Flynn on Clinton

A quote from Michael Flynn on 'Meet The Press' in September 2016 in a discussion re Clinton's private server: "When you are given immunity, that means you probably committed a crime.’’ 

And, of course, last night Trump tweeted "Mike Flynn should ask for immunity".

One view of Trump's proposed budget

Truly nutso

Pee Wee Pumps makes soft shoes for infants. Its president, a woman, says that the products "are not intended for walking, but rather to meet the current and ever-growing popular demand for 'high-fashion' in infant apparel". The company describes its products as "cool" and "diva defining". The market for these products is infants up to six months old.

The shoes have collapsible heels and pointed toes. The company's Facebook page shows an infant in heels sitting astride a miniature motorbike with the caption: "This little #Diva, defining cool posing in her #PeeWeePumps." Others of their ads include babies wearing bead necklaces, sequin dresses and tutus. The shoes features styles made from red satin and leopard-skin material.

A snake's dinner

A 25-year-old man in Indonesia went missing while harvesting palm oil. He was found a day later inside a 23-foot reticulated python.

Stop the tweets

Are we better off than the Caveman?

Bill Schindler, an anthropology professor at Washington College, says "No". He asserts that fewer people have mastered basic survival skills today than at any other time in human history. These skills, he argues are essential to understanding what it means to be human. He teaches a class in Experimental Archaeology and Primitive Technology in which students learn to build fires with wooden hand drills, make rope from plant fibers, and gather tree nuts, among other things.

He claims that things were not as bad in the old days as we think they were. Early humans did not rough it alone. They traveled within larger migratory groups, and possessed an intricate knowledge of the local environment and seasonal changes. They knew “where to be and when to be there,” Schindler says. “In terms of diet, bone strength, lack of disease, we were actually doing much better in the past than we are now.” Early humans had to be much more inventive, adept at problem-solving, and subtly attuned to changes in the natural environment than we are. Their need to cooperate made them socially connected, as people nowadays are desperate to be (“Think Facebook,” he says). Early humans may even have been smarter than us: Cro-Magnons had larger brains than we do today. Ancient peoples faced dangers but little routine emotional stress, and few of the chronic illnesses that arise from poor diet and lack of physical activity. They can also teach us a lot about how to interact with the natural world.

He actually lives a sort of primitive life. His family forages for wild fruits and greens, and fishes and hunts for much of its protein. His youngest son has killed and butchered his first buck. They also brew beer, and bake bread in an outdoor oven, for which they split the wood.

Student finds error in NASA data

In physics class seventeen-year-old Miles Soloman was looking at radiation sensors on the International Space Station (ISS). He found that ISS sensors were recording negative data when there was no radiation present. This is impossible. So, he let NASA know. They told him that while it was aware of the error, its experts had thought the data blips appeared only once or twice a year. But the student informed them it was happening several times a day.

A doubling population

James Vaupel, founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany, thinks the population of those living to 100 and older is doubling. “The number of centenarians in the U.S. and other countries has been doubling roughly every eight years. When the baby boomers hit, there’s going to be acceleration, and it might be doubling every five or six years.”  Clearly, the number is increasing. Between 1980 and 2010, the numbers in America rose from 32,194 to 53,364, an increase of almost 66 percent. The latest population estimate, released in July 2015, reflects 76,974 centenarians. Is it genes or behavior?

Sundown at West Chop

A Turkey Vulture looking for food on the Vineyard

A couple of quotes from Eric Trump

From an interview with Forbes Magazine:

“There is kind of a clear separation of church and state that we maintain, and I am deadly serious about that exercise. I do not talk about the government with him, and he does not talk about the business with us. That’s kind of a steadfast pact we made, and it’s something that we honor.” 

But less than two minutes later, he concedes that he will continue to update his father on the business while he is in the presidency.
"Yeah, on the bottom line, profitability reports and stuff like that, but you know, that’s about it.” How often will those reports be, every quarter? “Depending, yeah, depending.” Could be more, could be less? “Yeah, probably quarterly.” One thing is clear: “My father and I are very close,” Eric Trump says. “I talk to him a lot. We’re pretty inseparable.”

A harbinger of the future

Frank Daly was ordained as a Catholic priest in 1967. He was married in 1978 and the Church granted him approval to leave the priesthood. He and his wife, Janice Gould, had two children. She died in 2015. The Church received him back as a priest in 2016.

Not a full twin

Trump's budget does not shore up our defense against diseases.

