Need a nap?

Interesting Analysis

Steve Rattner looks at the first 337 days of Trump's administration through a series of very interesting charts.  One I found particularly interesting plotted the number of bills signed in the first 337 days of a president's administration. Since the days of Nixon George H.W. Bush signed the most bills - 242, just one more than Jimmy Carter at 241. There were four presidents who signed 200 or more bills and four who signed 100 or more. One signed less than 100, Trump at 96.

Rattner breaks down Trump's signing by type of bill as follows:

Bills related to space and science                       4 
Bills related to veterans                                   13 
Reversing Obama regulations                           16 
Ceremonial, routine and bureaucratic laws         62 
Significant legislation (the tax bill)                      1 

Not exactly what you would like to see. I wish he had done a similar breakdown for the others.

Regrowing a dog's bone

Don't mess with her

Who benefits?

The $700 billion budget

That's what the military will be getting this year, much more than other agencies. Could the fact that many of the top people in the Pentagon come from the defense industry have any influence? No.2 at the Pentagon will come from the executive council of Boeing, the Army undersecretary from the vice presidency of Lockheed Martin, the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology, and logistics from the very top job at Textron Systems, the 16th largest arms company in the world, the Army Secretary from Raytheon.

True or False?

Prevented from delivering a Christmas gift

Patrick Jiron, 83, and his wife, Barbara, 80, were arrested in Nebraska as they traveled from their home state of California to Vermont. The cause was failure to signal a turn. The couple was on their way to distribute Christmas presents to friends and family in Boston and Vermont. Their car was emitting a strong odor which caused the policy to search their car. Here's what the police found:

That's sixty pounds of  raw marijuana, which has a street value of about $300,000. 

I wonder what their family and friends were expecting as Christmas presents.

Take a dancing lesson

Pot and the Aged

Courtesy of a Duncaster friend

Changing faster and faster

Hiring can be expensive

Customs and Border Protection is hiring 5,000 Border Patrol agents, 2,000 customs officers and 500 agents for the Office of Air and Marine Operations this year to bolster Trump's war against illegal immigration. The hiring will be done by Accenture, an international professional services corporation. It will cost us $297,000,000 over a five-year period; that's $39,600 per hire. The starting salary of an entry level Border Patrol agent is $40,511.

The agency has had trouble retaining agents. Between 2013 and 2016, an average of 523 agents were hired, while 904 left. Maybe that's because one of the criteria for hiring is no prior illicit drug activity by applicants. Approximately two out of three applicants to the border agency failed the traditional polygraph. That’s more than double the average rate of eight law enforcement agencies.

But that should change as the polygraph test will no longer be administered. 

If only our government was as peaceful

Great minds think alike

How accurate?

Bad Words

The CDC is barred from using these seven words in their budget documents: evidence-based, science-based, vulnerable, entitlement, diversity, transgender, fetus. The reason being that Trump would not like seeing these words.

Did Hitler also bar the use of certain words?

Results of Climate Change

The Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society has recently published analyses of 27 extreme weather events in 2016. The conclusion: human-caused climate change was a “significant driver” for 21 of them. 

The NY Times looked at five of these events in some detail:

1. Record temperatures around the world
2. Coral bleaching in the Great Barrier Reef
3. Drought in Africa
4. Wildfires in North America
5. The warm “blob” in the Pacific Ocean

The Times does acknowledge that climate change may not be the sole cause of these events. 

Temperature records are the simplest to link to climate change. But droughts — which are influenced by a complex interplay of temperature, precipitation and soil moisture — can be trickier to connect to warming trends. And hurricanes are more difficult still, because they occur so rarely.

Special Ops around the world

Our Special Operations forces, including Navy SEALs and Army Green Berets, are in 149 countries around the world. That’s about 75% of the nations on the planet and represents a jump from the 138 countries that saw such deployments in 2016 under the Obama administration. It’s also a jump of nearly 150% from the last days of George W. Bush’s White House. This record-setting number of deployments comes as American commandos are battling a plethora of terror groups in quasi-wars that stretch from Africa and the Middle East to Asia.

Do you know more about law than he does?

Driving in India

Net Neutrality is Good for You

Break the law as a pedestrian...

...and you could lose your license to drive a car. That's what happened to about half of the 2,000 people who received pedestrian tickets in Duval County, Florida, from 2012 to 2016. For whatever reason they did not pay the $65 fine for violating pedestrian laws. Ergo, they lost their driver’s licenses or their ability to obtain one.

There is a hint of racism as 55 percent of the tickets given in recent years went to blacks despite the fact that they make up only 29 percent of the city’s population. Blacks were similarly overrepresented in the 932 tickets that led to license suspensions — 54 percent.

The Bigger Liar

The NY Times has compared the number of lies told by Obama and Trump. They appear to have tried to be factual in that they have listed all of the lies they attribute to each. They also claim: 

We applied the same conservative standard to Obama and Trump, counting only demonstrably and substantially false statements.

