for their scholarly study called "On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit".

Biology Prize - Awarded jointly to: Charles Foster, for living in the wild as, at different times, a badger, an otter, a deer, a fox, and a bird; and to Thomas Thwaites, for creating prosthetic extensions of his limbs that allowed him to move in the manner of, and spend time roaming hills in the company of, goats.

Literature Prize - Fredrik Sjoberg, for his three-volume autobiographical work about the pleasures of collecting flies that are dead, and flies that are not yet dead.

Perception Prize - Atsuki Higashiyama and Kohei Adachi, for investigating whether things look different when you bend over and view them between your legs.

---

Courtesy of the BBC

College accreditation

There are a number of organizations whose business is ensuring that colleges are toeing the mark. One of the larger of these firms is Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools, or ACICS. ACICS accredits over 200 colleges, which enroll an estimated 600,000 students. Schools accredited by ACICS received around $5 billion in federal student aid last year. 

It hasn't done a good job. The schools accredited by the agency on average have the lowest graduation rates in the country and their students have the lowest loan repayment rates. Perhaps, that's because two-thirds of ACICS commissioners — who make the ultimate decisions about accreditation for schools — were executives at for-profit colleges. Many of the commissioners worked at colleges that were under investigation. The Department of Education is finally removing ACICS from the list of those who can 'approve' colleges.

Would you like to be a goat?

Tom Thwaites, an Englishman, has lived as a goat for three days. He did it to escape the pressures of modern living. He did not do it overnight; he spent a year researching the idea. He even had a set of goat legs built for him. During the three days he developed a strong bond with one animal in particular.

They kill a lot of animals.

'They' are Wildlife Services, part of the Department of Agriculture. The Services killed 3,200,000 animals last year in an attempt to control predators so that “people and wildlife can coexist.” It so happens that the predators to be killed are specified by farmers and ranchers.

Richard Conniff wonders why all of these 'predators' need to be killed since they can be thwarted by other means. He sought answers from Wildlife Services but was unsuccessful in getting any information as Services issues information only once annually. That information lists the number killed of each type of animal and the method of killing. This from an agency that costs is over $127,000,000 a year. 

The mayor didn't like the pie

Full Integration

This year West Point appointed its first female commandant of cadets. Continuing the move to fully integrate women, the academy has now made boxing mandatory for all incoming students, male and female. The sport, academy officials say, teaches leadership by testing how cadets react while they are under attack. It is possible that men and women will be matched up against each other.

Boxing at West Point has been criticized particularly for women as several medical studies suggest that young women are significantly more likely to sustain concussions than men. Statistics released by West Point show that cadets have suffered 185 concussions in boxing class over the past five full school years, accounting for slightly more than half of all 355 concussions recorded in physical-education classes in that time frame.

Monday's so-called Presidential debates

When the League of Woman Voters ran them, the debates had substance. But that was almost twenty years ago. Now, they are run by the tv stations and the campaigns. When the League stopped, they predicted, “It has become clear to us that the candidates’ organizations aim to add debates to their list of campaign-trail charades devoid of substance, spontaneity and answers to tough questions. The League has no intention of becoming an accessory to the hoodwinking of the American public.”

Somewhat surprisingly John Anderson of ABC News has created a petition to make the debates follow the Oxford rules — to formally argue resolutions like “Resolved: The United States Should Withdraw from NATO,” in which the candidates would make brief opening and closing statements and in the time remaining question one another about the issue at hand, under strict time guidelines. You should sign the petition here.

Staying single

Japan's population is shrinking; the fertility rate is a mere 1.4, ours is 1.8 and in Nigeria it's 6.9. Yet, many young people don't seem interested in starting a family. A survey of Japanese people aged 18 to 34 found that almost 70 percent of unmarried men and 60 percent of unmarried women are not in a relationship. Furthermore, 42 percent of the men and 44.2 percent of the women admitted they were virgins and many were not even looking for a relationship. 

WOW!