Some have estimated that the 1918-19 “Spanish” influenza killed more people than all the wars of the 20th century combined. Other scientists think that, if left unchecked, drug-resistant infections will kill more people worldwide by 2050 than cancer and diabetes combined. We didn't do a good job handling the Zika virus. These scientists may be wrong but I doubt it. In today's interconnected world viruses can travel around the globe very fast. There appear to be more new viruses than there used to be. It is likely that terrorists will eventually use viruses as a weapon. The science exists to reconstruct the smallpox genome from readily available lab materials, with the added possibility of altering the virus just enough that our existing vaccine would be ineffective. So, why are we boosting arms but not vaccines?

The Changing World

Who's dying in America?

The answer, according to a recent study by Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton, is whites aged 50-54 with a high-school degree or less. In 1999 they had been dying at a rate 30 percent lower than that of that of all blacks in the same age group.  But by 2015, their mortality rate was 30 percent higher than that of all blacks in that age group. Between 1998 and 2013, death rates for Hispanics fell as well. 

Over this time period there has been a significant increase in deaths from suicides, poisonings, and alcoholic liver disease among whites with lowest levels of educational attainment. This is in contrast to Europe, where people of all educational backgrounds are living longer, which suggests that there’s something unique among middle-aged Americans without a college education that’s making them sicker.  The author attribute this difference to the fact that Europe has a social safety net. While middle-aged whites in the United States are left adrift once economic opportunities go away, those in Europe are provided with financial support and health care that make it easier to be satisfied with life. 

Conflicts of Interest?

Six Rules for Presidents

Barry Ritholz has reprinted Peter Drucker's "Six Rules for Presidents". 

• What Needs to be Done? Is the first thing the President must ask. He must not stubbornly do what he wants to do, even if it was the focus of his campaign. 
• Concentrate, Don’t Splinter Yourself …unless a President makes the risky and controversial choice of only one, he will achieve nothing
 • Don’t Bet on a Sure Thing ….Roosevelt had every reason to believe that his plan to “pack” the Supreme Court….would be a sure thing. It immediately blew up in is face – so much so that he never regained control of Congress
 • An Effective President does not Micromanage… the tasks that a President must do himself are already well beyond what any but the best organized and most energetic person can possibly accomplish
 • A President has no Friends in the Administration …they are always tempted to abuse their position as a friend and the power that comes with it • Sixth rule? Harry Truman advised JFK: “Once you’re elected, stop campaigning.”

Commenting on the House Committee on Russian Influence on U.S. Politics

Panda Diplomacy

How can Congress cut the EPA and Energy Dept. budgets?

An analysis by Bloomberg shows that spending related to the environment in fiscal 2016 was almost equally divided between congressional districts represented by either party.  The money was significant reaching $5.9 billion; South Carolina topped the list at $804 million. Will Congressmen vote for these cuts in their districts?

Then, you have the impact on jobs. In 2016, 4,462 vendors got government contracts related to the environment, climate, sustainability or similar fields. Twenty-five publicly traded companies earned more than $10 million each from those contracts. United Technologies Corp., based in Connecticut, earned $172 million. Again, who would vote for a budget which counts these companies out?

Listing the connections

You may want to start around minute 11.

How much does toilet paper cost in China?

It must be fairly expensive as, at a park in Beijing, they are using toilet paper dispensers with facial recognition to stop visitors from taking too much paper. Machines at the park scan visitors' faces before dispensing a fixed length strip of paper about 24 x 27.5 inches to each person. 

More paper is not dispensed to the same person until after nine minutes have passed. "If we encounter guests who have diarrhea or any other situation in which they urgently require toilet paper, then our staff on the ground will directly provide the toilet paper," a park spokesman said.

Dark matter is invisible

The Stupid Wall

ProPublica has a few numbers relative to Trump's Wall. The first budget number is $2.6 billion. However, this amount is not for a new wall; it will go to build a bunch of smaller walls and patch holes in the assortment of fences that now exist. The cost of the wall per se is now estimated at $21 billion.

Some other things that the $2.1 billion could be used for:

• To fund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting plus the $231 million given to the country’s libraries and museums plus the $366 million that goes to legal help for the poor. These total less than $1 billion.
• The federal government could increase the annual combined spending on the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities by 900 percent or so and still not get to the $2.6 billion. 
• The $2.6 billion is more than twice the annual costs of 21st Century Community Learning Centers created across the country to fund programs run before and after school and throughout the summer. You could actually throw in the $190 million spent on teaching students with disabilities and limited English proficiency and still not match the wall costs.

