Find your room in this Dutch hotel

Courtesy of a Duncaster resident

Where the money is

America in the early 20th century

Were they drunk when they built this building in Poland?

Courtesy of a Duncaster resident

The USDA under Trump

Four Largest U.S. Meat Companies Controlled 50% or More of Chicken, Beef and Pork Markets in 2016

Source:U.S. Department of Agriculture, Congressional Research Service

Fewer Violators Are Being Suspended 
The USDA is suspending fewer companies for violating the Packers and Stockyards Act after a peak during the Obama administration.

Source: USDA

Fines Issued by USDA Drop Under Trump 
Fines on meat companies for cheating and defrauding farmers surged during the Obama administration and then dwindled under Trump.

* The 2018 figure is based on preliminary case data on the USDA’s website. The final tally is not yet available. (Source: USDA)

From ProPublica

How many do you look at?

Is this our country?

Why won't they do their job?

The Republican State Senators from Oregon have not shown up for work since last Thursday. Many of them have fled the state for Montana, Washington and Idaho. They are afraid that they will have to vote for a climate change bill. If enough of them stay away, the legislature will not have a quorum and the session ends on June 30.

Of course, this is not the only bill that will not be voted on. There are another 100 waiting to be heard.

Banking or Gambling?

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) has a few disturbing numbers in a recent report:

JPMorgan Chase NA and Citibank NA control 75.7 percent of all precious metals derivatives contracts held by all of the 5,362 Federally-insured banks and savings associations.

JPMorgan Chase Bank NA holds $2.4 trillion in stock (equity) derivative contracts – which represents 64 percent of all stock derivative contracts held by all 5,362 Federally-insured banks in the United States. 

If you include the stock derivative contracts held by Citibank, Goldman Sachs Bank USA and Bank of America NA, together with the stock derivative contracts held by JPMorgan Chase Bank, you have 93 percent of all equity derivative contracts held by all 5,362 Federally-insured banks in the U.S.

Going Home

Isn't everyone entitled to legal counsel?

I guess Harvard doesn't think so as it will not renew the appointment of Ronald Sullivan and his wife as faculty deans of Winthrop House, one of Harvard’s undergraduate residential houses. The reason being that he is one of the lawyers who represented the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein in advance of his coming sexual assault trial. Why was his representing Weinstein a bad thing? "Reports by some students that they felt unsafe in an institution led by a lawyer who would take on Mr. Weinstein as a client."

Is this telling us something?

Speaking a foreign language

One view of tariffs

She makes sense to me.

An Odd Building

And I thought that Singapore was a rather conventional country

Courtesy of a Duncaster resident

Running Dry

Chennai has a population of 4.6 million. It is running out of water. Its largest reservoir and another important reservoir are running dry. Look at the difference in one year.

Here's how it looked in June 2018.

And now in June 2019.

Climate change and horse poop

A Pro at 7

They're getting younger and younger

In rehearsal

A Late Starter

Do you agree?

Traveling to freshwater lakes

That's what some researchers wanted to find out - how do fish get to isolated freshwater lakes. Their theory is that birds bring them there. And they do it via their digestive tract. The experiment involved whole killifish eggs. The eggs were put inside the digestive system of swans in Brazil. They found that an estimated one per cent of ingested killifish eggs were found to be viable in bird feces and capable of continuing their development. One egg in the study even hatched more than a month after its transit through a swan.

Talking Truths to Mitch

Things don't look well..

...at least to Ruchir Sharma of Morgan Stanley. His starting point is "Since the end of the recession, the economy has grown at about 2 percent a year in the United States and 3 percent worldwide — both nearly a point below the average for postwar recoveries." This is the longest, weakest recovery on record. The basic problem, he feels, is that central banks have printed a lot of easy money and given it to inefficient and big companies. These are no longer the times of the entrepreneur. The National Bureau of Economic Research shows that low rates gave big companies an incentive and means to grow bigger. As their power grows, workers’ share of national income has been shrinking, fueling inequality.

The economy is being dominated by big companies; for example, four airlines and three rental car companies account for more than 80 percent of the American travel markets. One company owns just about all major jewelers. It looks as though tech companies sell to Google, Apple, Facebook, etc. rather than try to unseat them. Start-ups represent a declining share of all companies in Britain, Italy, Spain, Sweden, the United States and many other industrialized economies. The United States is generating start-ups — and shutting down established companies — at the slowest rates since at least the 1970s.