We need more politicians like this - a lot more.

Can you figure it out?

From our Pembroke correspondent

Who should get Special Education services?

This year the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded that 15.4% U.S. children ages 2-8 had a mental, behavioral or developmental disorder and should receive special education. Texas does not agree with that percentage. Since 2004 the state claims that 8.5% of its students should get special education services and the state has taken steps to see that this standard is followed, despite the fact that since 1975 Congress has required public schools in the United States to provide specialized education services to all eligible children with any type of disability. 

Since this policy has been in effect the rate of Texas kids receiving special education has plummeted from near the national average of 13 percent to the lowest in the country — by far.  If Texas provided services at the same rate as the rest of the U.S., 250,000 more kids would be getting critical services such as therapy, counseling and one-on-one tutoring.

Another view of Gov. LePage

A pipeline of beer

Flying high in the sky

Senator Warren asks why

Senator Elizabeth Warren recently wrote a letter to the Inspector General of the Department of Justice in which she asks why DOJ did nothing with the referrals of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission that securities laws were violated in the lead-up to the Great Recession. Here are some excerpts from that letter: 

They detail potential violations of securities laws by 14 different financial institutions: most of America’s largest banks — Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Lehman Brothers, Washington Mutual (now part of JPMorgan), and Merrill Lynch (now part of Bank of America) — along with foreign banking giants UBS, Credit Suisse, and Société Generale, auditor PricewaterhouseCoopers, credit rating agency Moody’s, insurance company AIG, and mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The FCIC presented the DOJ with evidence that these institutions gave false representations about the loan quality inside mortgage-backed securities; misled credit ratings agencies; overstated assets and earnings in financial disclosures; failed to disclose credit downgrades, subprime exposure, and the financial health of their operations to shareholders; and suffered breakdowns in internal company controls. All of these were tied to specific violations of federal law.

And the FCIC named names, specifying nine top-level executives who should be investigated on criminal charges: CEO Daniel Mudd and CFO Stephen Swad of Fannie Mae; CEO Martin Sullivan and CFO Stephen Bensinger of AIG; CEO Stan O’Neal and CFO Jeffrey Edwards of Merrill Lynch; and CEO Chuck Prince, CFO Gary Crittenden, and Board Chairman Robert Rubin of Citigroup.
None of the 14 financial firms listed in the referrals were criminally indicted or brought to trial, Warren writes. Only five of the 14 even paid fines in civil settlements. None of the nine named individuals were criminally prosecuted, and only one — Crittenden, of Citigroup — had to pay so much as a personal fine, for a mere $100,000.

The Plastic Bottle Village

Try a solid gold toilet

This is a public toilet in the Guggenheim Museum and is available to one and all.

Reviewing the Great Recession

The Trump Organization

I never realized how deeply Trump was involved in businesses around the world. Among them are companies in India, South Korea, Turkey, UAE, Libya, Azerbaijan, Russia, Ukraine, China, Brazil, Bulgaria, Argentina, Canada, France, Germany, and who knows where else. Strange as I think it is, the basic appeal to companies in these countries is the Trump name; these companies want to use the name for their hotels, golf courses and other endeavors. Kurt Eichenwald has a wealth of detail in this Newsweek article.

A flower in the garden

Loving your children

Patricia Ann Spann took it to an extreme. She married her daughter and her son. She thought it was okay to get married because her name was not on the children's birth certificate because she had lost custody of them many years ago.

Her marriage to the daughter is about a year old. Her marriage to her son, which occurred in 2008, was annulled in 2009.

Cash or Pizza?

That's an ATM above, but instead of money it dispenses pizzas. Xavier University has installed the first one in this country. The machines have been available in Europe for fourteen years.

You use a touch screen to pick one of the $10 pizzas. There are seventy of them in the machine. The pizza is heated for several minutes, placed in a cardboard box and ejected through a slot. 

It could be a hit in colleges. But in the real world?

