Rand Corp. Analysis

Will they be happy ever after?

Will your vote in November be hacked?

Shall we do the dance?

How equal are we?

Are you retiring soon?

Why doesn't he have side effects from the pill?

Pills don't work the same for everybody. How can you know this pill will work for you? Well, there may be a way for you to know before you start taking the pill. DNA analysis may be that way. As its name suggests, the Center for DNA Guided Medicine claims to be able to tell you how a particular medicine will work on you. You supply your DNA and they compare it to drug response outcomes which they have gathered over the years. They can then answer such questions as:

Why don't my medications work?

How come the pill I am taking gives me side effects, but my friend does not have any?

Will my medications work better if I take more or less?

What combinations of pills are safest for me?

Is there only one thing to do today?

Will you join the millions who will watch THE HEARING? Of course, I'm talking about the Kavanaugh hearing. It sounds as though this is the most important thing that has happened this year, if not this decade. How many stations will carry it? How much is this costing us? How much time have our leaders spent on this rather than on more important matters, for example our failing infrastructure? Is it analogous to the battles in the Forum when Rome was failing, as we are now? Why can't we smarten up?

Living in Hell

We need AVR

A 7-year-old performs

Two heads are better than one

Repair or Prevent

FEMA operates on the basis of repairing and restoring property damaged by severe storms. Holland tries to prevent or minimize the danger from occurring. Which makes more sense to you?

FEMA winds up repairing dangerous locations - such as seashore homes - more than once. The residents suffer more than once. Federal flood insurance is paid more than once to the same people. It's likely that the costs incurred by FEMA match or exceed those incurred by Holland. Plus, people in the states suffer a lot more than those in Holland.

A recent 60 Minutes tells the story well.

It's getting better but still too many

New Army Recruits

Should we be worried about our debt?

John Feffer, who is not an economist, thinks so. Household debt hit a new high ($13.3 trillion) last month. Student debt hit its own record - $1.5 trillion. Mortgage debt at $9 trillion is close to the $10.5 trillion it reached during the mortgage crisis in 2008. Credit card debt surpassed $1 trillion for the first time. Corporate debt hit a new high of $6.3 trillion. And, companies have less cash available to pay that debt - the cash-to-debt ratio, which was 14 percent in 2008, has dropped to 12 percent.

Cute photos

From the Guardian:

I love you

Stay away from me

Shall we dance

Mortgage delinquency rate and housing prices

From Wolf Street
What will happen when housing prices fall?

Media Bias?

The following chart was posted on Business Insider. It was based on the Feb. 5-March 11, 2018, Gallup/Knight Foundation survey of 1,440 Gallup Panel members. How accurate it is I don't know.



From our Florida correspondent

A few ways Japan differs from U.S.

 Drink Cans Have Names Written In Braille On The Top

There Are Baby Seats Attached To The Wall In Most Bathrooms

This Kind Of Toilet. Wash Your Hands And Reuse The Water For Your Next Flush

u

Painting herself

Painting with no arms

Where are you on these charts?

Sorry you're leaving. Here's a little present

Slow processing of immigrant children

We have more than 100 shelters for migrant children who have crossed the border alone. These shelters are becoming overwhelmed. There were 2,400 such children in custody in May 2017; now there are 12,800, an increase of more than five times. It's not that more children are crossing the border; it's because there are far fewer being released to live with families and other sponsors. The number of children in a shelter last year occupied about 30% of the shelter last year; this year it's almost 90%.

The number of children crossing the border has not increased. The number of people coming forward as sponsors have decreased considerably. They don't want to be deported.

Is this OK?

Managing money

At the beginning of what may be a pretty devastating hurricane season would you shift money out of your budget if you ran FEMA? Well, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) has documents that he says show that to be the case. Where was the money moved? You won't believe this. ICE!

Where were you on this day in 2001?

Like December 7, September 11 will always live in our memories. I distinctly remember the radio broadcast on Sunday, December 7, 1941, when I was four years old. And, of course, Tuesday, September 11, 2001, has never left my memory. But the periods after these days was very, very different.

