Construction by helicopter

From our Plymouth, Mass. correspondent

Crickets for dinner

The UN says that 20 percent of the world’s consumers eat insects. Very few live in the West. But there are people here who hope that will change and crickets will be as popular as kale. 

Currently, in the U.S. there are four large producers of crickets. The largest one is Big Cricket Farms. Here's a quote from the CEO of the company,

“At any one time there are about 6 million crickets in the facility. My demand has been so robust that over the summer I finished getting a secondary facility up and running. That one probably carries between 4 to 8 million crickets at any given time. The crickets are sold four weeks before they’re finished being raised … so we’ve had to be selective at times about who ends up with our crickets. I’ve raised my prices maybe six times so far.”

Do you believe him?

Getting a job

I grew up in Cambridge, Mass. There were two public high schools, Cambridge High and Latin and Rindge Technical. Latin was for those who intended to go to college, Rindge for those who didn't. Many of my friends went to Rindge and 62 years later there was not much difference in their work life from that of Latin graduates. Some of each group did well, others did okay. 

When I was in business, I paid little attention as to whether an applicant had gone to college. I wanted to hire good programmers and my experience told me that a college education was not necessary for that.

In college I felt that about half of the students should not have been admitted as they were really not college material as I understood the term.

You can imagine how pleased I was to read of Randolph Technical High School in Philadelphia. It is one of the city’s Career and Technical Education High Schools, where all students participate in vocational programs. The students take regular classes such as math and English, but they also choose a speciality where they can earn college credit or a professional certification in areas such as dentistry, carpentry, automotive repair, vending, or health care.

When they graduate, the kids can go on to college (usually a community college) or get a well-paying job. Interestingly, these kids are more likely to graduate from high school than the typical Philadelphia student. 

Can't say I understand it

Hubble photos of the Veil Nebula

The cloud of material 110 light-years wide that lies about 2,100 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus (The Swan).
The structure formed about 8,000 years ago, after a star 20 times more massive than the sun died in a supernova explosion

A challenge to us

The Pope's conclusion of his speech to Congress:

A nation can be considered great when it defends liberty as Lincoln did, when it fosters a culture which enables people to “dream” of full rights for all their brothers and sisters, as Martin Luther King sought to do; when it strives for justice and the cause of the oppressed, as Dorothy Day did by her tireless work, the fruit of a faith which becomes dialogue and sows peace in the contemplative style of Thomas Merton.

Refugee Reality

Look ma, no prosthetic

A 28-year-old paraplegic man walks with the help of technology by which scientists rerouted signals from his brain to electrodes on his knees. The electrode cap the man is wearing picks up brain waves and beams them wirelessly to a computer, which deciphers the waves as an intention to stand still or walk. The relevant command is then sent to a microcontroller on the man’s belt, and on to nerves that trigger muscles to move the legs. 

The man, who was paralyzed from the waist down by a spinal cord injury, has become the first such patient to walk without the use of robotics. Researchers at the University of California, Irvine, south of Los Angeles, say the outcome marks a promising step that one day may help stroke and spinal injury.


ABC Breaking News

Life, Love, Death

Our judicial system has problems

1. Plea bargaining has replaced the trial in a vast majority of cases. Thus, the district attorney has more power than the judge. There is seldom a review of the deal and, in many cases, the accused is actually innocent.
2. Mandatory sentencing removes the judge from deciding punishment based on the details of a particular case. It also increases the prison population.
3. Because they can't afford to pay bail, poor people spend time in jail even though they are innocent.
4. The War on Drugs has increased the amount of crime here and in many other countries.

The 100-year-old track star

Don Perelman is 100 years old. He did quite well in the San Diego Senior Games yesterday. He broke records for his age group for the 100-meter dash, high jump, shot put, discus long jump. He ran the dash in less than 27 seconds. And he doesn’t take any vitamins. 

John Dean on the Republican candidates for President.

