What can you believe?

Another medical journal, Tumor Biology, has admitted that it published papers that cheated the peer review process. Between 2010 and 2016, 107 of the papers published in the journal have been retracted. 

The journal allowed authors to submit the names and email addresses of potential reviewers for their manuscripts. The names were real, but the emails were bogus, with some apparently controlled by companies paid by the authors to help them get their papers published. 

One view of the first 100

Fighting in school

In Missouri schools now must report any and all “first degree harassment” or fights to the authorities— if those situations arise during school hours and under a school’s jurisdiction. The 'authorities' include the juvenile office, the police and the prosecutors. They determine whether a student should be charged with a crime or if action needs to be brought in juvenile court regarding the actions of the particular students. It is possible that the student could be sent to a juvenile detention center, charged with a Class E felony and spend up to four years in jail. Under the old law a child could be charged with a misdemeanor and released to their parents.

Have some seeds

Wasting Drugs

That's what most nursing homes do. When a resident dies, moves out or no longer needs a particular drug, the drugs are discarded even though they may still be useful and could help someone else. Thirty-nine states had passed laws that allow the donation of these drugs. But almost half of the states with laws lack programs to get the drugs safely from one appropriate user to another, and many of those that do have programs are focused on cancer drugs.

There are no nationwide statistics that are kept, but the waste is substantial. Colorado officials have said the state’s 220 long-term care facilities throw away a whopping 17.5 tons of potentially reusable drugs every year, with a price tag of about $10 million. The Environmental Protection Agency estimated in 2015 that about 740 tons of drugs are wasted by nursing homes each year. 

Iowa does have a law allowing the reuse of drugs. The annual costs of their program are $600,000. In fiscal 2016 the program recovered and distributed drugs valued at about $3.4 million. 

A weird commercial

Now it's over 410

'It' is the carbon dioxide reading at the Mauna Loa Observatory. The reading was in excess of 410 parts per million (ppm), the highest in millions of years. In 1958 it was only 280 ppm.

The problem, as we know, is world-wide. Venice is installing $6 billion worth of sea gates to protect against increased tidal flooding. The Great Barrier Reef is disappearing. Coastal erosion threatens scores of treasured sites in Scotland.  Easter Island is in danger. Here, most of the glaciers that in the 19th century dotted what is now Glacier National Park have already melted, and the rest are expected to be gone within this century. Archaeological sites on the Alaska coast are being lost. The Statue of Liberty, cannot be considered safe: Flooding from Hurricane Sandy destroyed much of the infrastructure on Liberty Island in 2012.

Drug Overdose Mortality by State

Top 10 states per National Center for Health Statistics:

                                             Overdose         
                                            Death Rate       Deaths
West Virginia                              41.5                725
New Hampshire                          34.3                422
Ohio                                          29.9              3,310
Kentucky                                   29.9              1,273
Rhode Island                              28.2                310
Pennsylvania                              26.3             3,264
Massachusetts                            25.7             1,724
New Mexico                                25.3                501
Utah                                          23.4                646
Tennessee                                  22.2             1,457

A different kind of twins

Carmen and Lupita Andrade are a somewhat different type of conjoined twins. Most conjoined twins are stillborn or die shortly after birth. The Andrade sisters, who are now 16, are attached along their chest walls down to their pelvis where their spines meet. They each have two arms, but only a single leg, with Carmen controlling the right and Lupita, the left. The girls each have a heart, a set of arms, a set of lungs and a stomach, but they share some ribs, a liver, their circulatory system, and their digestive and reproductive systems. Years ago, they spent long hours in physical therapy, learning how to get up off their backs and sit and use their legs together. At the age of 4, they took their first steps. 

When they were tiny, doctors considered separating them, but concluded it couldn’t be done safely. They have learned to balance and coordinate every move, bracing themselves at times to offset the strain of supporting two upper bodies on one set of hips and one pair of legs.