Then, there are the “zombie firms,” which don’t earn enough profit to cover their interest payments and survive by repeatedly refinancing their loans. They account for 12 percent of the companies listed on stock exchanges in advanced economies and 16 percent in the United States, up from 2 percent in the 1980s. Companies are surviving in the “zombie state” for longer, depleting the productivity of healthy companies by competing with them for capital, materials and labor.

We all do stupid things

Kyle Kashuv is a survivor of the Parkland shootings. He graduated second in his class and was admitted to Harvard. Somehow, Harvard learned of racist and anti-Semitic comments he made on-line exchanging comments with his fellow students as they were cramming for a test. He was 16 years old at the time. He is a conservative and works hard supporting conservative endeavors. But, he has also worked very hard supporting gun control in schools.

Because of these comments Harvard revoked his admittance. In his defense, he wrote, “I am no longer the same person, especially in the aftermath of the Parkland shooting and all that has transpired since.” He also wrote to the Harvard diversity office, apologizing and asking what he could do to be a better person. When the comments became public last month, Kashuv immediately apologized. “We were 16-year-olds making idiotic comments, using callous and inflammatory language in an effort to be as extreme and shocking as possible.”

What is Harvard afraid of?

Plastic sneakers

When does food expire?

Viri probati

That's an approved man in Latin and Latin is commonly used in the Catholic Church. It was most recently used in a proposal for an upcoming Vatican conference on the needs of communities in the Amazon region. The approved men will be ordained as priests provided they are "elderly men, preferably indigenous, respected and accepted members of their community.” Such men could be ordained “even if they already have an established and stable family.” Is this the first step toward the ordination of married men in other areas of the world?

Another interesting chart

In California local jails have become more dangerous

In 2011 the California prison system introduced some reforms, one of which was the shifting of responsibility from state prisons to county lockups. Since then, the rate of inmate-on-inmate homicides has tripled or quadrupled, and statewide the number has risen 46%. 

But county jails are not equipped to handle those who have been in a state jail; they are designed to hold people no longer than a year. They don't expect inmates to suffer from serious mental illness or chronic medical conditions that those facilities have been unprepared to handle. The majority of people in county jails are accused of crimes, innocent under the law, whereas prisons only hold those who have been convicted of felonies. Jails mix both populations, and the result has been deadly.

Flood and a Landslide

Your Call

Fighting Crime in Phoenix

Apparently, it must be pretty tough. This video shows the cops' reaction when they learned that a 4-year-old girl walked out of a Dollar store with a Barbie doll she hadn’t paid for — without the parents’ knowledge.

Fighting forest fires can kill you

I guess that's obvious but how they can kill you over the long term. They have studied fighting fires in buildings and have found they bring elevated risks of cancer, heart and lung disease, and even mental health issues. But now they have realized that forest fire smoke is full of compounds and components that are regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency. The wildland firefighters and crews breathe carbon monoxide that can cause a significant and immediate loss in cognitive function. And there is more: a host of other toxins in the smoke, exposure to smoke laced with chemicals from herbicides that were applied to forests before they caught fire.

Their protection? A bandana is the only respiratory protective equipment recommended for firefighters to carry. And the EPA and many other health agencies warn that it doesn't actually help reduce particulate exposure. But experts say there's no easy alternative. The basic N95 respirators available to the general public don't hold up to the intense conditions of a fire. And the respirators that structural firefighters use are heavy, reduce vision and can only supply clean air for a short period of time. Wildfire shifts are generally 12 hours.

Is ICE too busy?

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency is supposed to review every case that comes to them for a foreign-born veteran. If a foreign-born service member received an honorable discharge, he or she is eligible for citizenship, provided he applies for it; his case is supposed to be reviewed by a senior ICE official. However, the GAO found that the agency didn’t bother to do this in 70% of the cases.

Historically, non-citizens have been vital to the nation’s military success. More than 100,000 lawful permanent residents have served in the U.S. armed forces since 2001.

Studying Trees

Are you in this group?

From The Big Picture

At least they responded

And they actually did something. "They" is JPMorgan Chase.  Back in May I recounted my experience trying to get Chase to forget about a one penny error I made in paying my monthly bill. Well, my first attempt at solving the problem did not work. Last week I got a notice saying that I still owed them a penny. When I called and asked them for the name of the person running this division, I could not get an answer. So, I wrote a letter to the division, with a copy to Jamie Dimon. They did respond twice - once for the division and once for Dimon. Supposedly, I now owe them nothing.

A Miracle

Assuming it's not fake news.