World War II dominated the lives of Americans. Everybody was involved in the war. I saved aluminum foil. My sisters sewed for the troops. My brothers joined the Army; one volunteered, the other was drafted and, at age 18, earned a Purple Heart at the Battle of the Bulge. My father joined the local Draft Board. My family was not alone in these activities, by any means. Just about everyone I knew or saw did something to help this country fight the war. We went to the grocery store with our ration books. Women became factory workers. Every day the front page of the newspapers told us what was going on in the war. We didn’t drive as much as we used to, we wanted to save gas.  Air raid drills occurred fairly often, as we lived on the coast. The men who did not go to war served as Air Raid Wardens. At school we practiced hiding under our desks should an air attack occur. We knew the names of most of the generals and admirals. Every so often we sent a large package to our cousins in Italy; the package contained food, clothing and other items to help them survive the attacks. Yes, some Americans protested the war, but there were very few ‘conscientious objectors’. We saw players from the Boston Red Sox (one of whom was Ted Williams) and the Boston Braves leave the ball field to serve in the military. When we went to the movie theater the first film shown every day was a newsreel about the war.

Our post-911 days pall in comparison. The only defensive incident that happened to me was a lengthy investigation at the Canadian border when I drove back to Canada the following weekend. That was the first and only investigation although I crossed the border subsequently quite often. Since we no longer have a draft, I knew hardly anyone who joined the military. The attack dominated the news for a relatively short while. Today, we seldom hear any news about Afghanistan – although we’ve been there for seventeen years. We’ve had a number of generals leading our forces there; the only one I can remember is Petraeus. Although we have failed to win a war since WWII, we seem to be doing little of value – other than spending trillions of dollars - to improve our capabilities.

What do the opposite post-attack experiences tell us about our country?

Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction reports

Despite spending around $900 billion in Afghanistan,  “between 2001 and 2017, U.S. government efforts to stabilize insecure and contested areas in Afghanistan mostly failed.” According to a July 30, 2018, report by that same inspector general, the Taliban was by then contesting control of or controlled about 44 percent of that country, while Afghan government control and influence over districts had declined by about 16 percent in a few years.

The Taliban view is
“This year Eid­ al­-Adha approaches us as our Jihadi struggle against the American occupation is on the threshold of victory due to the help of Allah Almighty. The infidel invading forces have lost all will of combat, their strategy has failed, advanced technology and military equipment rendered useless, [the] sedition and corruption­-sowing group defeated, and the arrogant American generals have been compelled to bow to the Jihadic greatness of the Afghan nation.”

Some thoughts about Afghanistan by Nick Turse:
The United States has not won a major conflict since 1945; has a trillion-dollar national security budget; has had 17 military commanders in the last 17 years in Afghanistan, a country plagued by 23,744 “security incidents” (the most ever recorded) in 2017 alone; has spent around $3 trillion, primarily on that war and the rest of the war on terror, including the ongoing conflict in Iraq, which then-defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld swore, in 2002, would be over in only “five days or five weeks or five months,” but where approximately 5,000 U.S. troops remain today; and yet 74 percent of the American people still express high confidence in the U.S. military.

The Real Lesson of Sept. 11

Joe Quinn, a veteran of Iraq (twice) and Afghanistan, has some interesting comments in today's Times. Here are a few excerpts (emphasis mine):

In Afghanistan, after an Afghan police officer demanded money from me at gunpoint to get through a checkpoint, I learned of the Kabul government’s widespread corruption. I learned that spending $68 billion on Afghan forces doesn’t buy the essential ingredients of a fighting force: loyalty, courage and integrity. I learned that most generals would always ask for more money, more troops, more time — and more war. It’s like asking Tom Brady what he wants to do on Sunday.

I learned that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. For the past 17 years in Afghanistan, we’ve tried everything: a light footprint, a big footprint, conventional war, counterinsurgency, counter-corruption, surges, drawdowns.

I learned that Osama bin Laden’s strategic logic was to embroil the United States in a never-ending conflict to ultimately bankrupt the country. “All that we have to do is send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written ‘Al Qaeda,’” he said in 2004, “in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note ….” Why are we continuing to do what Bin Laden wanted all along?

The ICC is bad

That is according to John Bolton and his boss. They have threatened sanctions against the International Criminal Court (ICC) because of two issues:

The first was ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda's request last year for a full investigation into alleged war crimes in Afghanistan, which would include any committed by US military and intelligence officials.
Then, a 2016 report from the ICC said there was a reasonable basis to believe the US military had committed torture at secret detention sites in Afghanistan operated by the CIA, and that the Afghan government and the Taliban had committed war crimes.

The ICC was established by a UN treaty in 2002, and has been ratified by 123 countries. The court investigates and brings to justice people responsible for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, intervening when national authorities cannot or will not prosecute.

Interestingly, China and Russia have not joined the court.