They lead a fairly normal life. They go to high school every day. They have a raft of friends. Carmen in learning to drive a car.

But Lupita is having trouble breathing. A curvature in her spine has reduced her breathing to 40% of her lung capacity. The odds of a successful operation are not very good.

Meet Eva Cassidy

Ella Fitzgerald's 100th birthday today

Giving money away

The province of Ontario, Canada's largest, is testing a new way to help poor people. The poor in three cities will be given money in place of current social welfare programs.The test will last for three years. Randomly selected participants living in three communities in Ontario will be given at least $12,600 a year minus 50% of any income earned from a job to live on. Couples will receive $18,300. Participants must have lived in one of the areas for over a year, be between 18-64 and be living on a lower income.

Ontario is not alone in trying this. Finland launched its own trial in January, and the Scottish government has expressed interest. The program will cost C$50m a year, and will include 4,000 households from across those three communities. By allowing people to keep part of their earnings, the government hopes people will be encouraged to work and not rely solely on assistance.

Superfoetation anyone?

It's only happened six times in the last 100 years. It happens when someone conceives then conceives again between two weeks and a month later. An English women conceived twins and two weeks later conceived another infant.

The War on Drugs

A few weeks ago NPR had a program on Lisbon and its decision to treat, rather than punish, drug addicts. So far, it's worked out well. What if we tried it here?

That's what Austin Frakt asks? He quotes from some studies that seem to be accurate: For one, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently estimated that prescription opioid abuse, dependence and overdoses cost the public sector $23 billion a year, with a third of that attributable to crime. An additional $55 billion per year reflects private-sector costs attributable to productivity losses and health care expenses. About 80,000 Americans are incarcerated for opioid-related crimes alone. The total annual economic burden of all substance use disorders — not just those involving opioids — is in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

Some other findings:
If we treated 10%1 more users,  the robbery and larceny theft rates would decrease by about 3 percent and the aggravated assault rate by 4 to 9 percent.
For a dollar spent on treatment, up to three are saved in crime reduction.
For every 100 patients on methadone per year, there were 12 fewer robberies, 57 fewer break-and-enters and 56 fewer auto thefts. 
The provision of heroin by doctors to patients addicted to it — permitted in Canada and some other countries — reduces crime.
The opening of an additional treatment facility in a county is associated with lower drug-related mortality in that county, as well as lower crime. The effect of crime reduction alone would save an estimated $4.2 million per facility per year, or almost four times its cost.

New England states could save $1.3 billion by expanding treatment of opioid-dependent persons by 25 percent.

Our changing earth

Cassini on Saturn

It's gotten warmer

The following chart is from Climate Central. It's based on data from NOAA and NASA and shows the degree of warmth each month from 1880 to 2015. The blueish boxes indicate cool months, the reddish warm months. As you can see, the blues have disappeared.

Working at an iPhone factory

Stock Market Terrorism

In Germany the bus for a soccer team was blown up by not one but three bombs. Only two people were hurt. The police have arrested a young guy who had speculated (via put options) in the stock of the football team. He bet $83,000 which he had obtained as a loan. His theory was that the stock would drop after the explosion. It did drop slightly but came back

How to meet with the NSC

The Grass Church

The first International Church of Cannabis opened its doors in Denver this week. The church has no specific dogma. “We’re building a community of volunteers, and the common thread is that they use cannabis to positively influence their lives, and they use cannabis for spiritual purposes,” said one f the founders of the church, which now has a congregation of more than 200. 

Colorado legalized recreational marijuana in 2012 and has been fine-tuning its regulations ever since. It is still illegal to smoke in Denver’s public spaces.

Buy drugs overseas

They are a lot cheaper. A couple of examples: Daraprim, the antiparasitic drug whose price was raised by Mr. Shkreli to nearly $750 per pill, sells for a little more than $2 overseas. The cancer drug Cosmegen is priced at $1,400 or more per injection here, as opposed to about $20 to $30 overseas. Would the pharmaceutical companies offer the drugs at these low oversea prices if they were not making money on them?

