Spinal implants

Newark = Flint?

The water situation in Newark has not been good for a while. In 2017, more than 22 percent of the samples from its water system tested during the first half of the year exceeded 15 parts per billion of lead, the federal threshold requiring action. Elevated levels have remained in the system for each of the ensuing six-month monitoring periods. The city finally had to act when an engineering study commissioned by the city found that measures to prevent lead from leaching into drinking water were failing at one of Newark’s two treatment plants.

The city is now acting; it has given 40,000 water filters across the city of 285,000 people, targeting tens of thousands of residences. The state has warned that children under 6 in homes with lead pipes served by the plant should not drink unfiltered tap water.

If you want to learn about Flint and other cities, click here.

He's trying to get warm

More on sending troops to the caravan

As we learned yesterday, we'll be sending 5,000 troops to deal with the caravan moving toward our borders. The last time we sent troops to the order the GAO calculated the cost per person per day at $120 for operations and maintenance, or $600,000 for 5,000 troops. That was in 2006, twelve years ago.

Furthermore,it's questionable whether the troops will actually meet the caravan. The deployment is set to last until Dec. 15. The migrant caravan is around 900 miles away, and most of the people in it are walking. Even if they managed to walk 20 miles a day, they most likely would not arrive until after Dec. 15.

The questions the media should be asking

Barry Ritholz has an excellent post today. He discusses Trump's domination of the news cycle. He also provides some examples for questions reporters should ask:

-Why hasn’t Trump’s massive Corporate tax cut fallen to more people in the middle class? 
-Why has it only benefited the top 1%?
-We were told by Steve Mnuchin the corporate tax cuts would not only pay for themselves, but would pay down the national debt. Instead, according to the Congressional Budget Office, it has caused the annual deficit explode. 
 – Mitch McConnell wants to pay for those tax cuts by slashing Medicare and Social Security – do candidates for the House and Senate support that approach? 
 -Why did the GOP vote so many times to take away coverage of pre-existing conditions contained in the ACA? -If it wasn’t for GOP Senator John McCain (a Trump adversary), the ACA and pre-existing conditions protections would have been lost. It was straight party ling vote and McCain did Americans a huge service. 
 -What was the role of Trump’s incendiary rhetoric in the Tree of Life mass killing of 14 Jewish Worshipers? 
 -How has Trumps Tariffs impacted farmers in the grain belt? 
 -How much has Right Wing Rhetoric encourage mentally unstable people like Cesar DICKHEAD to send pipebombs thru the mail to opponents of 
 -How much has the Trade War caused the stock market to have the worst month in years? 
 Etc., etc., etc.

Can 5,000 troops handle 3,500 migrants?

We are sending 5,000 troops to deal with the 3,500 migrants in the Caravan. How many migrants are kids? How many migrants will turn themselves over to the authorities as they seek asylum? How many will stay in Mexico? How stupid are we?

Maybe it only happens on Tuesday

Politico has gotten hold of Trump's schedule for last Tuesday. It shows that he was expecting to spend nine hours on 'Executive Time'. This is unscheduled time which he spends "tweeting, phoning friends and watching television.” His time for “official meetings, policy briefings and public appearances" was to take three hours. 

He does not start work until 11 most days. He has to watch “Fox & Friends”.

He's not looking for passengers

Will she succeed?

And we're helping Saudi Arabia starve people.

7-year-old Yemeni girl suffers from severe acute malnutrition.

A very good pianist

Paul Bisaccia played at Duncaster last night. How he could have memorized the works is beyond me and most of the other members of the audience. We were fortunate as we could see all of his movements on a large screen.

Yemen 2018

Males learn to hatch

Do we need Saudi Arabia?

Max Fisher and Amanda Taub, of the NY Times, write The Interpreter, a newsletter on many different subjects. The latest one discusses our relationship with Saudi Arabia and raises the question as to how important this relationship is to us. Their conclusion - not very.

They consider five items in their analysis:
1.Oil
We don't need it. We are making more than ever. There are many more producers than there ever were. 
2. Mutual Enemies
The second most common argument for the alliance is that the United States needs the Saudis to combat shared enemies. There are two problems with this. First, the list of shared enemies has shrunk from three (the Soviet Union, Iran and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq) to just one: Iran. Second, this formulation gets things mostly backward. It is the Saudis who need the United States to combat their enemies, not the other way around.
3. Counterterrorism
On this issue we deal with a lot of unfriendly states, including Russia.
4. Stability
n the rest of the Middle East, Saudi Arabia is not so much upholding stability as the status quo. Those are not necessarily the same things.
5. Arms sales
We don't have the numbers, $100 billion in sales - that Trump boasts. Saudi Arabia is hardly the world’s only prospective buyer of American military equipment.