Dogs in Korea

The Subminimum Wage

Did you know that there are more than 320,000 people who are legally paid a wage less than the minimum. These people are disabled and working for organizations using a section of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). This section, referred to as 14(c), says that workers “whose earning or productive capacity is impaired by age, physical or mental deficiency, or injury” can be paid based on their “productivity” or on the “quality and quantity” of their labor.

There are over 1,400 firms - tiny companies and large companies - holding 14(c) certificates in the US. They are referred to as Community Rehabilitation Programs, or more commonly, sheltered workshops. These organizations seek and receive contracts from large corporations to generate products and services that fund their operations. In Nevada one of these 1400 firms is accused of paying its workers 36 cents an hour.

Some of these firms do pay their executives well. PRIDE Industries, a Sacramento-based sheltered workshop, pays its CEO a salary of $792,132, while 906 workers are employed at subminimum wages. 

The Bionic Dancer

JPMorgan Chase has improved

At least in the eyes of the Federal Reserve. In 2013 the Fed required the bank to provide written progress reports to the New York Fed in 2013 until further notice. This was due to JP's secretly gambling with depositors’ money in exotic derivatives in London and losing at least $6.2 billion of those funds. Although the bank has pleaded guilty to three criminal felony counts since then, the Fed has removed the restriction.

In the interim JP has been charged by a number of agencies:

Last December the Hong Kong Monetary Authority charged it with anti-money laundering violations.

Also in December the Securities and Exchange Commission fined it 135 million for improperly providing American Depository Receipts (ADRs) “to brokers in thousands of pre-release transactions when neither the broker nor its customers had the foreign shares needed to support those new ADRs.”

In October the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) charged and fined JPMorgan Chase “for 87 apparent violations of the Cuban Assets Control Regulations; the Iranian Transactions and Sanctions Regulations; and the Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferators Sanctions Regulations.”

And it hasn't stopped. Yesterday the Swiss Competition Authority announced that it was fining JPMorgan Chase and other banks for anti-competitive behavior in the foreign exchange spot market.

What about the participation rate?

We're all pleased that the unemployment rate has been low for quite a while now. But the unemployment rate does have a flaw. It does not include those who have stopped looking for a job. That's measured by the participation rate; it measures all active workers divided by the working-age population. The participation rate has been low since the onset of the Great Recession.

From about the late 1980s until 2008, the participation rate fluctuated around 66% to 67%. But after the Great Recession, the rate dropped more 3 percentage points over the next seven years and has barely budged since. The latest jobs report shows it’s at 62.8%.

The 3 percentage points decline in participation translates to over 6 million people no longer in the labor force. Should we worry?

Texas cops at work

Trump's latest tweet moves the moon to Mars

"For all of the money we are spending, NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon - We did that 50 years ago. They should be focused on the much bigger things we are doing, including Mars (of which the Moon is a part), Defense and Science!"

 59.8K 1:38 PM - Jun 7, 2019

The GAO found a few problems auditing the IRS

These control deficiencies are:

nationwide strategy for safeguarding taxpayer receipts and associated information, 
physical security policies and procedures, 
review of visitor access logs, 
transmission of taxpayer receipts,
 designations of unit security representatives, 
review of automated tax refund information prior to certification for payment, 
review of refund schedule numbers for manual refunds, 
and review of suspicious and questionable tax returns in Examination.

Some Truths About Air Power

as seen by William Astore who spent his career as a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force and now spends his time teaching "military science". He makes his case that there are no enemy air forces or significant air defenses, we are the air power today. His basic tenets: 

1. Just because U.S. warplanes and drones can strike almost anywhere on the globe with relative impunity doesn’t mean that they should.

2. Bombing alone will never be the key to victory.

3. No matter how much it’s advertised as “precise,” “discriminate,” and “measured,” bombing (or using missiles like the Tomahawk) rarely is.

4. Using air power to send political messages about resolve or seriousness rarely works.

5. Air power is enormously expensive.

6. Aerial surveillance (as with drones), while useful, can also be misleading.

7. Air power is inherently offensive.

8. Despite the fantasies of those sending out the planes, air power often lengthens wars rather than shortening them.

9. Air power, even of the shock-and-awe variety, loses its impact over time.

10. Pounding peasants from two miles up is not exactly an ideal way to occupy the moral high ground in war.

His summary:
If I had to reduce these tenets to a single maxim, it would be this: all the happy talk about the techno-wonders of modern air power obscures its darker facets, especially its ability to lock America into what are effectively one-way wars with dead-end results.