How not to rob

You, Smartphones and Your Kids

Boats and 9/11

Last Week with Oliver

Census 2020

What has to be done per the GAO:

Schedule management: The Bureau's schedule for developing systems to support the 2018 End-to-End Test has experienced delays. These delays have compressed the time available for system and integration testing, and several systems experienced problems during the 2018 End-to-End Test. In addition, the Bureau is currently revising the system development and testing schedule for the 2020 Census as a result of challenges experienced and lessons learned while completing these activities during the 2018 End-to-End Test. Continued schedule management challenges may compress the time available for the remaining system and integration testing and increase the risk that systems will not function as intended.

Contractor oversight: Among other challenges, the Bureau is still filling vacancies in the government program management office that is overseeing its key integration contractor. In June 2018, Bureau officials reported that 33 of the office's 58 federal employee positions were vacant. This adds risk that the office may not be able to provide adequate oversight of contractor cost, schedule, and performance.

IT cost growth: The Bureau reported that its estimated IT costs had grown from $3.41 billion in October 2015 to $4.97 billion in December 2017—an increase of $1.56 billion. This increase was due, in large part, to the addition of technical integration services and updated costs for other major contracts (such as the contract for mobile devices). The amount of cost growth since the October 2015 estimate raises questions as to whether the Bureau has a complete understanding of the IT costs associated with the 2020 Census.

Cybersecurity: The Bureau has made progress by completing the security assessments for 33 of the 44 systems needed to support the 2018 End-to-End Test. However, as of June 2018, the Bureau had identified nearly 3,100 security weaknesses that will need to be addressed in the coming months. Because the 2020 Census involves collecting personal information from over a hundred million households across the country, it will be important that the Bureau addresses system security weaknesses in a timely manner and ensures that risks are at an acceptable level before systems are deployed. With the 2020 Census less than 2 years away, it is critical that the Bureau address these challenges and risks to ensure that its IT systems are developed, tested, and secured in time to support the count of the nation's population.

Meet the Civilian Marksmanship Program, or CMP

The organization, which is about one hundred years old, became a spin off of the Army in 1996. The Army hands over old weapons to the CMP, which then sells them to the public. They have been doing this for more than seventy years and have amassed a quarter-billion dollars in assets. The purpose of CMP is “To promote firearm safety and marksmanship training with an emphasis on youth.” The government could very easily sell these old weapons on the open market and put the money in the U.S. Treasury.

Obama's comment on the NYT unisgned OpEd

“The claim that everything will turn out okay because there are people inside the White House who secretly are not following the president’s orders?” Obama said. That is not a check — I’m being serious here — that’s not how our democracy is supposed to work. These people aren’t elected, they’re not accountable. They’re not doing us a service by actively promoting 90 percent of the crazy stuff that’s coming out of this White House, and then saying, ‘Don’t worry, we’re preventing 10 percent.’ That’s not how things are supposed to work. This is not normal.”

Texting changed his life

The arms of his mother

What's next for our country

It's hard to believe that this article in today's NY Times was written by a Trump insider. Some quotes:

But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic. That is why many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.

The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.

Don’t get me wrong. There are bright spots that the near-ceaseless negative coverage of the administration fails to capture: effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more.
But these successes have come despite — not because of — the president’s leadership style, which is impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective.

The bigger concern is not what Mr. Trump has done to the presidency but rather what we as a nation have allowed him to do to us. We have sunk low with him and allowed our discourse to be stripped of civility.

There is a quiet resistance within the administration of people choosing to put country first. But the real difference will be made by everyday citizens rising above politics, reaching across the aisle and resolving to shed the labels in favor of a single one: Americans.

90 degree days

In 1998 there were 6 days of 90 degree heat during the entire summer in Cambridge, Ma. where I grew up. Twenty years later in Connecticut (about 100 miles south of Cambridge) there have been at least 12 such days. Global warming, anyone?

Meet Ann and Gussie

The tallest statue in the world

India is honoring the memory of a famous Hindu who was active in India's battle for survival by building a statue 600 feet tall, taller than any other statue. It will cost $430 million. That is twice the height of the Statue of Liberty. The world's current tallest statue in China is 422 feet tall. The statue will be dedicated in October.

What does George W. have to say?

The White House is withholding from the Senate more than 100,000 pages of records from Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh’s time as a lawyer in the administration of former President George W. Bush. The reason? Executive privilege. Why are they being withheld? The records “reflect deliberations and candid advice concerning the selection and nomination of judicial candidates, the confidentiality of which is critical to any president’s ability to carry out this core constitutional executive function.” Sounds weak to me.

Clouds fly

More deaths by car here

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