Excerpts from a recent article:

• Not one of the GOP candidates is attempting to lead; rather, they all are dancing to the tune(s) they believe the GOP base wants to hear. But the contemporary GOP base, after years of irresponsible Republican leadership that has turned them off to all things relating to government, has lost contact with reality. Accordingly, the GOP base has made clear they do not want a candidate who is really qualified. To the contrary, as the polls leading up to this second debate showed, the party’s base favors the least qualified candidates.
• Remarkably, the Republican base at this stage of the primary process favors candidates who know absolutely nothing about being president: Donald Trump and Ben Carson.
• In short, at this stage of the primary process, the Republicans favor two of the least qualified potential candidates in modern history for the presidency, and after this last debate, they may make it a trio if Fiorina advances in the polls.
• No one can really be surprised at this anti-Washington, anti-qualified politician posture of the GOP base. After all, Republican leaders have been playing their base, as well as other Americans, for fools for several decades. Republican leaders have been pushing anti-government rhetoric for decades. The effort to diminish–or better yet, destroy–federal power began in earnest when Newt Gingrich was a back-bencher in the late 1970s, throwing grenades in the House of Representatives. His total irresponsibility in gaming the system attracted attention, and soon he was the leader of the House Republicans, and Speaker of the House by 1995. He never stopped pushing the envelope, down to his forcing an impeachment of President Bill Clinton over his affair with Monica Lewinsky, while Gingrich was deeply involved in his own marriage destroying affair. Other GOP leaders have picked up where Gingrich left off as his own bad behavior made him irrelevant on the national stage.

Advice from a 6 year-old to her divorced parents

I find it hard to believe that this was all the little girl's doing.

What's wrong with our electoral system

Another major increase in the price of drug

Daraprim has been around for 62 years and the standard of care for treating a life-threatening parasitic infection. It's used to treat babies born to women who become infected during pregnancy and people with compromised immune systems, like AIDS patients and certain cancer patients. Its cost before being acquired by a new drug company, Turing Pharm-aceuticals, was $13.50 per tablet; its current cost in $750 per tablet. This increase could cost some patients hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.

This is not the first time something like this has occurred. Doxycycline, an antibiotic, went from $20 a bottle in October 2013 to $1,849 by April 2014. Again, this was a case where an old drug was acquired by another company.

Is this a polar bear?

The effects of climate change?

A scary article

Harriet Washington has written a very scary article in the American Scholar. It's about tropical diseases, which she asserts are no longer restricted to the Tropics, they are here now and, unless we do something, they will really flourish. 

Currently, those most affected by these diseases are the poor. At least 330,000 U.S. citizens have Chagas disease, the most common parasitic disease in the Americas, and estimates range as high as one million. It infects six million to seven million more people in Latin America. It can be treated, but the lack of awareness by doctors in the United States means that it often isn’t.

It appears that tropical diseases have more than straightforward physical effects; they also undermine intellectual development. They affect our ability to calculate, to focus, and to process visual information. While we made a big deal about Ebola, about 11,000 people have died from Ebola in sub-Saharan Africa, but 10 million people—nearly half the population of these countries—suffer from at least one NTD or malaria or both. 

More questionable information gathering by the FBI

The FBI apparently wants to fingerprint all of us. Currently, only the fingerprints of criminals or suspected terrorists, etc. are stored in FBI files and accessible to the rest of law enforcement and some other government agencies. Now the FBI will be storing fingerprints taken for a background and, thus, available to be searched right along with fingerprints taken for criminal purposes.

The FBI is also moving beyond fingerprints they'll include photos. Employers and agencies will be able to submit a photograph along with prints as part of the standard background check. 

Gimmicking the testing

Since 2009 Volkswagen has been deceitful with regard to its diesel vehicles. It developed software to control emissions. When the car is on the road, there is little control over emissions. When the car is being tested for emissions, the software turns on the full emissions control system. The company has been ordered to recall and fix about 500,000 of its cars, both VW and Audi. There will likely be penalties. 

The Pope said...