Bella Mossa

Good Job!

What should we do?

Solar power for you

Stiglitz on Inequality

Will CLOs become today's CDOs?

A major cause of the Great Recession was the CDO (a collateralized debt obligation). It was a structured asset-backed security sold to high risk mortgagees that eventually seriously wounded the mortgage market and the economy. Now, the financial geniuses are pushing the CLO, a collateralized loan obligation. Like CDOs they are being sold to high risk borrowers - companies with junk-level credit ratings. The C.L.O.s are made up of loans to between 100 and 300 already indebted corporate borrowers. Sears, which filed for bankruptcy this week, was among the companies that took what are called leveraged loans. Such loans to companies hit a record of more than $550 billion last year, eclipsing levels in the last years before the financial panic.

A rectangular iceberg in Antarctica

Have you ever seen an iceberg like this?

Hurricanes in Europe

Retail is not dead - at least among the mammoths

Taking photos deep in the ocean

Purple urchins like kelp

Kelp is part of the underwater forests that in many ways are as important to the oceans as trees are to the land. The forests absorb carbon emissions and provide critical habitat and food for a wide range of species. Kelp forests exist along the cooler coastlines of every continent but Antarctica. But they are being attacked. In California it's the purple urchin, a shellfish the size of a plum with quarter-inch spikes, that is the attacker. The heat of climate change gas resulted in a 60-fold explosion of purple urchins off Northern California’s coast and they are decimating the forest.

Adaptation = Endurance

Growth Rates

Man's best friend

Scorpion venom

The American Plan

No, it's not a foreign affairs item. It's what they called a group of laws created in the late 1910s. The laws were designed to eliminate venereal diseases. It started in an attempt to reduce prostitution around military bases, but it quickly expanded. Federal agents divided the nation into ten districts within which paid supervisors and field representatives were “to investigate the presence of alcohol, prostitution, and general female promiscuity in a given area.” Should investigators discover women they considered likely to have an STI, they had the legal authority to examine them, quarantine them indefinitely, and subject them to medical treatments that were thought to be a “magic bullet” but were known to be extremely painful and carry terrible side effects. At the time no effective treatment existed for syphilis or gonorrhea. The age listed for a first ‘offense’ or ‘delinquency’ was often as low as seven.

The agents had considerable leeway as to whom they subjected to the law. Some examples: One woman, for instance, was arrested and examined for defending a friend from the police…. One woman owed rent to a former sheriff…; another was arrested after changing jobs, when her former boss vengefully reported her to the health officer. One woman was arrested after her car broke down…. One woman was forcibly examined after just being on a date with a man who was drinking.

He likes opening doors

No protection for farm animals

The Animal Welfare Act is aimed at protecting confined animals, such as those living in laboratories or zoos. However, there are a vast number of animals it does not protect: those living on industrial farms. And there are a heck of a lot of them; there can be millions on a single farm. The Animal Welfare Institute has just published the results of a study of barn fires from 2013 to 2017. Their report concluded that more than 2.7 million US farm animals perished in potentially preventable barn fires in that period. 326 barn fires killed at least 2,763,924 farm animals, of which chickens represented 95 percent of all farm animals who died in barn fires. 

The main cause (or suspected cause) of barn fires was malfunctioning or misused heating devices, accounting for nearly half of all barn fires. Barn fires happened most often in the Upper Midwest and Northeast. The five states with the highest number of barn fires were New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota.

Should we worry?

A serious problem created by climate change

An article by scientists from China, US and England in "Nature Plants" predicts a major loss in the amount of beer, the most popular alcoholic beverage in the world,  available due to climate change. That's because the supply of its main ingredient, barley, will decline sharply in periods of extreme drought and heat. They predict yield losses from 3% to 17% depending on the severity of the conditions. That will mean less beer available to drink; for example, 32% less in Argentina. And it will cost more; for example, a doubling in beer prices in Ireland. 

Should you start stocking up?