This article counts only distinct falsehoods for both Trump and Obama.

We left out any statement that could be plausibly defended even if many people would disagree with the president's interpretation. We also left out modest quantitative errors, such as Trump's frequent imprecision with numbers.

Their conclusion:

In his first 10 months, Trump told nearly six times as many falsehoods as Obama did during his entire presidency, 103 vs 18.

Wasting Food

We waste a lot, tons and tons. In the world we throw out about 1.3 billion tons of food a year, or a third of all the food that we grow. In poor countries waste occurs on the farm or on the way to market; lack of refrigeration being the culprit. In wealthy countries we are the main cause - We buy too much food. We don’t finish our plates.About 40 percent of wasted food is thrown out by consumers.

We in the United States waste more than $160 billion in food a year.

Hell

Nature 2017

What are we doing about Russian hacking?

Black mothers are more likely to die....

...than white mothers, particularly from pregnancy- or childbirth-related causes. In a national study of five medical complications that are common causes of maternal death and injury, black women were two to three times more likely to die than white women who had the same condition. In New York City it's especially bad; black mothers are 12 times more likely to die than white mothers. And it's gotten worse; in 2001-2005, their risk of death was seven times higher. They are dying at about the same rate as women in countries such as Mexico and Uzbekistan, the World Health Organization estimates.

It doesn't seem to matter whether the women are well-off or not. One study of  years of data found that black, college-educated mothers who gave birth in local hospitals were more likely to suffer severe complications of pregnancy or childbirth than white women who never graduated from high school.

Why is this happening? There are many reasons. Black women are more likely to be uninsured outside of pregnancy, when Medicaid kicks in, and thus more likely to start prenatal care later and to lose coverage in the postpartum period. They are more likely to have chronic conditions such as obesity, diabetes and hypertension that make having a baby more dangerous. The hospitals where they give birth are often the products of historical segregation, lower in quality than those where white mothers deliver, with significantly higher rates of life-threatening complications.

Is this another form of discrimination? In a survey conducted this year by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, 33 percent of black women said that they personally had been discriminated against because of their race when going to a doctor or health clinic, and 21 percent said they have avoided going to a doctor or seeking health care out of concern they would be racially discriminated against.

Eliminating Student Loans

We know quite well that student loans are a big drain on the economy.

A few schools are starting to do something about it. They are replacing all student loans in their undergraduate financial aid packages with scholarships. The three schools doing this are Yale, Princeton and Brown.

Boston 2017

The Boston Globe has begun a new Spotlight series - Racism in Boston. First startling fact: Using data from the Federal Reserve of Boston, Spotlight found that non-immigrant African-Americans in the Boston area had a median net worth of $8. White households in Boston, on the other hand, average a net worth of $247,500, or nearly 31,000 times more than African-American Bostonians.

The Catholic Church and Alcohol

Okay, Holy Communion requires bread and wine. So, the priests made sure it was available wherever they lived. The Franciscans brought vines to California in 1779 and began making wine, which had never been made before in America. They did the same thing in Argentina, Chile and Australia. But there is more than wine.

Dom Perignon is the name of a Benedictine monk who apparently knew how to make champagne. You can still get a good glass of beer in Trappist monasteries around the world. Whiskey was invented by medieval Irish monks. Chartreuse was perfected by the Carthusian order almost 300 years ago. Bénédictine may have been invented by an Italian Benedictine in the 1500s. And the cherry brandy known as Maraska liqueur was created by Dominican apothecaries in the early 16th century.

Yezidi girls today

Relax

Visitor from outer space

Nothing is perfect

Just about everyone I know who has used hospice is pleased with their experience, whether at home or in the hospital. But, Time has an article reporting on an investigation by Kaiser Health which shows that some people are very unhappy with hospice. One survey found that 1 in 5 respondents said that their hospice agency did not always show up when help was needed. Another survey found that 9% were dissatisfied with their hospice experience. The Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services says that 21% of hospices did not provide crisis care in 2015. 

One thing about hospice I did not realize is that many of these agencies are for-profit businesses. And it's a pretty good business as profit margins are almost 15%.

Is this what we want?

Medicine for Black Women

One Form of Insanity in the 21st Century

Joey Erace travels fairly frequently to California and Texas to play baseball for amateur teams. Such travel is typical for many of us. Joey's difference is his age - 10 years old. He is one of the generation whose parents believe that their child is talented enough in a particular sport to receive a college scholarship. Besides the travel costs, his parents have invested significantly in Joey. Their New Jersey home has a $15,000 backyard batting cage. His private hitting coach charges $100 per hour, as does his Philadelphia-based fielding coach. In the world in which he travels he is well-known. He has more than 24,000 followers on Instagram. Jewelry and apparel companies have asked him to hawk their stuff. But, when asked for an autograph, he suggests a photo as, at age 10, he does not know how to write cursively. 