1. “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” -- Comment the pope made July 29, 2013, at a press conference. 
2. “A little bit of mercy makes the world less cold and more just.” -- He said during a blessing at St. Peter’s Square March 18, 2013.  
3. “I believe in God -- not in a Catholic God; there is no Catholic God. There is God, and I believe in Jesus Christ, his incarnation. Jesus is my teacher and my pastor, but God, the Father, Abba, is the light and the Creator. This is my Being.” -- Francis said Oct. 1, 2013, to La Repubblica. 
4. “The faith with which a person enters marriage must also be examined, and we also need to make it clear that the divorced are not excommunicated.” -- Francis said in May 2014 to reporters.
5. “Wretched are those who are vindictive and spiteful.” -- He said at a public sermon in 2013. 
6. "God is not a divine being or a magician, but the Creator who brought everything to life." -- From the address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences Oct. 28, 2014. 
7. “When we see a holy people of God that is humble, whose wealth is in its faith in the Lord, in its trust in the Lord, they are the ones who are saved." -- On Vatican Radio Dec. 16, 2014. 
8. “Although the life of a person is in a land full of thorns and weeds, there is always a space in which the good seed can grow. You have to trust God.” -- Interview with American magazine Sept. 30, 2013.
9. “The confessional is not a torture chamber, but the place in which the Lord's mercy motivates us to do better.” -- The pope said this Sept. 19, 2013, during an interview with Jesuit publications.
10. “Each of us has a vision of good and of evil. We have to encourage people to move towards what they think is good... Everyone has his own idea of good and evil and must choose to follow the good and fight evil as he conceives them. That would be enough to make the world a better place.” -- As said to Cultura Oct. 1, 2013.

From International Business Times

The frog moves

The start of the perpetual presidential campaign

It all started on January 2, 1960. That's when John F. Kennedy announced his campaign for presidency and his entry in the New Hampshire primary. Before then, the party bosses selected the candidates just before the convention. I know the quality of presidential candidates has not improved, at least not in the 21st century. But the perpetual campaigning we suffer through has only helped boost media profits.

What I don't know about water

The alumni magazine for Columbia has a fascinating article about the work being done with water by some of the faculty. Here are some interesting facts:

• We use about 100 gallons of water a day per person. (I find this hard to believe, but consider the toilet, the washers, etc.). But we drink only about a half-gallon a day.
• The essential point made in the article is that we treat all water so that it is drinkable. This is a huge waste of energy.
• Salt water comprises 97% of earth's water. Two-thirds of the remaining water is encased in ice sheets. Our supply of water is a mere 1% of all the water on earth.
• 70% of our water is used by agriculture. The most common form of irrigation used in agriculture is flood irrigation, 15-20% of which will evaporate before use.
• The largest expense in bringing water to California is powering it over the mountains.
• 20% of our water is lost because of faulty piping.

Maybe we need to look at our water problem in a different way.

Telling it like it isn't

Last item on her bucket list

Books without a library

That's what Bexar County, Texas, is doing. They have opened the BiblioTech library, which offers about 10,000 free e-books for the 1.7 million residents of the county. This is not the first time this has been tried. Arizona tried it in 2002, but it was too soon.

You can still go to the library and use its 600 e-readers, 48 computer stations, laptops and tablets. Plus, the library also offers kids' story time and computer classes. You must use its 3M Cloud Library app.

From our Florida correspondent

Police Chief on the grill

An excerpt from an interview of the Texas police chief by Chris Hayes re the kid and the digital clock bomb: 

“Once it’s determined that this is just a clock or just a piece of electronics, why then the arrest and all of that?” he asked Boyd. “That’s very hard for folks to understand.”

“I get that. I understand the concern,” the chief responded. “The officers pretty quickly determined that they weren’t investigating an explosive device. What their investigation centered around is the law violation of bringing a device into a facility like that that is intended to create a level of alarm. In other words, a hoax bomb — something that is not really a bomb, but is designed and presented in a way that it creates people to be afraid.”