But buying drugs made overseas is virtually impossible. Yet, the law does, in fact, make it possible. Under a provision of the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003, the FDA can allow drug imports whenever they are deemed safe and capable of saving Americans money. Further, 25% or more of drugs labeled American-made are actually manufactured in other countries, in plants inspected by the F.D.A. (So are 80 percent of the active ingredients used in the production of drugs in American factories.) In actuality, the “imports” that the industry refers to are the same pills as those “American-made” drugs, produced by the same F.D.A.-inspected plants overseas.

A young boxer

Not going North

“We’re sending an armada,” Trump said to Fox News last Tuesday afternoon. He was referring to the sending to Korean waters of an aircraft carrier and its squadron of support ships. Over the weekend members of the administration, including McMaster and Mattis, confirmed Trump's statement. But in the real world the ships were sailing south, not north. They were going to take part in joint exercises with the Australian Navy in the Indian Ocean, 3,500 miles southwest of the Korean Peninsula. Trump's announcement caused a furor in North and South Korea. 

We all make mistakes, sometimes fatal mistakes. One would hope that the number and frequency of mistakes made by Trump and company in the past 100 days will not continue much longer.

The American Voter

A river disappears

The Slims River in Western Canada is no more. This river was about 500 feet wide and had been around for hundreds of years. Its waters flowed northward and eventually reached the Bering Sea. But in Spring 2016 the Kaskawulsh glacier which had been feeding the river began a relatively brief period of intense melting and redirected the meltwater to the Gulf of Alaska, thousands of miles from its original destination.

Another form of cancer, at least in the U.S.

That is the price of cancer drugs is, itself, a cancer. Here, a recent study showed that the price of cancer drugs rises each year at an average of 8.8%, in England it's 0.24%. Furthermore, the prices for the top 10 cancer drugs are 42 percent higher in the U.S. than they are in the United Kingdom.

A large part of the problem arises from the fact that in almost all other countries but the U.S. the government has a large say in the setting the price of a drug. Why is that?

Another medical wonder

Taxing the big banks

They don't pay much. Nine of the largest and most profitable US banks paid an average federal tax rate of only 18.6 percent between 2008 and 2015. That led to a credit of about $80 billion on their financial statements and a good bonus for the executives. 

I find this hard to believe but the six largest US banks (Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo) have set up more than 2,300 subsidiaries in tax havens like Bermuda and the Cayman Islands. How they can keep track of all these companies I know not. But, in 2016, these companies were holding nearly $150 billion in profits offshore. 

Another gimmick benefiting the banks is the fact that there is no tax on short term trading. Wall Street traders buy millions of dollars in stocks or derivatives and sell them a split second later with no tax consequences.

The French Election

Looking at US

William Astore, a retired Lieutenant Colonel and history professor, asks:

If you were Chinese or Russian or Shia Muslim, how might U.S. military activities appear to you? 

He has a few answers:

* Expansionist? Check.
* Dedicated to dominance via colossal military spending and global interventionism? Check.
* Committed to economic and ideological hegemony via powerful banking and financial interests that seek to control world markets in the name of keeping them “free”? Check.

He's also worried at how much our armed forces have become separated from the rest of the country. Even our Congressmen are separated as it has given its war-making powers to the president and the military. 

Astore likens us to Germany at the start of the 20th century. "The German military, praised as the “world’s best” by its leaders and sold to its people as a deterrent force, morphed during those two world wars into a doomsday machine that bled the country white, while ensuring the destruction of significant swaths of the planet."

He asks one final question:

Is North Korea’s Kim Jong-un the only unstable leader with unhinged nuclear ambitions currently at work on the world stage?

