Moving a prosthetic foot

Mr. Pigeon

I had thought she had made a joke

Far from it!

We need more midwifes

Memorial Day Thoughts

by William Rivers Pitt

It is our principle (sic) export, a vital economic engine, the hub to which all the spokes of our rickety national wheel are attached, and it is visibly cracking. You can't steal $6,000,000,000,000 from a country in less than 20 years and fail to make a monstrous impact on the very bones of that society, yet that six trillion is merely loose change compared to what we have squandered on permanent war since 1947.

Every bomb dropped, every missile launched, every bullet fired, every bandage used, every body bag filled represents money that once belonged to all of us but has been transferred to a small group of wealthy war profiteers we will never meet. The theft is generational in scope, and affects everything from the hospital bills we can't afford to the roads too potholed to drive on to the schools without enough teachers and books. The damage done to us all is comprehensive, and that's before we get to the body count.

And so there are the flags of Memorial Day, meant to honor the sacrifice of those who died in the wars. The remaining war survivors in the US are victims of a lethal machine designed to extract maximum profit for as long as possible, as are their brothers and sisters in the cold ground, as are the murdered civilians in Asia and the Middle East, as are we all.

Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq … it's all the same war, bolstered by the same profit motive and veiled in the same empty promises. Only the dead -- the fallen US soldiers and those they have killed -- know the true cost of war here at the end of empire. A truly fitting memorial would be a Memorial Day when no new flags are needed, when we have all the dead we can stand and choose not to make more.

Honor that, and you honor them all.

Leaving MS-13

One way to become a citizen

The White Company

It's the name of a firm started by Mr. & Mrs. White. Right?

Wrong! It's what British Airways calls its Business Class. This is 2018, isn't it? I guess it isn't for the genius who approved this name. But, someone approved the money for the full page ad in today's NY Times.

Views on Korea

How much water do you use a day?

If you lived in Cape Town, South Africa, you'd have to get by on just 13 gallons of municipal water per day – a little less than the amount it takes to flush a toilet four times. Use more, and the city reduces your pressure to a trickle, and your water bill can turn into a mortgage payment. The city government has already raised the probability of a “Day Zero,” when taps across most of the city would be shut off indefinitely. So, most people work hard to keep within the 13 gallon limit.

Since 2016 the city has cut its water use by half. Its biggest customers now use 80 percent less. Other cities have not been as lucky. When Melbourne, Australia, was in a drought period from 1997 to 2009, it did cut its water consumption by half, but it took 12 years, and at the end of it, residents were still guzzling 17 gallons a day. California has had similar results; between 2012 and 2016 it brought its home water use down 25 percent, to about 100 gallons per person per day.

An example of the techniques Cape Town residents use: 90-second showers and then flushing their toilets with the water they collected while doing it. They discuss water-saving techniques on Facebook. They exchange the names of local companies that will sink a personal well in your backyard. They use recycled wastewater from local factories and vineyards. And the police also track down those who use water in such pursuits as watering their lawns.

Ho Hum

2017 was another year in which CEOs of public companies made just a little more than the typical employee - like 275 times as much, on average. It was a good year as the median pay for the 200 highest-paid chief executives was $17.5 million, and they received an average raise of 14 percent, compared with 9 percent in 2016 and 5 percent the year before that.

For the first time, two chief executives on the list were awarded more than $100 million each. Hock Tan of Broadcom received $103.2 million, while Frank Bisignano of First Data earned $102.2 million. 

Life in Hawaii

Eating Gold

Courtesy of our Florida correspondent

Returning to the Great Recession?

The Theranos Game

Guests for breakfast

Sound as a weapon?

In the past year we learned of American diplomats in Cuba complaining of hearing strange, wrenching noises and suffering symptoms like headaches, dizziness and loss of hearing. Twenty-four cases were confirmed. Now, a similar issue is reported in China when an American embassy employee has signs of possible brain injury after reporting disturbing sounds and sensations. These symptoms began in late 2017 and were still happening in April.

What's wrong with this cake?

A South Carolina mother ordered a cake for the graduation party for her son at a Publix market. The order was made on-line and the program checks for “profane/special characters” and deleted the 'cum' from "Summa cum Laude."

Another blow against unions

When I was a kid in the 20th century, unions were a major force in America. I can recall union leaders, such as John Lewis, being interviewed on the radio fairly often. Newspaper articles about unions were common. That is not the case today. More than 50% of the labor force was unionized; today in the 21st century it might be 20%. Maybe that's why the Supreme Court on Monday ruled that companies can use arbitration clauses in employment contracts to bar workers from joining forces in legal actions over problems in the workplace. The idea of a class-action law suit is verboten. This makes life easier for corporations.

Foster Care

Are small banks in trouble?