Joey Erace is not alone. Millions of kids have the same dream as Joey and are as wrapped up in this life which is more like that of pro athletes than neighborhood kids. As a result, neighborhood Little Leagues, town soccer associations and church basketball squads that bonded kids in a community–and didn’t cost as much as a rent check–have largely lost their luster. Joey and company live in a world which seems to be governed by companies trying to make money. 

It is estimated that this youth-sports economy – which includes everything from travel to private coaching to apps that organize leagues and livestream games – is now a $15.3 billion market that has grown by 55% since 2010. The United States Specialty Sports Association, or USSSA, is a nonprofit with 501(c)(4) status, a designation for organizations that promote social welfare. According to its most recent available IRS filings, it generated $13.7 million in revenue in 2015, and the CEO received $831,200 in compensation. The group holds tournaments across the nation, and it ranks youth teams in basketball, baseball and softball. The softball rankings begin with teams age 6 and under. Baseball starts at age 4. 

Is this what we want for our grandchildren when only 2% of high school athletes go on to play at the top level of college sports, the NCAA’s Division 1?

Where have the insects gone

There was a recent study of the insect population over a period of time.  The study covered a 27 year period in 63 nature protection areas in Germany. While no other areas were studied, the results are very scary. The author concluded that the population declined 76% in that time. He states that this decline is apparent regardless of habitat type, while changes in weather, land use, and habitat characteristics cannot explain this overall decline.  

Should we be worried? We've seen the number of bees decline substantially. What else has?

Be wary when you go to the ER

In most cases you'll be charged a facility fee simply for walking through the door and seeking service. It does not include any care provided. And this fee can be quite expensive. These fees are coded on a 1 to 5 scale, to reflect the complexity of care delivered to the patient. The hospital decides the code to be used. The fees have risen sharply since 2009. Here are a few sample codes.

The facility fee has really increased.  The Health Care Cost Institute says the price of these fees rose 89 percent between 2009 and 2015 — rising twice as fast as the price of outpatient health care, and four times as fast as overall health care spending. This is probably due to a shift to using higher codes. Total ER revenue fees rose by more than $3 billion between 2009 and 2015, despite the fact the HCCI database shows a slight (2 percent) decline in the number of emergency room fees billed in the same time period.

A tattoo gone wrong

Catt Gallinger, a Canadian model, apparently figured a purple eye would be just the thing to make her famous. She was right, but not famous in a good sense. The following photos came from her website and, by definition, are questionable.

She has never left home

Home happens to be a jail cell in Afghanistan. Meena, who is now 11, was born there, nursed there and weaned there. She has spent her entire life, including that in utero, in prison and will probably spend the rest of her childhood there as well. She is there because her mother is a convicted serial killer serving a life sentence. Afghanistan allows her to keep her daughter with her until she turns 18. Meena has no idea what the world outside the walls looks like.

Meena is not the only child in this prison; she is one of 36 children jailed with their mothers. It is estimated that there are hundreds of imprisoned Afghan children whose only crime is having a convicted mother. There is a program that runs orphanages for children whose mothers are imprisoned, but the women have to agree to let their sons and daughters be taken, and the program does not cover many areas of Afghanistan.

There are some amenities in prison. The women’s cells are arranged around a spacious courtyard, shaded by mulberry trees, and the children have free rein of it. There is a set of rusting, homemade swings, monkey bars and slides that end in muddy puddles. A schoolroom is in one of the cells, with a white board and a mixture of benches and chairs, seating 16 children at eight desks. A single teacher looks after three grades, first through third, an hour a day for each grade; at age 11, Meena has reached only the second grade.

The military academies are no different from other colleges...

... when it comes to paying the football coach. In 2016 Navy paid their coach $2 million, the Air Force paid  $932,521, and Army paid $885,000. The Air Force coach also gets a housing allowance.

All of this pales before the salary of Michigan's Jim Harbaugh who gets $9,000,000. But it is still our money the coaches are getting.

From our Florida correspondent. 

Reading the Qur'an

Gary Wills has written a very interesting new book, "What the Qur’an Meant: And Why It Matters", that is reviewed in the current NY Review of Books by G. W. Bowersock, whose fundamental point seems to be "the Qur’an is utterly incompatible with the barbarous beliefs and conduct of those who have violently espoused an alleged caliphate in its name in the twenty-first century." 

Bowersock also looks at Edward Gibbon's "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", which showed that the Qur’an recognized Hebrew and Christian scriptures alongside the revelations of Muhammad as comprising “one immutable religion.” Muhammad, according to Gibbon, urged strangers of every tribe to worship a single deity: “He asserted the liberty of conscience, and disclaimed the use of religious violence.” 