Dancing the dance of their youth

Courtesy of our Brooklyn correspondent

The press on United Airlines and Dr. Dao

Yves Smith has a devastating article on the furor regarding United Airlines ejection of Dr. Dao. She argues that neither the press nor United did a good job. The law states that a paying passenger with a confirmed seat who has been seated cannot be removed. Very few, if any, articles in the press point this out. The press seems to be convinced that United had the right to remove Dr. Dao. Further, the press reported that the doctor reboarded the plane; there is little proof of that. And, there was little mention of the possibility of a concussion, which did occur. 

United also was contravening the law when they gave preference to their employees over people who had reserved confirmed seats, in violation of 14 CFR 250.2a.

If you are interested in this situation, you really should read Smith's article.

Looking for his trainer

The eagle flies from the world's tallest building,a tower in Dubai.


Courtesy of a Duncaster resident.

Living together

Religious Discrimination in 2017 America

Solve the infrastructure problem by making money

Thomas Hanna does not mean "making money" in the sense of earning it. He means it in the sense of the government issuing new money. Hanna argues that neither public-private partnerships nor the issuance of government bonds will solve the problem. He feels that the days of public-private partnerships are over in that the private company does not make enough money on what is a considerable investment. Governments suffer because of the high costs of the bonds. He is pushing a national infrastructure bank or a network of state-level infrastructure banks. He feels that this is what quantitative easing did when the Fed pumped trillions in new money into the financial system.

Does the Navy have to train in the Gulf of Alaska?

The Navy's Northern Edge training exercise has been held in Alaska every two years. This exercise involves ships, aircraft, ordnance, and the widespread use of sonar across more than 42,000 square nautical miles of the marine environment of the Gulf of Alaska. It may drop bombs, launch torpedoes and missiles, and engage in other activities that may poison the Gulf waters. 

Many Alaska towns on the Gulf are very concerned about the effects of these activities have on the towns and have protested to the Navy with little effect. First of all, these exercises threaten their livelihood which is based on fishing, the single largest private sector employer in the state of Alaska, providing over 63,000 jobs. The activities threaten four areas protected for reasons of environment conservation. The Navy has produced an Environment Impact Statement which acknowledges that fish in the area are at risk of chemical exposures of various sorts because the war games will introduce chromium, lead, tungsten, nickel, cadmium, cyanide, and ammonium perchlorate, along with numerous other heavy metals and toxic substances, into Alaskan waters. The statement also states that more than five tons of toxic materials could be introduced into the fertile fishing areas of the Gulf each time the Navy conducts a training event. The sonar aspect generates audible blasts up to 235 decibels -- humans begin to suffer hearing damage at 85 decibels -- that travel for thousands of miles across the ocean

After the 2015 exercise, Alaska witnessed the single largest whale mortality event ever to occur in its waters. Statewide, in the year that followed, Alaska had its worst pink salmon fishing season in four decades. A federal disaster declaration was even issued to give salmon fishermen some relief, deferring the repayment of loans. That year also saw the biggest die off of Murres, a small seabird, ever recorded in the state.

Punish the bankers not the banks

So says Charles Goodhart, Emeritus Professor at the London School of Economics. 

"If a bank CEO knew that his own family’s fortunes would remain at risk throughout his subsequent lifetime for any failure of an employee’s behaviour during his period in office, it would do more to improve banking ‘culture’ than any set of sermons and required oaths of good behaviour. The root of the problem is the bad behaviour of bankers, not of banks, who are incapable of behaviour, for good or ill. The regulatory framework should be refocused towards the latter, with a focus on reforming incentives."

Has Brian Williams lost his mind?

Oliver has some sound opinions here. It looks like he reads Elizabeth Warren's speeches.

Icebergs in the North Atlantic

The North Atlantic is the main shipping route between Europe and North America because it is the fastest route between the two areas. If icebergs clog the route, shipping costs and times go up. Currently, there are now 481 icebergs parked in the shipping lanes of the North Atlantic. That is a lot more than normal and they have built up quite rapidly. “As of March 27 we had only tracked 37 icebergs into the transatlantic shipping lanes in the 2017 ice season. One week later, on April 3 we had 455,” says Coast Guard Commander Gabrielle McGrath, the head of the International Ice Patrol. “We’re now at 481 at this point.” Usually, by the end of April there are a little over two hundred. A number close to 500 is not seen until late August.