“Right, but he never called it a bomb, right?” Hayes countered. “He just kept calling it a clock. I mean, it never came out of his lips, he never did something or started showing it around saying, ‘Look at this bomb I have.’ He said, ‘Look at my clock.'” 

“There definitely was some confusion and some level of information that didn’t come out immediately,” Boyd said, adding that in many cases, someone who would make a “hoax bomb” would not be likely to admit to doing so to police.

How different would the interrogations of the kid been if he were not Muslim?

You need the right name

Clearly, Ahmed Mohamed does not have the right name in 21st century America. Mohamed is a kid, he attends the ninth grade in a Texas school. He decided to build a digital clock to impress his teacher. The impression he created was that it was a bomb. The police were called to the school and interrogated him. He was refused a call to his parents. Evetually he was arrested and left school in handcuffs. A national brouhaha has followed; Obama, Clinton, Zuckerberg, MIT have all chimed in and derided the stupidity of the school and the police. Eventually, the police chief acknowledged, “We have no evidence to support that there was an intention to create alarm or cause people to be concerned.” Would anything have happened if his name was Smith? That's very likely as he did create something interesting. But we live in fear. Anyone who might be a Muslim has to be suspicious.

The Military around the world

Probably no other country has deployed troops to so many foreign lands. We have around 800 U.S. bases in eighty or so foreign countries.  Although the wars ended more than sixty years ago, there are still 174 U.S. “base sites” in Germany, 113 in Japan, and 83 in South Korea. Some estimates say it costs us about $156 billion a year, money we could use for our deteriorating infrastructure.

White collar crime is down

Or, is it simply that the number of federal prosecution of white collar criminals is at its lowest level in the last twenty years? It is down by more than one third (36.8%) from levels seen two decades ago but the population is up.

There are differences in the popularity of certain crimes. Twenty years ago, mail fraud was the most frequent lead charge. Ten years ago it was bank fraud  Five years it was aggravated identity theft. Currently, fraud by wire, radio or television tops the list of lead charges. 

Net loss of 10 billion a year

Another flaw in our legal system

Poor spider

Is the daiquiri a thing of the past?

The daiquiri was reasonably popular back in the 20th century although I must confess that I haven't had one for maybe 10 years. Last night we went out to dinner at a popular local restaurant. One of our party ordered a daiquiri. The waitress, a young lass in her twenties, did not understand the word, she had never heard of it. Okay, I can understand that. But the bartender had never heard of it either and he might have been in his forties. Maybe this is another indication of getting old?

Who is in prison

From janitor to principal

Another Angola?

Yesterday I posted a video about Angola, the Louisiana prison that has undergone a massive change towards humanity under a warden driven by his Christian beliefs. Today's NY Times talks about a Brazilian prison that is beginning to change due to a warden driven by religion. 

Antônio Galdino da Silva Neto is certainly not an ordinary prison warden. His first job was that of a police officer. However, he wound up in jail for killing his wife in a domestic dispute. Life in prison, especially for an ex-cop, was like hell. And hell began on day 1. Murder, beatings, sexual attacks - it went on and on. But then he met a minister and that changed everything for him. He began to practice his religion and in five years he was released for good behavior.

For some unknown reason, in 2011 he was nominated by the governor to head a prison. He has tried many innovative things based on the same ideas as the warden of Angola, although he is not as fervent a believer as the Angola warden. Will he succeed?

Mike, the headless chicken

Ok, so you don't believe it's possible for a chicken to live without his head. Well, it's happened at least once. It was on a farm in Colorado in 1945. Mike survived a killing of the chickens owned by a farmer. He lived another 18 months and traveled around the country. Life Magazine even featured Mike in one of its issues.

They first took the chicken to the University of Utah, where the chicken was put through a battery of tests and was deemed to be alive. Then, they toured the country. Mike died in 1947.