Wills' reading of the Qur'an reveals at least one thing surprising to me: the Arabic words “jihad” and “sharia” do not occur in the Qur’an with the implications attached to them now. In its Quranic usage “jihad” means simply “striving” or, as Wills prefers, “zeal,” but certainly not “holy war.” The word “sharia” appears only once in the entire Qur’an and means simply the right path, similar to the path (hodos in Greek) invoked by early Christians. Wills contends that “the Qur’an never advocates war as a means of religious conversion”

Further, Wills believed that the Qur’an is well disposed to the other religions of the book and explicitly cites with approval the Torah and the Gospels, recognizing five “antecedent prophets” to Muhammad: Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. “We make no distinction between any of His messengers” (Q. 2:285).

The Qur'an also includes God's creation of the world which is similar to Christianity's. In the Quranic creation, God makes Adam and a nameless woman, and Satan tempts both together with a promise of immortality.

Meet your stewardess

Single Payer?

Will the proposed tax cuts reverse this trend?

Why don't we fire him?

Your granddaughter?

Money wasted on healthcare

ProPublica has been writing about this issue for a while. Here's a summary of what they've found. 

Experts estimate the U.S. health care system wastes $765 billion annually — about a quarter of all the money that’s spent. Of that, an estimated $210 billion goes to unnecessary or needlessly expensive care, according to a 2012 report by the National Academy of Medicine. ProPublica has been documenting the ways waste is baked into the system. Hospitals throw away new supplies and nursing homes discard still-potent medication. Drugmakers combine cheap ingredients to create expensive specialty pills and arbitrary drug expiration dates force hospitals and pharmacies to toss valuable drugs. We also reported how drug companies make oversize eyedrops and vials of cancer drugs, forcing patients to pay for medication they are unable to use. In response, a group of U.S. senators introduced a bill this month to reduce what they called “colossal and completely preventable waste.”

Overtreatment related to mammograms is a common problem. The national cost of false-positive tests and overdiagnosed breast cancer is estimated at $4 billion a year, according to a 2015 study in Health Affairs. Some of this is fueled by anxious patients, some by doctors who know that missing a cancer diagnosis can be grounds for a medical malpractice lawsuit. But advocates, patients and even some doctors note the screenings can also be a cash cow for physicians and hospitals.

Patients aren’t true health care consumers because they typically can’t shop by price and they often don’t have control over the care they receive, Saini said. The medical evidence may support multiple paths for providing care, but patients are unable to tell what is or is not discretionary, he said. Time pressure adds urgency, which makes it difficult to discuss or research various options.

Pretty scary! 

It's all over the map

Source: Center for American Progress

Running on wine

Earlier this month I wrote about the London bus system which is testing the use of coffee extract as part of the fuel used by its diesel buses. It turns out that incorporating waste products into fuel is not new. Parallel Products, a California company, has been doing it for thirty years. The waste it uses comes from wine, beer, tainted liquors and flat colas. According to its website “Each year, Parallel Products receives and recycles over 13 million cases and 3 million bulk liquid gallons of unsaleable beverage products.”

Courtesy of our Florida correspondent.

Flying with the birds

Safe driving

In 1990 there were many more killed in auto accidents than in 2015. Here is a list of the deaths per billion vehicle miles traveled that year:

France      25.7
Israel        22.4
Germany   19.7
Australia    14.7
Canada      14.5
U.S.           12.9
Sweden      12

Now look at the results for 2015:

France         5.9
Israel           5.9
Germany      4.6
Australia       4.9
Canada        5.1
U.S.             7
Sweden        3.2

Where we were the second safest country in 1990, we were the worst in 2015.

Flies under water

Black Friday

$5.6 or $1.52 trillion

The Pentagon says that our wars since 9/11 have cost $1.52 trillion, or $7,740 each for you and me. But this cost does not include war-related costs of the departments of state, veterans affairs, and homeland security, as well as the cost of interest paid to date on the money the US has borrowed to pay for the wars. When you add in these costs, as was done by the Costs of War project, based at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, you get $5.6 trillion, or $23,386 each for you and me.

But, as the report states, even $5.6 trillion is not the total cost. It does not include the substantial costs of war to state and local governments—most significantly, the costs of caring for veterans—or the millions of dollars in excess military equipment the US donates to countries in and near the war zones. 

Furthermore, the $5.6 trillion figure does not include the money the US commits to operations in the Horn of Africa, Uganda, Trans-Sahara, the Caribbean, and Central America as part of Operation Enduring Freedom. Nor does it tally spending through the Department of Defense European Reassurance Initiative meant to deter Russia; money for Operation Odyssey Lightning, which paid for airstrikes against ISIS in Libya beginning in 2016; or US counterterrorism activities taking place in dozens of countries across the world.

What do you think the total costs are?

Running on coffee

London is experimenting with coffee as a diesel fuel for its buses. This is a biofuel created by blending oil extracted from coffee waste with diesel. Biofuel from different waste products - such as cooking oil and tallow from meat processing - is already used in many of the capital's 9,500 buses. Buses can be powered using the fuel without the need for modification.