American Craft Brewers Are In Trouble

Or so says James Koch, the head of one of the largest American craft brewers, Boston Beer Company. His argument is that the feds have allowed two companies, Molson Coors and AB InBev, to buy so many domestic craft brewers that they now control 90 percent of domestic beer production. These acquisitions have resulted in 6 percent increase in beer prices and the loss of 5,000 American jobs.

Other countries have not treated the two brewing giants as well.  China required AB InBev to sell its $1.6 billion stake in China’s largest brewer back to the Chinese government at a bargain-basement price. South Africa required guarantees of lifetime employment for its citizens, and the Monopolies Commission in the European Union required divestitures by SABMiller and AB InBev to keep their new, combined market share to 9 percent.

He sounded good but

There was no yelling or screaming or insulting in Trump's talk last night about our bombing the Syrian air base from which the chemical bombs were launched. He sounded like a serious, rational person. But, as Seth Moulton points out,“So @POTUS cares enough about the Syrian people to launch 50 Tomahawks but not enough to let the victims of Assad find refuge and freedom here.” And as Elizabeth Warren states "We should not escalate this conflict without clear goals and a plan to achieve them.”

And then there is the question of Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution which gives Congress - not the president - the authority to order an armed attack on a sovereign nation.

Another surprise

According to Bloomberg, Gary Cohn, Trump's economic adviser  told  the Senate Finance Committee during his confirmation hearing that he supports a return to Glass-Steagall. This should not have been a surprise to me as the Republican platform for the 2016 election called for a return of Glass-Steagall.

McMaster is doing the job

In February Trump named General McMaster to head the National Security Council. I thought it was a very good move. He has made some personnel changes. The media is filled with Bannon's leaving the council. But it is probably more important that McMaster has selected the director of national intelligence, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the director of the CIA and the ambassador to the United Nations to join the Council. Those positions were absent from Trump’s original order but are necessary for the Council to do its job.

Of course, he also named Rick Perry of 'Dancing with the Stars' fame.

This is a surprise

Ex-General Stanley McChrystal supports public broadcasting. He writes that it "makes our nation smarter, stronger and, yes, safer". He feels that it's especially valuable for young children, particularly those who are not in day care. Another quote: "I’ve seen articles that say PBS and its member stations are ranked first in public trust among nationally known institutions. Why then would we degrade or destroy an institution that binds us together? We need public media that acts as our largest classroom. We need broadcasting that treats us as citizens, not simply as consumers. We need a strong civil society where the connection between different people and groups is firm and vibrant, not brittle and divided. We need to defend against weaknesses within and enemies without, using the tools of civil society and hard power. We don’t have to pick one over the other."

Looking at the gender wage gap

The Foreign Trump

Social Security Disability Benefits a Boondoggle?

Some think so. But the reality is that Social Security disability benefits are incredibly hard to get—fewer than 4 in 10 applicants are approved, even after all stages of appeal. To qualify for benefits, you must have one or more medically determinable physical or mental impairments expected to last at least 12 months, or to result in death. And many recipients do, in fact, die: 1 in 5 male and 1 in 6 female Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) beneficiaries die within 5 years of receiving benefits.

However, you need more than simply having a disability to qualify for benefits. You also have to prove that your impairment, or combination of impairments, leave you unable to do any job that exists in significant numbers in the national economy at a level where you could earn even $11,070 per year. 

Let's have a No Donald Day

In the meantime serious matters, such as climate change, our seemingly perpetual wars, his attempt to kill the EPA, are basically ignored by the media. I'm in favor of a day where the media has zero stories on Trump. What say you?

Stupid Watergate

Fake Accomplishments

An Infrared View of Oregon

Generating Electricity