An odd sentence

A former prominent neurological researcher at Yale and NYU was convicted of stealing $87,000 from NYU and various grant programs from 2012 to 2014. Although he was making $200,000 a year, I guess that wasn't enough for his flights, hotel rooms and dinners for himself, his family and others. The judge's sentence: he must play piano an hour at least twice weekly for the next three years at group facilities in Bridgeport, New Haven, Hartford, and Waterbury.

Did he or didn't he offer to donate $1,000,000 to charity

Today's Boston Globe published the results of Warren's DNA test. Read the full story here.

An unwanted new customer

Drinking clean water

Stop the talk and act

College student/athletes

The fact is that if the sport is football or basketball played at the Division 1 level there is no time to be a student, at least if you are African/American. 

Studies show that black Division I football and men’s basketball players spend three times as many hours per week on athletics as they do on academics. On average, the players spend more than 25 hours on sports-related activities other than games, such as practice, workouts, general team meetings, film sessions and travel. On the other hand, the players spend less than eight hours on academics outside of class, such as writing papers, studying, getting tutored or working on group projects.  Most football and men’s basketball players underperform academically and routinely graduate at lower rates than “other student-athletes, black non-athletes and undergraduates in general.”

What is the payoff as less than 2 percent of college football players get into the NFL, and only 1.2 percent of college basketball players get drafted into the NBA. 

A risky profession

Forty-eight journalists have been killed so far in 2018; four of them in Europe. Viktoria Marinova of Bulgraia is the latest. Maltese investigative journalist, Daphne Caruana Galizia, was killed by a car bomb in October. Slovakian investigative journalist Jan Kuciak and his girlfriend were shot to death in February. Swedish freelance journalist Kim Wall was killed and mutilated last year by a Danish inventor. 

And we have the case of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi Arabian journalist for the Washington Post, who may have been killed while visiting the Saudi consulate in Istanbul last week. 

Reducing climate change

The previous post in video

I'm glad I'm old and won't be here for 2040

2040 is when we will be really up the creek, according to a report issued on Monday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists convened by the United Nations to guide world leaders. The report was written and edited by 91 scientists from 40 countries who analyzed more than 6,000 scientific studies and describes a world of worsening food shortages and wildfires, and a mass die-off of coral reefs as soon as 2040.

The report predicts that the atmosphere will warm up by as much as 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) above preindustrial levels by 2040, resulting in damaging coastlines and intensifying droughts and poverty.  We can prevent this temperature increase by reducing greenhouse pollution  by 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, and 100 percent by 2050.  Coal is the preeminent problem; the scientists think we should stop using it. We have to increase renewable energy from today's 20 percent of the electricity mix to as much as 67 percent.

Health Costs Today

From Kaiser Family Foundation

Maybe you should have been a barber

Anthony Mancinelli is the oldest barber in the world, according to Guinness. He is 107 years old and has been cutting hair since 1922, when he was 11 years-old and Warren Harding was president. He cuts hair five days a week from noon to 8 p.m., that's 40 hours a week. He has all his teeth and is on no daily medication. He has never needed glasses, has all his hair, and his hairstyling hands are still steady.

He has always worked hard, has never smoked or drank heavily. He drives to work, cooks his own meals and trims the bushes in his front yard with no help.

Trump is good for the country

She likes tattoos

Maybe he should have fully divested

Forbes has an article about Trump's wealth over the past two years. By their calculations he has not done well. His net operating income dropped 27% between 2014, the year before Trump announced his run for president, and 2017, his first year in the White House. His net worth has dropped from $4.5 billion in 2015 to $3.1 billion the last two years, knocking the president 138 spots lower on the Forbes 400.

Forbes thinks that if he’d liquidated, paid capital gains tax on his entire fortune and created a blind trust to invest it all in the booming stock market, Trump would be $500 million richer than he is today—without the headaches.

An autonomous farm factory

Two views of some U.S. cities

How many 'studies' were reported in today's newspaper?

It seems that there is at least one almost every day. Are they true? Well, there is a web site, Retraction Watch, that tries to replicate published studies. Often, they do not succeed. It's not because they are stupid; the studies are erroneous. 

Three scholars decided to expand the site's work by writing twenty fake papers. To increase the probability of the studies being published they used fashionable jargon to argue for ridiculous conclusions. They sent the papers to high-profile journals in fields including gender studies, queer studies, and fat studies. They did well;  seven of their articles had been accepted for publication by ostensibly serious peer-reviewed journals. Seven more were still going through various stages of the review process. Only six had been rejected.