Photos from Alaska

courtesy of Truthout

The Gulkana Glacier in the Eastern Alaska Range is melting and retreating rapidly. US Geological Survey glaciologists told Truthout they expect this year to be among the top three highest-melt years for the glacier, which has been studied every year for the last 60 years. (Photo: Dahr Jamail)

The author holds a glacier survey stake on Alaska's Gulkana Glacier. The stake was placed in April, at which time the tip of the stake was just inches below the surface of the snowpack. The snowpack is gone, along with roughly three feet of glacial ice. (Photo: Louis Sass)

Inventing accounts

It's bank accounts I'm talking about. While Wells Fargo is the bank in the news this month, it is likely not the only bank that is inventing accounts. The invention involves existing customers. Because the profit on those customers that only have one account, perhaps a checking account, is fairly low, c. $40 per customer account, Wells Fargo decided to sign existing customers up for additional products, the practice is called "cross-selling". The problem is that most customers said no to another account. So, Wells Fargo opened an account anyway. Thus, someone with a savings account supposedly opened a checking account, got a credit card, transferred a 401(k), and maybe even took out a mortgage. 

Wells Fargo has been doing this mythical "cross-selling" for several years and has been able to increase the average number of products, per customer, from about four to more than six. However, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau finally got wise and fined the bank $190,000,000. More than five thousand employees were fired for the offenses. But, as is typical in today's world, none of those fired were at all high in the corporate structure.

One view of TV's coverage of the election

A good way to start the day

You need to read the article

The Atlantic has the most intelligent comments about terrorism that I have ever read. The basic point, as I interpret the article, is that we don't know enough about the subject. This lack of knowledge is in direct contrast to our experience in World War II and the Cold War. I can't effectively summarize the article, but here are some of the comments the authors, who have spent most of their work life trying to understand terrorism, made.

I am continually surprised by how many submissions treat terrorism as something that began on 9/11 and whose authors seem to be unaware of the wealth of research and literature which predated that watershed event. Similarly, the fashion in terrorism studies today is highly methodological treatments replete with voluminous accompanying tables, figures, graphs, and statistical interpretations. While impressive in a purely technical sense, I often find little in them that is either new or genuinely advances the field or improves our understanding of the phenomenon.
There is also an understandable “herding” aspect to contemporary terrorism research around whatever the issue or threat du jour happens to be. It was suicide terrorism a decade ago, radicalization more recently, and “lone wolves” today. Less common in my experience are submissions that focus less on what is topical and in the news and more on what is unique, unusual, trendsetting, anticipatory, or novel. The literature on terrorism that authoritatively draws on historical comparisons, contemporary analogues, new theoretical interpretations, or truly innovative approaches seems to have become far less prevalent in recent years.I would add that much as we still lack an understanding of why persons become terrorists, we also still lack an understanding of how governments can best and most effectively respond to this menace.
In this respect, the fact that terrorism is a strategy of provocation is often forgotten or neglected. Terrorists have arguably always attempted to provoke governments to react emotionally and precipitously to threats rather than respond in a sober and rational manner. Many critics charge that this is precisely what happened in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks with the declaration of an expansive “war on terror.” Yet, governments seem to have continually fallen into this trap—with the predictable result that we remain enmeshed in spiraling cycles of violence and campaigns with no end apparently in sight.
Hand-in-glove with this is a failure to understand that terrorism is also a strategy of attrition. It is designed not only to wear down the terrorists’ government opponents and undermine the morale of both the authorities themselves and the citizens they either represent or are charged with protecting, but also over time to create deep fissures in national polities, to undermine public confidence in elected leaders, to foment paranoia and xenophobia, and thus cause liberal societies to adopt increasingly illiberal means to enhance security and supposedly better protect and defend against this threat. One just has to look at the divisive debates and political campaigns today in the United States, Germany, and elsewhere to see the corrosive effects that this terrorist strategy is having on our societies and political systems.
The tendency to oversimplify what is an extraordinarily complex phenomenon is still very much with us, especially with policymakers. People want to see terrorism through one prism. Or to see it in binary terms: It is either the work of evil fanatics or of misguided youth. The messy reality is hard to deal with. For many years researchers have been trying to explain that there is no single “terrorist profile,” but such a profile still seems to be the holy grail. There is a notion that on 9/11, the world changed, and in many respects it did. But that has become a basis for discarding what happened and what was learned before.
It would be incorrect to say that civil liberties have been savaged, but we have laid the foundation for what, under a less benign government or a more frightened populace, could become a more oppressive state.