Seniors are falling more often

The National Center for Health Statistics found that in 2016 the rate of death from falls for people 75 and older was 111 per 100,000 people. This was more than double the rate in 2000 - 52 per 100,000 people. Why? Elizabeth Burns, an author of the study, says, “The most likely reason is that people are living longer with conditions that in the past they might have died from.” In addition, she continued, older adults are on medications that increase their risk of falling. Women are slightly more likely to fall than men, but men are slightly more likely to die as a result of a fall.

What can we do about it? Exercise at least 20 minutes a day, combining aerobic and anaerobic exercise including weight lifting which strengthens the legs. Tai chi, the Chinese martial art, appears to be an effective way to improve balance.

What should we not do? Minimize the medications we take to sleep as they can compromise balance. Avoid bifocal or progressive lenses when walking outside. Don't wear high heels. Wear shoes that have a back, and a sole with good tread.

Returning to America post WWI

That's what Paul Krugman is arguing about re Trump's moving us toward trade wars. He "is returning America to the kind of irresponsibility it displayed after World War I." As indicated by refusing to join the League of Nations, slamming the doors shut on most immigration, doubling average tariffs on dutiable imports (via Smoot Hawley Act, Emergency Tariff Act, Fordney-McCumber Tariff). Like now,farmers were especially hard hit - low prices for their products and high prices for farm equipment, leading to a surge in foreclosures.

Our tariffs put our World War I allies in an impossible position: We expected them to repay their huge war debts, but our tariffs made it impossible for them to earn the dollars they needed to make those payments.

The combination of trade war and debt nexus created a climate of international distrust and bitterness that contributed to the economic and political crises of the 1930s. But we learned something about a post-war world. After World War II we operated on the basis that free trade and peace went hand in hand.

The decline of diversity in crops

Maybe he just wanted a glass of wine.

No one answered the door at three o'clock in the morning, so an 11-foot alligator broke some low windows and entered a house in Clearwater, Fl. He knocked over a wine shelf and several bottles of wine were broken.

No one was injured during the incident but police said the gator had some minor cuts to its shoulder area. It will be taken to a private alligator farm.

Courtesy of our Florida correspondent

A new sales pitch for toilet paper

Charmin is trying to sell urban millennials and aging consumers toilet paper that will take care of them for three months and not take up much space. They call it the Forever Roll. It comes in two sizes: multi-user, which is 12 inches in diameter, and single user, which is 8.7 inches in diameter. By comparison, conventional rolls measure roughly five inches in diameter.

Two kids fighting

Trading with Mexico

Do you agree?

Nearing the end?

The Top Ten

For the past ten years the World Economic Forum has published a list of the most powerful cities in the world. The goal is to select cities that best attract capital, businesses and people – what it refers to as the cities’ magnetism.

The six factors scrutinized are: economy, research and development, cultural interaction, livability, environment, and accessibility. These six are, in turn, broken down into 70 different indicators which are all given a score. The cumulative score gives the institute its final rankings. The maximum possible score is 2,600 points.

The 2018 top five remains unchanged from last year – London, New York, Tokyo, Paris and Singapore.

Still Dancing

Pleasing the boss

It may not have been Trump, it may have been a member of his staff but Rear Adm. Charlie Brown, the Navy’s chief of information, said in a statement that a “request was made to the U.S. Navy to minimize the visibility of USS John S. McCain (when Trump was in Japan), however, all ships remained in their normal configuration during the President’s visit.”

No matter who issued the statement, it was still childish.

Read at a funeral I attended

Death Is Nothing At All
By Henry Scott-Holland 

Death is nothing at all. 
It does not count. 
I have only slipped away into the next room. 
Nothing has happened. 

Everything remains exactly as it was. 
I am I, and you are you, 
and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged. 
Whatever we were to each other, that we are still. 

Call me by the old familiar name. 
Speak of me in the easy way which you always used. 
Put no difference into your tone. 
Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow. 

Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together. 
Play, smile, think of me, pray for me. 
Let my name be ever the household word that it always was. 
Let it be spoken without an effort, without the ghost of a shadow upon it. 

Life means all that it ever meant. 
It is the same as it ever was. 
There is absolute and unbroken continuity. 
What is this death but a negligible accident? 

Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? 
I am but waiting for you, for an interval, 
somewhere very near, just round the corner. 

All is well. 
Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost. 
One brief moment and all will be as it was before. 
How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again! 

Source: https://www.familyfriendpoems.com/poem/death-is-nothing-at-all-by-henry-scott-holland