It would take just over 2.55 million cups of coffee to create the enough biofuel to run a London bus for a year once the oil has been blended with diesel.

Figure this one out

Courtesy of a Duncaster correspondent

This, too, is our earth

Courtesy of our Pembroke, MA correspondent

Automation Anxiety

Analyzing Trump's Approach

Read it. And weep?

 From the Institute of Policy Studies: 

• The three wealthiest people in the United States — Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett — now own more wealth than the entire bottom half of the American population combined, a total of 160 million people or 63 million households. 
• America’s top 25 billionaires — a group the size of a major league baseball team’s active roster — together hold $1 trillion in wealth. These 25 have as much wealth as 56 percent of the population, a total 178 million people or 70 million households. 
• The billionaires who make up the full Forbes 400 list now own more wealth than the bottom 64 percent of the U.S. population, an estimated 80 million households or 204 million people — more people than the populations of Canada and Mexico combined. 
• The median American family has a net worth of $80,000, excluding the family car. The Forbes 400 own more wealth than 33 million of these typical American families. 
• One in five U.S households, over 19 percent, have zero or negative net worth. 
• “Underwater households” make up an even higher share of households of color. Over 30 percent of black households and 27 percent of Latino households have zero or negative net worth to fall back on.

Looking for a job

Brett Talley, a deputy assistant attorney general, has been nominated by Trump to a federal district judgeship. Talley would be able to hold this position for life, which, he being 36-years-old, could be quite a long time. One 'slight' problem with this nomination is that he has never tried a case. Further, he was unanimously deemed “not qualified” by the American Bar Association. 

He is the fourth judicial nominee under President Trump to receive a “not qualified” rating from the bar association and the second to receive the rating unanimously. Since 1989, the association has unanimously rated only two other judicial nominees as not qualified. 

Just another indication of Trump's management talents.

Suing for payment of student loans

Student loans are very big business; they are the largest source of household debt outside of mortgages. With the increase in loans comes increasing defaults. And there are companies that specialize in trying to collect on defaults. One of the largest, Transworld Systems, has filed more than 38,000 lawsuits in the last three years on behalf of a single client, the National Collegiate Student Loan Trusts. However, many of these cases were flawed. In the words of Richard Cordray, the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Transworld “sued consumers for student loans they couldn’t prove were owed and filed false and misleading affidavits in courts across the country.” In some cases Transworld employees swore that borrowers’ loans had been purchased by investors on dates that were months or even years before the loans were actually made.

The toilet the world is waiting for

It's made of 24 different Louis Vuitton bags plus one of his suitcases. It was designed by artist Illma Gore; it took her three months. You can buy it for $100,000.  

From our Florida correspondent

An appropriate article for Veterans Day

William Rivers Pitt writes about the Sacred Soldier at Truthout. He, too, questions how we deal with the voluntary Army. Some excerpts:

• After so very many years of condensed war –seven decades and counting since Pearl Harbor and the National Security Act, with the inevitable violent blowback hitting us where we live -- the United States has fully adopted the siege mentality necessary for the implementation of a permanent state of conflict. That mentality has poured out of the Pentagon and down onto Main Street everywhere, patrolled by armored police driving through communities of color with tanks and sporting military-grade weaponry that came to them at a steep discount from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The nightly footage from the local news and the international news looks more and more similar by the day.
• The fault lies with politicians who glorify and take advantage of the Sacred Soldier in equal measure, even as they slash funding for real soldiers who desperately need it. The trauma of multiple deployments, combined with the deliberate undermining of the national economy for the benefit of the wealthy, has made for a hard homecoming for many of those real soldiers. Their reward -- to be used as advertisements for the vast payday of permanent war whether they like it or not -- is beneath contempt, and profoundly dangerous.
• Many soldiers today do not even want you to thank them for their service. They wish simply to come home, to heal, and to find their parcel of normal after a season in Hell. This is the most reasonable expectation imaginable, and the fact that this country still struggles to fulfill even this small measure of solace tells you all you need to know about our national priorities. Any nation that does not care for its war veterans has no business making new ones.

Hiding their money

The Paradise Papers focus on secretive offshore investments. Surprisingly to me, colleges - especially the upper crust - engage in this activity. I can understand why companies or individuals use these secret, low tax investments, as their job is to maximize profits within certain humanitarian limits. I find it hard to see why such activity can be considered morally correct for colleges. It is true that when schools earn income from enterprises unrelated to their core educational missions, they can be required to pay a tax that was intended to prevent nonprofits from competing unfairly with for-profit businesses. But, isn't their first obligation to their students? Could they not use that money to lower tuition? Which would result in lowering the massive debt many of these students assume.

Thoughts on Veterans Day

This is a reprint of a post of mine from November 2015.