We have survived more than four decades of terrorism. People are shocked when I point out that during the 1970s, the United States survived 50 to 60 terrorist bombings a year. Imagine that volume of terrorist activity today. We need to take terrorism seriously, but we ought not to inflate the terrorist threat.
Terrorism involves not just the terrorists and their counterterrorist adversaries. Terrorism is aimed at the people watching. It is intended to produce fear, which will, in turn, cause us to exaggerate the threat. And it often works. Research focuses on the terrorist threat and the countermeasures. We devote less attention to the reactions of the audience. We don't want to look at us.
Accordingly, one has to wonder whether from the terrorists’ perspective they think they are losing. The threat posed by ISIS’s caliphate may soon prove to have been a flash in the pan, but the fact that al-Qaeda has survived the greatest worldwide onslaught ever directed against a terrorist group by the most technologically advanced military in the history of mankind underscores how much more challenging counterterrorism is today compared with the 20th century—when many left-wing groups were small enough to be crushed by police action or simply outlived their relevance.
The terrorists have a second advantage. It is inherently less difficult to exploit anger and fuel violence than it is to bring or restore order. In continuing efforts to combat terrorism, the United States must be cautious not to assume the mission of removing every tyrant, fixing every failed state, eliminating every ungoverned space—in other words, reconstructing and policing the world. As we reflect upon 9/11, one poll asked whether the world is now a safer place. Is that America's burden?
Martha nails it when she writes that our enemies' conception of success and victory are vastly different than our own, and that losing the caliphate is, in their eyes, a mere tactical reversal. When a struggle is divinely ordained—as both al-Qaeda and ISIS claim theirs to be—all temporal setbacks or defeats are inconsequential and mere speed bumps on the highway to triumph: challenges deliberately put in the terrorists’ path to test their fealty and ultimate commitment to the cause and the group that they serve.

Goodbye, Wilderness

That's what some scientists think will happen unless we change our ways. The study team mapped wilderness areas around the globe, which were defined as "biologically and ecologically intact landscapes free of any significant human disturbance", and then compared that to one produced by the same methods in the early 1990s. The result? Rapid development had wiped out roughly 10 percent of wilderness over the past 20 years. 

The study reported total losses of 3.3 million km² since the 1990s, particularly in South America, which experienced 29.6 percent loss, and Africa, with 14 percent. The world currently has a total of 30.1 million km² of remaining wilderness, which is primarily located in North America, North Asia, North Africa, and Australia.

Tightening campaign finance laws

Miami-Dade County voters will have an opportunity to change campaign financing in the county when they vote in a couple of weeks. The proposed law would ban vendors, their lobbyists and immediate relatives from giving to most candidates for county offices, and reduce the allowable maximum contribution for all donors from $1,000 to $250. A petition supporting the proposal gathered 
nearly 130,000 signatures.

The NFL and 9/11

I can't say that I studied today's newscasts, but I was struck by the amount of time given by the NFL to military endeavors at various NFL games. I couldn't help wondering whether the NFL was paid for these displays as it has been been paid for previous similar ventures. 

I was alive fifteen years ago and don't remember the military being involved in any significant way. Today's performances would have been more reflective of that day if firefighters were being remembered today. 

Again, without denigrating the troops, It seems odd to be praising a military that has not won a war in 70 years.