Dr Tom Smulders, a chicken expert at the Centre for Behaviour and Evolution at Newcastle University, contends that Mike did not bleed to death. He was able to survive because, in Smulders opinion,  up to 80% of his brain by mass - and almost everything that controls the chicken's body, including heart rate, breathing, hunger and digestion - remained untouched.

This is Angola Prison?

Declining Arctic Ice

Homo naledi

It looks like scientists have discovered another prehuman species. They're calling it Homo naledi. It seems to be a big find as the 1,550 body pieces they have discovered so far is the largest sample for any hominin species in a single African site, and one of the largest anywhere in the world.The discovery was made in a cave in South Africa. It is thought the cave served as a burial chamber.

Pharmaceuticals is a good business

Especially in the U.S. where drugs cost twice as much as in the rest of the world. It is a tough business. On average, only one in every 5,000 compounds that drug companies discover and put through preclinical testing becomes an approved drug. Of the drugs started in clinical trials on humans, only 10 percent secure F.D.A. approval.

Still, it is profitable. Gilead, maker of Sovaldi, has profits of around 50 percent. Biogen, Amgen and other biotech firms have profits of around 30 percent. Merck and Pfizer are seeing profits of 18 percent.

Some drugs can cost you $300,000 per year. Although these specialty drugs are not widely used (they represent about 1 percent of prescriptions), they do bring on the money ( they account for 32 percent of all spending on drugs).

Ezekiel Emmanuel asks why don't we adopt a system like Australia or Switzerland? Australia is the only purchaser of drugs for the country, making drugs available at fixed prices that are now listed online. Switzerland includes only those drugs that are effective and cost-effective on its approved drug list. It then establishes a maximum allowable price for the drug, but up to that point, companies can decide what to charge. 

Water Risk Around the World

Here's a sample:

For more click here

Getting ready for the school year

Refugees

Today's NY Times has two powerful op-eds on the refugee crisis, one by Michael Ignatieff, the other by Nicholas Kristof. Some interesting excerpts:

• The Syrian civil war has created more than four million refugees. The United States has taken in about 1,500 of them. Canada 1,074. Australia 2,200. Brazil 2,000.
• The Gulf States and Saudi Arabia have taken in 0 refugees. 
• The United Nations system to register refugees is overwhelmed. 
• If governments won’t help refugees escape Syria, smugglers and human traffickers will, and the deadly toll will rise. 
• Other refugees. Albert Einstein. Madeleine Albright. The Dalai Lama.
• In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States received hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese boat people. 
• United Nations aid requests for Syrian refugees are only 41 percent funded, and the World Food Program was recently forced to slash its food allocation for refugees in Lebanon to just $13.50 per person a month. 
• Half of Syrian refugee children are unable to go to school. 

Is there anything more to be said?

Numbers with a lot of zeroes

Water, Water. Is it everywhere?

NASA has a satellite called GRACE; it is used for gravity recovery and climate experiment. One of the interesting things it can do is predict major flooding, because it can determine saturation of the ground by water and thus its predisposition to flooding.

GRACE recently completed a study of the world's 37 largest aquifers and found that more than a third of them are being used at unsustainable rates — they are being drained far faster than natural processes can restore them. It found that 13 of the 37 aquifers, from California to the Middle East to China, were running out of water. Eight of the 13 were determined to be overstressed, with no replenishment at all. Five were declared extremely stressed or highly stressed, with some replenishment but not enough to sustain their use. An overused aquifer will collapse and no longer retain inflows of water.

The worst one was in the Middle East, the Arabian Aquifer System. It supplies water to 60 million people in the Middle East and was declared in the study to be the most overstressed water supply in the world. The Indus Basin aquifer in India and Pakistan is the second most overstressed system. 

Another couple of million down the drain.

Where else but in Afghanistan? Another building boondoggle - a new, single headquarters on Camp Brown in Kandahar. The contract was let to an Afghan company in 2012 to build a $5 million, two-story building with administrative space and a secure communications room for logistics, maintenance, personnel and operations management. Completion was scheduled for July 2013. (You may recall that our combat mission was scheduled to end at the end of 2014.)