This has happened every day for almost 100 years

Courtesy of our Florida correspondent

Another thing to worry about

A study in Pediatrics Magazine looks at the growing number of suicide attempts and suicides among young people in this country from 2008 to 2015. The results are not good; the number almost tripled. The findings show more girls than boys were suicidal and the number of incidents were highest in the spring and fall.

I've been saying for a while that all empires fail. I believe that we are on that path, but very, very few realize that. A brief segment of Morning News on NPR confirmed for me that I have been right, even though the article was about movies. In essence the article said "China now has more cinema screens than the U.S. and is expected to overtake all of North America in box-office revenues and audience numbers by 2020." 

Young vs. Old

Shrinking at the Supermarket

The BBC documents the shrinkage of goods we buy. Here are some excerpts from the report:

According to the UK’s Office of National Statistics, 2,529 products on supermarket shelves decreased in size or weight in the five years between 2012 and 2017.
Consumer watchdog Which? found in 2016 that some brands of toilet paper have lost up to 14% of the number of sheets per roll over two years, without any corresponding drop in price.
A study of US breakfast cereals over a three-year period by researchers at Arizona State University and Cornell University in New York found 15 products suffered a reduction in packet size, and in the majority this resulted in an increase in the relative cost for each ounce (28g) of cereal.
Research by the BBC earlier in 2018 also revealed that many popular chocolate bars have reduced in size over the past four years. A Twix, for example, has lost 13.8% of its weight since 2014, while Kit Kat Chunky bars are 16.7% lighter.

Do we have the same situation in America?

Economic Growth by Presidents in early days

The Early Economic Records of Presidents from Kennedy to Trump

President     GDP      Business Investment      Investment in Equipment
Kennedy      7.0%               8.3%                                   14.2%
Johnson        6.3%             10.7%                                  11.9%
Nixon           0.0%             -1.6%                                   -0.3%
Carter           2.7%              8.2%                                   12.2%
Reagan        -2.1%              3.0%                                   -3.0%
Bush-1          2.6%              0.5%                                  -0.2%
Clinton         3.5%              7.7%                                  13.5%
Bush-2         1.1%             -4.7%                                   -6.1%
Obama         2.2%              1.5%                                   14.7%
Trump          2.6%              5.9%                                     9.0%

Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis. These measures represent annual growth rates of real GDP, business fixed investment, and investment in equipment over the three quarters from each president’s third, fourth and fifth quarters in office.

Courtesy of Brookings Institute

What were they thinking?

Courtesy of our Florida correspondent

Recovering from a flood

Penguins in the Antarctic every summer are in danger of having their simple stone nests become flooded. So, the females go looking for fresh pebbles to shore up their house. Some get them by stealing, which often results in a fight. Others target the nests of unsuccessful males living at the edge of the colony. With no parental duties, these singletons are free to go on pebble-hunting sprees and amass veritable stone castles. They are also extremely desperate to spread their seed. And about a third of the females will help them spread it. Scientists say that the sex is a swift affair; many of the inexperienced males misfire and miss their target. The female then toddles back to her nest with a pilfered pebble in her beak. Some especially cunning females flirt but skip the sex part, and simply make off with a stone. One particularly effective hustler was recorded swiping 62 pebbles within an hour.

Pensions for our federal legislators

Dambisa Moyo has an interesting idea - link politicians’ pensions to their performance, as is the case with many high-level managers at publicly traded private companies. If these CEOs screw up, their pension is reduced.

Moyo proposes that the pension be based on many vital things, such as the quality of education, health outcomes, and economic indicators like GDP growth, inflation, unemployment, and income inequality.

21st century America?

A 21st century graduation

Do you believe in this future?

Courtesy of our Glastonbury correspondent

Climbing Mt. Everest

Amputees can also be mountain climbers. Xia Boyu, age 69, lost his feet forty years ago. This month he climbed Everest. He was the second amputee to do so and the first from the Nepalese side.

Medical spending and longer lives

A Family Outing

The above photo is of an Indonesian family a few years ago. They attended church yesterday. They went to two churches, the mother and daughters (now ages 9 and 12) to one, the father and sons (now ages 16 and 18) to another. But, they did not worship very long at these churches. They detonated bombs in both places, killing themselves and parishioners.

They do have sympathy from other parents. On Monday, two parents attacked a police station in the same city, also taking their three children along, one of whom survived.

Number 14 Found

The number refers to the feet found on the beach of an island in British Columbia. Last week a walker on the beach found it. In previous cases running shoes have encased the foot; in the current case it was covered by a hiking shoe. Feet have been found here for more than a decade.

There are several theories as to the cause of the unattached feet: a tsunami, a human trafficker, a Mafia hit man, a deranged foot fetishist or a serial killer who had spread body parts out to sea. Others have theorized that the floating appendages could belong to people falling off a ship or killed in a plane crash. One thing that is not the cause of the disembodied feet is suicide or accident,or so the coroners say; they think it is likely that the cause was someone slipping and falling into the sea, or a swimmer being swept into the ocean by a huge wave.