It's cost us $4 trillion so far

Three interesting charts

Courtesy of Wolf Street

In August, US commercial bankruptcy filings jumped 29% from a year ago to 3,199, the 10th month in a row of year-over-year increases, the American Bankruptcy Institute, in partnership with Epiq Systems, reported.

Deaths from Terrorism in the West since 1970

Courtesy of The Big Picture

Little food in Venezuela

Too many managers?

Looking at numbers provided by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, two academics writing in the Harvard Business Review conclude that there were 23.8 million managers, first-line supervisors, and administrators in the American workforce in 2014. On average, each of these managers supervises 4.7 employees. Managers and administrators made up 17.6% of the U.S. workforce and received nearly 30% of total compensation. The authors think that results in waste approaching $3 trillion.

The authors don't think the number of managers is justified. Their judgment is based on what they call "post-bureaucratic pioneers". These pioneers run their complex businesses with less than half the managerial load typically found in large companies. The average span of control in these and other vanguard organizations is more than double the U.S. average. 

Are they cherry-picking?

Hard to believe

The Washington Post has a lengthy article about "Trump's History of Corruption". It is truly "mind-boggling":

• Trump’s casino bankruptcies, which left investors holding the bag while he skedaddled with their money 
• Trump’s habit of refusing to pay contractors who had done work for him, many of whom are struggling small businesses 
• Trump University, which includes not only the people who got scammed and the Florida investigation, but also a similar story from Texas where the investigation into Trump U was quashed. 
• The Trump Institute, another get-rich-quick scheme in which Trump allowed a couple of grifters to use his name to bilk people out of their money 
• The Trump Network, a multi-level marketing venture (a.k.a. pyramid scheme) that involved customers mailing in a urine sample which would be analyzed to produce for them a specially formulated package of multivitamins 
• Trump Model Management, which reportedly had foreign models lie to customs officials and work in the U.S. illegally, and kept them in squalid conditions while they earned almost nothing for the work they did 
• Trump’s employment of foreign guest workers at his resorts, which involves a claim that he can’t find Americans to do the work 
• Trump’s use of hundreds of undocumented workers from Poland in the 1980s, who were paid a pittance for their illegal work 
• Trump’s history of being charged with housing discrimination 
• Trump’s connections to mafia figures involved in New York construction 
• The time Trump paid the Federal Trade Commission $750,000 over charges that he violated anti-trust laws when trying to take over a rival casino company 
• The fact that Trump is now being advised by Roger Ailes, who was forced out as Fox News chief when dozens of women came forward to charge him with sexual harassment. According to the allegations, Ailes’s behavior was positively monstrous; as just one indicator, his abusive and predatory actions toward women were so well-known and so loathsome that in 1968 the morally upstanding folks in the Nixon administration refused to allow him to work there despite his key role in getting Nixon elected.

Morocco and Terrorists

Pay for Performance

President Clinton was able to limit companies to deducting only a maximum executive pay of $1,000,000 except if the pay was for performance by the executive. This performance pay can be deducted from the company's income tax. A study by the Institute for Policy Studies looked at the top 20 US banks and found that more than $2 billion in performance bonuses was paid to their top five executives over the past four years. These payments cost us more than $725 million in taxes we had to pay. The executives of the big banks did well, the performance pay of Wells Fargo CEO was $155 million in fully deductible performance pay at a cost to taxpayers of $54 million.

A few more examples of government waste

Water in Oregon

The Army Corps of Engineers vs. the EPA and others

The EPA, the Department of the Interior and the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation have raised serious environmental and safety objections to the North Dakota section of the controversial Dakota Access oil pipeline. The agencies cited risks to water supplies, inadequate emergency preparedness, potential impacts to the Standing Rock Indian reservation and insufficient environmental justice analysis. They want the Corps of Engineers to issue a revised draft of their environmental assessment.

The Corps says 'no'; the original environmental assessment prepared by the pipeline's developer, Dakota Access LLC, is fine.

Sounds in old age

No time for the waiting game?