When I was a kid in the 1940s, it was pretty obvious that this nation was at war.  Everyone was involved in some activity to help the war effort. I and my friends collected aluminum foil.  My sisters knitted.  We went to the market with ration book in hand.  Every so often we prepared for an air raid.  My brothers served in the Battle of the Bulge and other combat.  All of my male cousins and most of the men I knew were drafted.  I learned to read via the headlines and the lead stories of the war that the newspapers carried every day.  I practiced my writing by writing letters to my brothers.  All of the men in East Cambridge were drafted.  It was pretty obvious why we should celebrate their efforts.  Hardly anyone was against the GI Bill.  I can fully understand why in the '50s and '60s Armistice Day was a big deal.  And, I can readily understand why Eisenhower renamed Armistice Day to Veterans Day in 1954.

However, I find it very hard to understand the brouhaha that is now made of Veterans Day.  When Nixon abolished the draft in 1973, people now had a choice as to whether they wanted to join the military or not, as they always had a choice whether they should join the police, become a teacher, practice medicine, fight fires, etc.  There are many professions where the goal is not making a dollar.  Soldiers are not the only ones risking their lives.  Police and firefighters also risk their lives.  The military is not the only important profession that keeps this country whole.  Where would we be without teachers or policemen?  Why don't we have a teacher's day or a policemen's day?

The fact of a volunteer army makes us more susceptible to go to war, especially because we know so few of the volunteers. As I said above, many of the people I knew in the '40s were drafted and risked their lives defending this country.  Some of my relatives served in Korea.  Friends served in Vietnam or moved to Canada.  Coffins landed in the military base in Bedford, MA almost every night.  We were all involved in these wars and realized their cost.  The President didn't tell us to avoid the fact that we were at war, we were all helping the war effort.  That was our duty as citizens, no matter our age or circumstances.

It is interesting that most of the politicians that will be speaking on Veterans Day have not served in any capacity in the military.  I'll end with a comment from Aaron O'Connell, a professor at Annapolis, "Uncritical support of all things martial is quickly becoming the new normal for our youth. Hardly any of my students at the Naval Academy remember a time when their nation wasn’t at war."

Learn about bots and trolls

Growing Planes

Killing the State Department

In the nine months of Trump's presidency 60% of the career ambassadors in the State Department are no longer there. Also, there is a freeze on lower level hiring which affects the future. Career diplomats are not political appointees; they do not change with every White House administration. We need them and their experience. 

It seems as though President Trump refuses anyone who opposed his candidacy, as did most of the Republican foreign policy establishment. When asked about the vacancies, Trump said, "I'm the only one that matters."

First steps to a new mode of transportation?

Mass Shootings

Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit focused on understanding and reducing gun violence, analyzed every mass shooting it was able to identify in the United States from 2009-2016. Here are their findings:

• From 2009-2016 in the U.S., there have been 156 mass shootings—incidents in which four or more people were shot and killed, not including the shooter. These incidents resulted in 1,187 victims shot: 848 people were shot and killed, and 339 people were shot and injured. In addition, 66 perpetrators killed themselves after a mass shooting, and another 17 perpetrators were shot and killed by responding law enforcement.
• The majority of mass shootings—54 percent of cases—were related to domestic or family violence.
• Mass shootings significantly impacted children: 25 percent of mass shooting fatalities (211) were children. This is primarily driven by mass shootings related to domestic or family violence, in which over 40 percent of fatalities were children.
• In nearly half of the shootings—42 percent of cases—the shooter exhibited warning signs before the shooting indicating that they posed a danger to themselves or others. These red flags included acts, attempted acts, or threats of violence towards oneself or others; violations of protective orders; or evidence of ongoing substance abuse.
• More than one-third of the shootings—34 percent—involved a shooter who was prohibited from possessing firearms.
• Only ten percent of incidents took place in “gun-free zones”, or areas where civilians are prohibited from carrying firearms and there is not a regular armed law enforcement presence (armed security guards, for example). The vast majority of incidents—63 percent—took place entirely in private homes.

The Biggest Navy Scandal

440 active-duty and retired sailors are currently under scrutiny for possibly violating ethics rules in their dealings with Glenn Defense Marine Asia. The owner of the company, Leonard Glenn Francis or "Fat Leonard", is in jail for bribery and fraud. He overcharged the Navy by around $35 million. 69 of those being investigated are admirals. Charges have been filed on 29 thus far.

It seems that Leonard didn't have to do much to sway the admirals - fancy meals, post-dinner romps that sometimes included prostitutes, and lots of alcohol. For this, he was able to overcharge for “fuel, tugboats, barges, food, water, and sewage removal,” for almost ten years.

Use cars as a model?

Nicholas Kristof has an interesting approach to our gun violence problem. He looks at the issue of car safety. In 1946 there were 9.6 deaths per 100 million miles traveled; last year that number was down to 1.18. Why? The effect of such things as seat belts, federal safety standards, a national speed limit, car safety ratings, air bags, mandatory reporting of defects. 