From the National Council of Churches

An excerpt from a letter from the Council:

"During his appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Judge Kavanaugh exhibited extreme partisan bias and disrespect towards certain members of the committee and thereby demonstrated that he possesses neither the temperament nor the character essential for a member of the highest court in our nation. Therefore the National Council of Churches calls for the withdrawal of Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court immediately.” 

What would you call this?

Law Professors don't back Kavanaugh

Over 2,400 law professors have written to Congress opposing Judge Kavanaugh sitting on the Supreme Court. They feel that he does not have the judicial temperament required and showed a lack of commitment to judicious inquiry.. As the Congressional Research Service explains, a judge requires “a personality that is even-handed, unbiased, impartial, courteous yet firm, and dedicated to a process, not a result.”  The judges believe that "Judge Brett Kavanaugh displayed a lack of judicial temperament that would be disqualifying for any court, and certainly for elevation to the highest court of this land."

I doubt that the professors are all Democrats. More and more professors are signing up. Yesterday it was 1,700 plus.

Why Kavanaugh should not be a Supreme Court Justice

Laurence Tribe has some reasons:

His intemperate personal attacks on members of the Senate Judiciary Committee and his partisan tirades against what he derided as a conspiracy of liberal political enemies guilty of a “calculated and orchestrated political hit” do more than simply display a strikingly injudicious temperament. They disqualify him from participating in a wide range of the cases that may come before the Supreme Court: cases involving individuals or groups that Judge Kavanaugh has now singled out, under oath and in front of the entire nation, as implacable adversaries.

Judge Kavanaugh’s attacks on identifiable groups — Democrats, liberals, “outside left-wing opposition groups” and those angry “about President Trump and the 2016 election” or seeking “revenge on behalf of the Clintons” — render it inconceivable that he could “administer justice without respect to persons,” as a Supreme Court justice must swear to do, when groups like Planned Parenthood, the NRDC Action Fund, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Naral Pro-Choice America or the American Civil Liberties Union appear as parties or file briefs on behalf of plaintiffs and defendants. 

My decades of observing the court’s work and arguing cases there convince me that his required recusal would extend to a very broad slice of the Supreme Court’s docket during his lifetime tenure as a justice. That would leave the court evenly split in far too many cases, for years on end, if he were to recuse himself as required — or deeply damaged in the public’s trust if he were not.

Syphilis outbreak

Cases of syphilis have increased every year since 2013; there's been an increase of 73% since then. It seems that the rate is highest among babies born with syphilis; it has more than doubled in the past four years and last year reached a 20-year high, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Yet, syphilis was thought to be almost eliminated by 2000.

What is going on?

It's hard to believe

But China's medical system is truly terrible. Some examples:

China has one general practitioner for every 6,666 people, compared with the international standard of one for every 1,500 to 2,000 people, according to the World Health Organization.

It's so difficult to get an appointment with a doctor that scalpers make a living doing it.In July, hundreds of thousands of children were found to have been injected with faulty vaccines.

Instead of going to a doctor’s office or a community clinic, people rush to the hospitals to see specialists, even for fevers and headaches.

This winter, flu-stricken patients camped out overnight with blankets in the corridors of several Beijing hospitals.

People bribe doctors to get an appointment.

A typical doctor sees 50 to 60 patients in a workday of about seven and a half hours. In the United States, a family doctor has 83 “patient encounters” in a 45-hour workweek.

Hospitals have become battlegrounds. At least one hospital has hired taekwondo experts to teach doctors self-defense techniques. Some hospitals pay private security companies for protection. Last year, the government pledged to station an adequate number of police officers in emergency departments, where most doctor-patient violence occurs.

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Pushing the limits

California has just passed a law which makes it mandatory for companies “whose principal executive offices” are in California have at least one woman on their boards by the end of 2019 and two by 2021. Failure to do so means a fine of $100,000 for a first violation and $300,000 for a second.

While European countries, including France, Germany and Norway, have already developed gender diversity requirements for corporate boards; it seems ant-democratic to me.

They were prescient

In 1780 John Adams wrote that "the greatest political evil" to be feared under a democratic constitution was the emergence of "two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other." I can't say that our two parties are "great" but they sure oppose each other. 

In his farewell address George Washington described the "spirit of party" as democracy's "worst enemy." It agitates the Community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one party against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection." He's right on the button for today's parties.