Wall Street Bonuses

The Institute for Policy Studies looked at the bonuses paid to Wall Streeters for 2016. Some conclusions:

The total bonus pool for 177,000 Wall Street employees was 1.6 times the combined annual earnings of all 1,075,000 U.S. full-time minimum wage workers. 

The average Wall Street bonus increased by 1 percent last year to $138,210. Since 1985, the nominal value of the average Wall Street bonus has increased 890 percent, whereas the minimum wage has risen only 116 percent.

The 2016 bonus pool held enough dollars to lift the pay of any one of these groups of low-wage workers up to $15 per hour:

• all of the country’s 3.1 million restaurant servers and bartenders, 
• all 1.7 million home health and personal care aides, or 
• all 3.2 million fast food preparation and serving workers.

The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan (SIGAR) has just issued its latest High-Risk List, which spells out the greatest threats to the ultimate success of our more than 15-year-long U.S.-funded reconstruction effort in Afghanistan. That investment is now more than $115 billion and will continue at around $5billion a year until 2020. It is the largest expenditure to rebuild a single country in our nation’s history. It has been used to train Afghan security forces, stand up the Afghan government, and develop the local economy. But it is not doing well. This especially true with regard to the capabilities of the Afghan security forces and government corruption.

Other high risk areas are Sustainability, On-Budget Support, Counternarcotics, Contract Management, Oversight and Strategy and Planning.

The important people at colleges in America...

are not professors. They're coaches of sports. Sure, we know that some college football or basketball coaches make big bucks. But now, as college athletics generates more money, you find situation such as:

From 2006 to 2016, pay for Kentucky’s track and field coach climbed from $108,000 to $429,000 (298%); men’s tennis coach pay jumped from $122,000 to $230,000; and gymnastics coach pay rose from $112,000 to $252,000. Every coach made more than the school’s average full professor’s salary of $121,000. The rifle coach made $133,000; not bad for what is really a minor sport.

At the University of Kansas, men’s golf coach pay jumped from $84,000 to $201,000 over the past decade. At the University of Virginia, pay for the women’s volleyball coach rose from $94,000 to $221,000. And at West Virginia University, men’s soccer coach pay jumped from $66,000 to $188,000. 

Kentucky really spends money on athletics. It is building a professional-quality stadium is needed to lure top recruits. The stadium will cost only $49 million baseball stadium and will feature artificial turf, permanent seating for 2,500 and the ability to offer expanded seating for up to 7,000. The new stadium will be part of an “athlete’s village” Kentucky is building that includes a $45 million football training complex (opened in 2016), a new $9.5 million softball stadium (opened in 2013), and a new $7.7 million soccer stadium (opened in 2014).

Children in Nigeria today

When will DOD be auditable?

The GAO has been reporting for several years that the books of our military cannot be audited. Three public accounting firms tried to audit the Budgetary Schedules of all three military services for 2015. Not one could express an opinion because of a lack of sufficient evidence to support the amounts presented. They identified material weaknesses in internal control and collectively issued a total of over 700 findings and recommendations. These weaknesses included, among other things, the military services’ inability to reasonably assure that the Budgetary Schedules reflected all of the relevant financial transactions that occurred and that documentation was available to support such transactions. 

20th century snowfall

Who has the largest GDP?

Winter 2017

The Republican Health Plan

A Celebrity Urologist

Dr. David Samadi is a regular medical expert on Fox News, who advertises for and attracts international patients and boldface names, such as “Today Show” host Matt Lauer. His patients at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan are served gourmet meals. He is one of the country’s highest-paid surgeons, earning $6.7 million in 2015 as a specialist in robotic prostate surgery.

However, the Boston Globe's Spotlight Team "found that Samadi overlapped one case with another at some point in about 70 percent of his roughly 2,200 operations between mid-2013 and mid-2016. Hundreds of times, one operation overlapped completely with another." Current and former medical personnel  told regulators and the Globe that Samadi, while working on one case, routinely hands off simultaneous operations to unsupervised residents who are still learning how to do surgery. His residents have also complained to an accrediting agency that he doesn’t properly train them.