His suggestions for addressing the gun problem: 

• Background Checks - 22 percent of guns are obtained without one 
• Protection Orders - Keep men subject to domestic violence protection orders from having guns 
• Ban Under-21s - A ban on people under 21 purchasing firearms (this is already the case in many states) 
• Safe Storage - These include trigger locks and guns and ammunition stored separately, especially when children are in the house 
• Straw Purchases - Tighter enforcement of laws on straw purchases of weapons, and some limits on how many guns can be purchased in a month 
• Ammunition Checks - Experimentation with a one-time background check for anybody buying ammunition. 
• End Immunity - End immunity for firearm companies. That’s a subsidy to a particular industry 
• Ban Bump Stocks  - A ban on bump stocks of the kind used in Las Vegas to mimic automatic weapon fire 
• Research ‘Smart Guns’  - “Smart guns” fire only after a fingerprint or PIN is entered, or if used near a particular bracelet.

Make sense to you?

Turning urine into gold

Meditation on Daylight Saving Time

Had any plastic lately?

Studies have found plastic in the fish we eat. In one study, 1 in 4 fish that researchers purchased from fish markets in Indonesia and the United States during the second half of 2014 were found to have plastic in their guts. Studies have also found microplastics in the digestive systems of shellfish, including oysters, mussels and lobsters. Two Belgian researchers, looking at the amount of microplastics in some shellfish, concluded in 2014 that the average European seafood consumer could be eating 11,000 microplastics every year.

Plastics are the No. 1 type of trash found in the sea. Most of it comes from land from such activities as dumping of garbage into waterways. We don't do a good job of managing our waste. In 2010, over 50 percent of waste in more than 60 countries worldwide was found to be inadequately managed, mostly due to a lack of waste management infrastructure coupled with ballooning populations.  The United States is one of the world’s top five waste-generating developed countries, according to the World Economic Forum.

A better way of voting?

You really have to read the GAO report itself.

The Department of Defense (DOD) is the only government agency that is incapable of being audited as the accounting system is, at heart, not really a system.

Here's the beginning of the GAO's comments: "The Journal Voucher Working Group (Working Group), which is comprised of Department of the Army (Army) and Defense Finance and Accounting Service personnel, since 2015 has been actively working toward implementing new processes to address inadequate support for journal vouchers (JV) in the Army’s general fund. JVs are accounting entries manually entered or system generated to record corrections or adjustments in an accounting system. From October 2016 to March 2017, the Working Group identified more than 121,000 unsupported JVs totaling $455 billion in one of its reporting systems, Defense Departmental Reporting System-Budgetary (DDRS-B)."

Continue here.

Public debt of U.S. Territories

Before reading this, try to state the names of the territories. I had trouble naming them all, and there are only five.

The GAO looked at the past fifteen years. Its conclusions:

Puerto Rico's debt grew to 66% of GDP and the territory is now in default. Its financial future is unclear until debt restructuring is complete. 

Guam's debt increased to 44% of GDP. Large unfunded pensions, if unaddressed, may hamper repayment. 

The U.S. Virgin Islands' debt grew to 72% of GDP. It's uncertain if financial reform will let the territory borrow at favorable rates again. 

At 11% and 16% of GDP, respectively, American Samoa and Northern Mariana Islands had lower debt relative to the size of their economies.

Some GAO analyses of the F-35

Click here for more info.

Would better regulations save lives?

Where the money is

Less wine being produced?

The International Organization of Vine and Wine estimates that world wine production will fall 8.2 percent in 2017 compared to the previous year, reaching its lowest point in two decades. The reason: “unfavorable climate conditions” in Italy, France and Spain, the world’s three largest producers. Pinot noir is in the most danger as it is vulnerable to hail, late heat waves and other weather extremes.

And the decline in production is estimated for the U.S., as well. A peer-reviewed study in 2006 projected that climate change, by 2100, would reduce the U.S. area suitable for premium grape growing by up to 70 percent. Earlier this year an Oregon climate assessment reported that the Willamette Valley can expect a three-fold to nine-fold increase in the amount of area burned by the year 2100.

You can't join a class-action lawsuit

A while ago the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) passed a rule that would have banned the “mandatory arbitration clause” that prevents people from joining together in a class-action lawsuit. Wall Street didn't like this rule and worked hard to kill it. This spring they succeeded with Congress and this week President Trump joined them when he signed the resolution Congress had passed to kill the rule.

While we cannot band together in a lawsuit against Wall Street, they  still have a right to join with other companies to sue us for damages.

Checking the food we import

If Martha Rosenberg is correct, there is not much checking done. We have only 200 full-time inspectors policing 300 U.S. ports. One result of this staffing is that 96 percent of shrimp shipments are not opened or checked at the ports. The FDA places faith in the suppliers; it uses an automated system that flags companies with prior offenses and only then inspects documents, opens shipments or send samples to a lab. Does this make sense to you?