Nine of the feet have been identified, two of them from the same person, according to the Coroners Service. Most of the feet were men’s. In at least three cases, the shoes were size 12.

Lovers or Enemies?

Perfect timing

Courtesy of a Duncaster friend

He likes parachuting

Should we worry?

Not good news

According to Robert Reich:

1. The four largest food companies control 82 percent of beef packing, 85 percent of soybean processing, 63 percent of pork packing, and 53 percent of chicken processing.
2. There are many brands of toothpaste, but 70 percent of all of it comes from just two companies.
3. You may think you have your choice of sunglasses, but they’re almost all from one company: Luxottica – which also owns nearly all the eyeglass retail outlets.
4. Practically every plastic hanger in America is now made by one company, Mainetti.
5. What brand of cat food should you buy? Looks like lots of brands but behind them are basically just two companies.
6. What about your pharmaceuticals? Yes, you can get low-cost generic versions. But drug companies are in effect paying the makers of generic drugs to delay cheaper versions. Such “pay for delay” agreements are illegal in other advanced economies, but antitrust enforcement hasn’t laid a finger on them in America. They cost you and me an estimated $3.5 billion a year.
7. You think your health insurance will cover the costs? Health insurers are consolidating, too. Which is one reason your health insurance premiums, copayments, and deductibles are soaring.
8. You think you have a lot of options for booking discount airline tickets and hotels online? Think again. You have only two. Expedia merged with Orbitz, so that’s one company. And then there’s Priceline.
9. How about your cable and Internet service? Basically just four companies (and two of them just announced they’re going to merge).  

Is he a typical 21st century candidate?

Too much media focused on Trump

Last month I complained about how much attention the media devotes to Trump. Nicholas Kristof has followed up on that subject, pointing out many of the important areas that are not being reported on properly, such as:

"American life expectancy has fallen for two years in a row,
guns claim a life every 15 minutes and
the number of uninsured is rising again even as a child in the U.S. is 70 percent more likely to die before adulthood than one in other advanced nationsIn Myanmar, the government is engaging in what many believe to be a genocide against the Rohingya minority.Gaza is erupting, and there’s heightened threat of a new war in the Middle East.
The U.S. has been complicit in Saudi Arabian war crimes in Yemen.
The carnage in Syria continues.The world’s progress against malaria, which kills almost one person a minute, has stalled.A fifth of children under 5 worldwide are stunted from malnutrition.Bill Gates and others warn that one of our top risks is a pandemic for which we are ill prepared."

Eyeglasses could change the world

The International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness estimates that there are more than one billion people around the world who need eyeglasses. Others say that the number is closer to 2.5 billion. The results are fewer children being educated, more people being struck down by drivers with poor eyesight, middle-aged coffee farmers in Bolivia cannot spot ripe beans for harvest and a host of other problems. The W.H.O. estimates that this costs the global economy $200 billion annually in lost productivity. 

But we're not doing much about it. In 2015, only $37 million was spent on delivering eyeglasses to people in the developing world, less than one percent of resources devoted to global health issues. This is virtually unbelievable as no new drugs or scientific advances are needed. Factories in Thailand, China and the Philippines can manufacture so-called readers for less than 50 cents a pair; prescription glasses that correct nearsightedness can be produced for $1.50.

But we also need more eye doctors. For example,  Uganda has just 45 eye doctors for a nation of 41 million. Until last year, Liberia did not have a single eye clinic.. And then there are social issues. In rural India, glasses are seen as a sign of infirmity, and in many places, a hindrance for young women seeking to get married. 

Policeman defending himself

Is this reality in 2018?

A very large tumor

That's a photo of an ovarian mucinous tumor that weighed 132 pounds and stretched the patient's abdomen into a 3-foot-wide orb. The bigger it got, the faster it grew. And it was growing by 10 pounds a week when she was operated on. The patient, who was only 38 years old, could no longer walk. And because the tumor was increasing the pressure on her digestive tract, she was malnourished and growing weaker everyday. The tumor was not malignant, all of it is gone, and there is not a large chance that it will come back.

There have been larger ovarian tumors, one reached 303 pounds before  it was resected in 1994.

A happy coincidence

Ping Kuen Shum, of Vancouver, retired on April 26. It was also his birthday. He decided to buy a lottery ticket that day. Surprisingly, it was a winning ticket. While the odds of his ticket winning were one in 13,983,816, his prize was $1,500,000. 

There are some strange people in the world

Take Thomas Tramaglini, for example. He is superintendent of schools in Kenilworth, NJ. He was arrested yesterday for "lewdness, littering and defecating in public".  That's right - defecating. He did this near a high school's track and football field. And, he did it just about every day. The kids complained to the cops and the cops caught him in the act.