Landslide at dump is a killer

Fukushima Six Years Later

Here's where things stand; 

• 400 Tons of Contaminated Water Per Day
• 3,519 Containers of Radioactive Sludge
• 64,700 Cubic Meters of Discarded Protective Clothing 
• Branches and Logs From 220 Acres of Deforested Land
• 200,400 Cubic Meters of Radioactive Rubble
• 3.5 Billion Gallons of Soil
• 1,573 Nuclear Fuel Rods
• Estimated Cost of removing all the waste and cleaning the site, $188.6 billion.
• Time frame - begin removing fuel debris from the reactor cores in 2021&nbsp

Don't be interviewed at home

Professor Robert Kelly when he was being interviewed live on BBC News about South Korea.

So whose paying taxes?

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy recently released a study of the tax burdens of 258 of the Fortune 500 from 2008 to 2015. They found that these 258 companies earned more than $3.8 trillion in profits and paid an average rate of 21.2 percent. Companies with the biggest tax subsidies over the eight years, the institute’s report included:
 ■ AT&T ($38.1 billion) 
 ■ Wells Fargo ($31.4 billion) 
 ■ JPMorgan Chase ($22.2 billion) 
 ■ Verizon ($21.1 billion) 
 ■ IBM ($17.8 billion) 
 ■ General Electric ($15.4 billion) 
 ■ Exxon Mobil ($12.9 billion)
 ■ Boeing ($11.9 billion) 
 ■ Procter & Gamble ($8.5 billion)
 ■ Twenty-First Century Fox ($7.6 billion)
 ■ Time Warner ($6.7 billion) 
 ■ Goldman Sachs ($5.5 billion)

GE protested that the report was “deeply flawed and misleading.”

Other tidbits from the report:
• 100  companies enjoyed at least one year in which their federal income tax was zero or less 
• 24 companies paid zero taxes in four out of eight years 
• 18 companies (including General Electric, International Paper, Priceline.com and PG&E) paid no federal income tax over the eight-year period.
• Collectively, the 258 corporations enjoyed $513 billion in tax breaks over the last eight years. More than half of those tax breaks, $277 billion, went to just 25 of the most profitable corporations. 

Talk about snow

It is snowing in New England now. It may reach as much as 5 inches, which means that probably the schools will be closed. This would not happen in Japan. One small town in the mountains gets 695 inches a year. That’s 26 times more snow than New York City receives in a winter, and more than six times as snowy as supposedly snowy Syracuse. Yet, the road to this town is open year-round.

There are mountains in Japan. Parts of the JIDA Mountains can receive as much as 1,500 inches of snow a year, or 125 feet. Within these mountains is a tourist attraction, the Snow Canyon, whose walls can be as high as 66 feet.

Poverty in the U.S.

Stephen Pimpare, an author and professor at UNH, addresses the issue in today's Washington Post. He disagrees with our basic assumptions - the US is a land of opportunity, where upward mobility is readily available and hard work gets you ahead. 

As evidence of the weakness of "the land of opportunity" argument he notes that the rates of intergenerational income mobility are higher in France, Spain, Germany, Canada, Japan, New Zealand and other countries in the world than they are here in the United States. And that mobility is in further decline here, an indicator of the falling fortunes not just of poor and low-income Americans, but of middle-class ones, too. Poverty here is widespread. According to the Census Bureau, over a three-year period, about one-third of all U.S. residents slip below the poverty line at least once for two months or more.

Poverty is common here in his opinion "because of  low wages or lack of jobs, the poor quality of too many schools, the dearth of marriageable males in poor black communities or the high cost of birth control and day care. Never mind the fact that the largest group of poor people in the United States are children. Never mind the grim reality that most American adults who are poor are not poor from lack of effort but despite it."

Personally, I think we succeed here initially because of chance, the most important aspect of which is that we were born here and the elderly among us grew up in largely strong economies.

Another result of Fukushima

In the last minute the speaker claims that the activity of the boars was predicted in the bible. This seems like a stretch to me.

Could you beat them?

Growing tomatoes in space

And you'll never guess what is enabling this growth - urine. The German Space Agency is the prime actor in this movement. Visitors to the agency's offices can taste the tomatoes, which are not exactly the tastiest they've eaten. But they're fine for astronauts.

The tomatoes are grown atop of columns packed with pumice stone – solidified lava that is riddled with holes – home to rich colonies of bacteria. These microbes feed on the urine pumped through the pipes, some bacteria convert ammonia into nitrites and others convert this into nitrate salts, i.e. fertilizer. This is just like the nitrogen cycle that takes place naturally in soils and watercourses on Earth. As well as urine, this closed-loop biological system could be used to process leftover food or leaves that drop from a plant.