The Arctic is warming up

It's warming up twice as fast as the global average. You can see the result in the shrinking ice. But, perhaps what you can't see is a bigger problem. The Permafrost, which covers 25 percent of the Northern Hemisphere, is melting.  As a result, the ground warps, folds, and caves. Roadways built on top of permafrost have becoming wavy roller coasters through the tundra. Long-dormant microbes — some trapped in the ice for tens of thousands of years — are beginning to wake up, releasing equally ancient C02, and could potentially come to infect humans with deadly diseases. And the retreating ice is exposing frozen plants that haven’t seen the sun in 45,000 years.

And it's getting worse. “In the 1980s, the temperature of permafrost in Alaska, Russia and other Arctic regions averaged to be almost 18°F,” the U.S. Geological Survey explained in 2015. “Now the average is just over 28°F.”

Benefits of cutting taxes

Cross this bridge

Keeping it secret

Derivatives were a major cause of the Great Depression. Two of the worst offenders were Citigroup and Merrill Lynch. The government (we) really helped them out. In 2011, Citigroup received $2.5 trillion in cumulative, secret low cost loans from the Federal Reserve during the 2007-2010 financial crisis while Merrill received $1.9 trillion. But both companies are still heavily involved with derivatives, so involved that they have been fined by "regulators". 

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) recently fined Citigroup $550,000 for failing to properly report derivative trades. One of the violations was defined as follows: “…Citi violated its reporting obligations by reporting ‘Name Withheld’ as the counterparty identifier for tens of thousands of swaps with counterparties in certain foreign jurisdictions.”

And, for the second time in two years, the Financial Conduct Authority in the U.K. has fined Merrill Lynch for failure  “to report 68.5 million exchange traded derivative transactions between 12 February 2014 and 6 February 2016.”

Some sad numbers

The oldest person to have tattoos?

Lily Hutchison is almost 94 and has twelve tattoos on her forearms and ankles. She got her first tattoo when she was 80. All of her tattoos have some family connection, initials for family members and the logos of the three colleges her grandchildren attended.

Lily is a little different in another way. The only television shows she watches are Penn State and Steeler’s football games.

Moving to the Arctic

A Three-Legged Elephant

A Sign for Today

She'd make a good Congresswoman

Rodriguez Aguilera is a candidate for Congress. She wants to replace Florida Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. Some of her claims may be accepted by members of our current Congress: 

• She has communicated with extraterrestrials since she was seven years-old.
• She has been brought aboard a space ship and had conversations with aliens who let her in on key secrets about their visits to Earth. 

The aliens told her:

• There is a cave in the island of Malta that contains 30,000 skulls that are “different from humans”.
• The world’s “energy center” is located somewhere in Africa.
• The limestone Coral Castle tourist attraction in Florida is actually an ancient Egyptian pyramid.

Killing more civilians?

A nonprofit monitoring group, Airwars, reports that in the first seven months of the Trump administration thus far more civilians have been killed than under the entirety of the Obama administration. The claim is that 2,300 to 3,400 civilians were killed in the 8 years of Obama. In the first seven months of the Trump administration, they estimate that coalition air strikes have killed between 2,800 and 4,500 civilians.

Will the Afghanistan War ever end?

Twitter Targets

Computer centers get hot...

and Sweden is taking advantage of that. Computers get hot enough that they have to be cooled off. This is done by a lot of fans blowing cool air in and sucking hot air out. That’s because computers get hot – and it takes a lot of fans to keep them cool enough to operate properly. The heat in most computer centers is discarded at waste. For the past few years Sweden and a few other countries do not send the heat to the waste pile. It is run back through the pipes that fed in cool air and into plants where it is distributed for heating. 

The system is still in early days but Sweden expects to generate enough heat to warm 2,500 residential apartments by 2018. Long term it hopes to meet 10% of the entire heating need of Stockholm by 2035.

Friendship

Carefully walking down the aisle

Someone should start a pool...

...as to who our first opponent will be in Trump's War. North Korea, Iran, China, Syria, Russia,......... You name it.

Beer from bread

Tristram Stuart, a British author,  makes beer from bread. Why not? They have the same ingredients: water, grain, and yeast. And there is enough wasted bread around. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization says that a third of all food produced globally—approximately 1.3 billion tons worth—is wasted every year. Stuart is also a food waste activist and has started the Feeding the 5000 event, in which mass public dinners are made from surplus food.

He calls his beer Toast ale. Each pint has the equivalent of one slice of bread in it. This is not a fly-by-night venture; the company has brewed 9 tons of bread since its inception. This summer it began exporting to the U.S. It is now brewed and canned in the Bronx by the Chelsea Craft Brewing Co. in roughly 10,000 can batches. It is available at Whole Foods Inc. and at select restaurants such as Tom Colicchio’s Craft and Dan Barber’s Blue Hill.

Stuart now makes three varieties: a lager called Much Kneaded; Bloomin’ Lovely, a session IPA; and Purebread, a pale ale.