Helping ducks cross the street in DC

Becoming beautiful in Brazil

While everyone would like to be beautiful, in Brazil many are willing to undergo plastic surgery to become beautiful. It is the second-largest consumer of plastic surgery in the world, with 1.2 million surgeries carried out every year. Many think that you must be beautiful to get a job, find a spouse and move up the ladder. This push is so strong that public hospitals provide plastic surgeries for free or at low-cost, and the government subsidizes nearly half a million surgeries every year.

An eerie phone call

Yesterday I dialed the wrong number. The voice that greeted me and asked me to leave a message was that of a friend who has been dead for six months or so. Apparently, he was unable to take the call.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE ACCEPTANCE SPEECH OF PRESIDENT TRUMP

Translated by Dana Milbank of the Washington Post

OSLO, DEC. 10, 2018

Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, distinguished members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee:

I have received a lot of honors — like, a lot. I was on the cover of Time more than anybody else. I went to the best schools. I was elected president on my first try. It was the biggest electoral college landslide since Reagan. But people tell me this is a big honor — the biggest, maybe. And I think this is very good for you, because your ratings are going through the roof right now. This crowd is much bigger than Obama’s was.

People don’t know this, but some other top guys like Nelson Mandela have won this award before. He’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, even though South Africa is a crime-ridden mess that is just waiting to explode — not a good situation for the people! Anyway, with me, you’re breaking all the records. You’re welcome.

I love Norwegians! I want more immigrants from Norway and others who have the same merit-based complexion that Norwegians have. Why are we having all these people from shithole countries? Why do we need more Haitians? Take them out. They all have AIDS.

I thought I was going get this peace prize when I told your prime minister in January that I was sending Norway some F-52 fighter jets. People laughed and said the F-52 only exists in the video game “Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare.” But they aren’t laughing anymore, because we also sent Norway barrels full of Xbox Ones.
You’re going to need those F-52s because there are a lot of bad hombres in Europe. You look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this? They’re having problems like they never thought possible. Germany is a total mess. Brussels is a hellhole (although, I admit, Belgium is a beautiful city). Have you seen the videos of destructive radical Islamic terrorism in Britain? Paris is no longer Paris.

The haters and the liars say I don’t deserve this award. They make up fake news about how I invented the country of Nambia, shoved the prime minister of Montenegro, thought the prime minister of Singapore was from Indonesia, mistook New Zealand’s prime minister for Justin Trudeau’s wife, called Israel’s Holocaust memorial “so amazing,” admired Brigitte Macron’s body, rewrote the history of Napoleon’s Russia invasion, substituted a porn actress’s name for the British prime minister’s, mixed up the names for China and Taiwan, and had missile talks while guests at Mar-a-Lago listened.

Wrong!

I was, like, really smart, when I made peace with Rocket Man. By calling him short and fat and saying I would totally destroy him with fire and fury from my big and powerful nuclear button, I got him to negotiate. He still hasn’t given up his nuclear weapons, but he has agreed to stop calling me a dotard. In exchange I have agreed not to attack him, and I have given California to North Korea.

I am bringing peace to the rest of the world, too — peace from terrible, horrible and disgusting deals like the Paris accord and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The world’s shipping lanes are now more peaceful and quiet. Trade wars are good, and easy to win! I might give people peace from other stupid deals: the insane Iran nuclear deal, the terrible Cuba exchange deal, the worst ever Australia refugee deal, bad-joke NAFTA and obsolete NATO. We have also made air travel more peaceful by making sure people fromSyria, Iran, Libya, Somalia and Yemen don’t visit America.

On my way to the Nobel Prize, I knocked the hell out of the Islamic State, sent nice, new, smart missiles into Syria and dropped the Mother of All Bombs on Afghanistan. But those are only a tiny, tiny fraction of the countries I could have bombed.

I did not bomb Mexico even though they’re murderers and rapists. I did not bomb Canada, even though they are disgraceful about trade. I didn’t bomb Pakistan, even though they have given us nothing but lies and deceit. I didn’t bomb China, even though they are raping our country. And I have strongly supported the leaders of Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Philippines and Russia, as they promote peace by silencing noisy dissidents.

Your Majesties and Highnesses, people who worked for me once said “do not congratulate!” — but I fired most of them. So come on, get up and applaud. You are so lucky that I gave you that privilege.

Competitive Yoga?

That's right. There are people who compete doing Yoga postures. There are even kids doing it. The photo above is of a 14 year-old boy. And, of course, there is an organization, USA Yoga, that runs these competitions. There are even regional and national championships.

Competition consists of making prescribed sequence of poses to be completed in a limited time period. Competitors are judged more on technical accuracy than the difficulty of the pose.