The test in space is scheduled for later this year, The rocket will contain  two miniature greenhouses, as well as tomato seeds, a tank of synthetic urine and bacterial colonies. The spacecraft will spin to simulate gravity and water the system. It is expected that the tomatoes will germinate and the urine will produce tomatoes.

Medicaid and the Disabled

Speeding up traffic

Ann Arbor works on speeding up its traffic. It has reduced weekday travel times on affected corridors by 12 percent, and weekend travel time by 21 percent. The system not only is able to sense if a vehicle is stopped, and turn the light green to help it along. It knows how many vehicles are stopped, in which lane, and how many vehicles are coming down the pike.

The system relies on pavement-embedded sensors or cameras to spot cars waiting at red lights. The signals send that information via fiber network to the Big Computer back at traffic management base, which compiles the data. This stuff works on a macro and micro level: If there are four cars lined up to go one way through an intersection, and zero cars lined up to move perpendicular to them, the light might turn green for the four. But a network of connected lights—like in Ann Arbor—will analyze the entire grid, and figure out who to prioritize to get the most people to their destinations the fastest. Advanced traffic control systems can even predict delays and congestion build-up before they happen, based on the ebb and flow of commutes.

Did he suffocate?

A man who owned six tons of porn died when his collection of filthy magazines fell on top of him (see below). The 50-year-old's body was was only discovered six months later when the landlord entered his flat in Japan to find out why the rent had not been paid.

Coming to America

Ridiculous CEO pay

Barry Ritholz has an excellent article on executive compensation. I say "compensation" because CEOs get paid more, much more, than their salary. And it's gotten worse. The Economic Policy Institute reports, “CEO pay grew an astounding 943% over the past 37 years.” EPI further observes this was a far faster growth rate than “the cost of living, the productivity of the economy, and the stock market.”

Another study - this by the research firm Audit Analytics. More companies report executive pay using non-GAAP accounting. And it's getting worse; last year 58% of the S&P companies used non-GAAP, five years ago only 27% did.

A Harvard Law School study: The 10 companies identified as the most overpaid firms as a group underperformed the S&P 500 index by 10.5% and actually demolished shareholder value as a group with –5.7% financial returns.

Another false tweet

Today's stupid tweet from Trump:
 "122 vicious prisoners, released by the Obama Administration from Gitmo, have returned to the battlefield. Just another terrible decision!."

Reality:
NBC News National Correspondent Peter Alexander points out, a report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence found that 113 of the 122 former Guantanamo detainees cited by Trump were released under President George W. Bush and only nine under Obama.

John Oliver meets the Dalai Lama

Why are we still using artificial turf?

Stuart Shalat, a specialist in environmental health, gives several reasons:

Black crumbs derived from tires are the prime component of artificial turf.  Tires are a mixture of natural and synthetic rubber, carbon black – a material made from petroleum – and somewhere between four and 10 gallons of petroleum products. They also contain metals, including cadmium, lead, which is neurotoxic, and zinc. Some of the chemicals in tires, such as dibenzopyrenes, are known carcinogens. Also, in addition to chemicals used in the manufacture of the tire, any chemical the tires were exposed to in their use can become absorbed on the carbon black in the tires.

Weedkiller is needed to kill the crabgrass and other weeds that start growing in it. 

The field surface temperatures can reach as high as 200 degrees Fahrenheit. 

The turf  is laid over either concrete or compacted earth, artificial turf is a harder surface than grass. This can increase the risk of injuries, particularly concussion.

No killing, No arrest

A recent study by Boston Magazine found that, from the start of 2014 through September 20, 2016, there were 618 non-fatal gun shootings in Boston. Yet, in only 4% of the shootings were arrest made. Results were not good with fatal shootings either, as only 15% saw an arrest. 

The police attribute this result to the fact that witnesses generally refuse to cooperate and help identify shooters. But other cities have taken steps to alleviate the problem. Results have improved in these cities such as Milwaukee clears 30 percent of such cases by arrest. Denver made arrests in 29 percent of its cases over the past two years. Baltimore claims a 36 percent solve rate. And even small yet trigger-happy Trenton, New Jersey, clears a remarkable 45 percent of its non-fatal shootings cases.

Is the Coast Guard part of the military?

Apparently not in the eyes of the Trump administration nor in the government's current organization where it reports to Homeland Security. I - and I suspect many of you - find it hard to not think of the Coast Guard as part of the military. 

While the administration is seeking an overall increase of $54 billion in the Pentagon budget, it is cutting the Coast Guard budget by $1.3 billion. "With all the success we had last year, there were over 500 events that we had great information on, but we just did not have enough planes, enough ships, to target all 500-plus events," said the Commandant of the Guard. "We are really besieged down there," he added, referencing Coast Guard operations off the coast of Colombia. In addition to its operations targeting drug smugglers and human traffickers, the Coast Guard has been in and out of the Arctic region with its ice-breaking ships, especially as Russia attempts to claim parts of the region, and its rich resources, for itself. 

"We're challenged in our ability to exert leadership when, you're the world's most prosperous nation, yet we can only seem to afford two icebreakers," the Commandant said. He said that ideally, the service would need a fleet of 3 heavy and  medium icebreakers to remain competitive. 

Coming out at 95

Retired Generals Speak Up

120 retired generals, including Petraeus and Stavridis, wrote a letter to Congress and some Cabinet members bemoaning the proposed cuts in the State Department budget. Some points made: 

"The State Department, USAID, Millennium Challenge Corporation, Peace Corps and other development agencies are critical to preventing conflict and reducing the need to put our men and women in uniform in harm's way." "Crises our nation faces do not have military solutions alone -- from confronting violent extremist groups like ISIS in the Middle East and North Africa to preventing pandemics like Ebola."We know from our service in uniform that many of the crises our nation faces do not have military solutions alone -- from confronting violent extremist groups like ISIS in the Middle East and North Africa to preventing pandemics like Ebola." 

Dying earlier

A recent report in The Lancet found that, “Notable among poor-performing countries is the USA whose life expectancy at birth is already lower than most other high-income countries, and is projected to fall further behind, such that its 2030 life expectancy at birth might be similar to the Czech Republic for men, and Croatia and Mexico for women.” 

There are three primary reasons: 

It has the highest infant and maternal mortality rates of any of the countries in the study. It has the highest obesity rate. It is the only country without universal health insurance coverage.

Chaos around the corner?

Another thing to worry about

Volcanoes! The U.S. Geological Survey believes that 55 of our 169 active volcanoes  pose a high or very high threat to people. And the threat is not only molten lava; volcanic gas and falling boulders have also killed people.

We do monitor well-known volcanoes such as Hawaii’s Kilauea, Washington’s Mt. St. Helens, and Wyoming’s Yellowstone. But there are many that are not well monitored. Almost half of the active volcanoes in the country don’t have adequate seismometers—tools used to track the earthquakes that often occur during volcanic eruptions. And even at the sites that do have seismometers, many instruments—selected because they are cheaper and consume less power—are unable to take a complete record of the ground shaking around an eruption, meaning “the full amplitude of a seismogram may be ‘clipped’ during recording, rendering the data less useful for in-depth analyses.

Living with half a brain

We don't really know much about the nations of the world

From William Astore, retired Lieutenant Colonel

All the metaphors and images do, however, suggest one thing -- that Afghanistan isn't real to American leaders, much as Vietnam wasn't to an earlier generation of them. It's not grasped as a sophisticated culture with a long and rich history. Those in charge see it and its people only through the reductive and distorting lens of their never-ending war and then reduce what little they see to terms that play well to politicians and the public back home. Stalemate? We can break it. Platform? We can firm it up and launch attacks from it. Petri dish? We can contain it, then control it, and finally eradicate it with our lethal medicines. What they refuse to do, however, is widen that lens, deepen their vision, and see the Afghan people as a richly complex society that Washington will never (and should never try to) dominate and reshape into our image of a country.

Fukushima is still a problem

A new reading of the reactor #2 reveals the highest level of radiation recorded to date. True, this is the first time a reading was taken there, but 530 sieverts per hour is a number experts have called "unimaginable". Robert Cringely, who knows a lot about radiation, writes, "What this means is there’s a puddle of molten uranium that has melted its way through the steel pressure vessel, through the reinforced concrete containment, through the reinforced concrete foundation of the nuclear facility, and is now working its way through whatever rock or soil lies underneath the foundation, dropping lower each day."

Home Ownership Over the Past 50 years

A Surprise

Trump was relatively rational and not too vitriolic. His speech was just like that of all the other presidents. As usual, it enabled our Congressmen to keep in shape by standing up every few minutes.