Well, the contractor fell almost a year behind schedule, and in October 2013, the commanders whose troops had been assigned to occupy the building decided it was no longer needed. Six months later, the military cancelled the project. By this time, $2.2 million had already been spent. The building remains half constructed, with no stairs to the second floor, electrical wiring or plumbing. It has never been used.

52 years later are we any better off?

An Unlivable Hell?

That's essentially what the latest UN report on Gaza says, “The social, health and security-related ramifications of the high population density and overcrowding are among the factors that may render Gaza unliveable by 2020”.

Here are some excerpts:

• The Israeli blockade “ravaged the already debilitated infrastructure of Gaza, shattered its productive base, left no time for meaningful reconstruction or economic recovery and impoverished the Palestinian population in Gaza". 
• Gaza’s electricity supply was not even enough to cover 40 percent of demand, 95 percent of water from coastal aquifers — Gazans main source of freshwater — was considered unsafe to drink. 
• Unemployment in Gaza last year was 44 percent — the highest level on record — hitting young women especially hard, leaving more than eight out of 10 women out of work.
• 72 percent of all households in Gaza are meanwhile struggling with food insecurity, and the number of Palestinian refugees who rely entirely on food distribution from UN agency has ballooned from 72,000 in 2000 to 868,000 by last May.

21st Century Transportation

From our Plymouth correspondent

Follow the wires

More loosening up by Pope Francis

It used to be that a priest needed special permission from a bishop to forgive the sin of abortion. Most American bishops did grant the permission. However, as part of the upcoming special Holy Year of Mercy, every priest in the world will be able to forgive the sin of abortion.  
Francis also made a gesture towards so-called breakaway traditionalist groups, the most prominent of which is the Society of St. Pius X. This group pulled away from the church when Bishop Lefebvre of France ordained four new bishops without papal approval. As part of the Holy Year, anyone who confesses their sins to a priest of such a group will be forgiven. 

It's strange that a 7-year-old American plays the bagpipes

My bet for president

Crawfish, Crawfish has filed his candidacy for president of the United States with the Federal Election Commission. It is running as an independent (“One Nation Under Claws”). It has yet to raise the $5,000 needed to be considered an official candidate, but it does have 27,000 likes on Facebook.

Guessing the future

Communicating in an emergency

Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) spent more than $5 billion for the purchase of radio equipment by public-safety agencies from fiscal 2012 through 2014. However, the RFP specified that federal, state and local agencies “should” not must meet the voluntary standards worked out over more than a decade by government and industry officials. 

As a result, we still have situations like that of 9/11 where more than 100 firefighters didn’t hear an order to evacuate the South Tower of the World Trade Center and lost their lives when it collapsed.  

Grad PLUS

Grad PLUS is a federal program which gives professional and graduate-school students unlimited access to below-market-rate loans from the government. It's done well since enacted in 2006. Of the government’s $1.1 trillion student loan portfolio, 40 percent of the money is owed by graduate and professional school students — who make up only 16 percent of all student-loan borrowers.

It has been a big seller among law schools. Law-student indebtedness grew from an average of $66,000 for public institutions in the 2005 academic year to $88,000 in 2012. The figures for private law schools were $102,000 in 2005 and $127,000 in 2012. More than half of law students use Grad PLUS. Maybe Grad PLUS has not worked so well here as only about 60 percent of the Class of 2013’s law degrees landed immediate employment.

Medical Funders

I'd never heard of medical funders until I read this article on Reuters. What these funders do is purchase medical bills at a deep discount from physicians, hospitals and others who have provided care to patients involved in personal injury litigation. They may also loan the litigants travel and expense money at a high rate of interest. It can be a lucrative business. When a patient’s lawsuit settles, the medical funder stakes a claim to part of the settlement by placing a lien for the full amount of the surgical bill. The funder’s profit lies in the difference between what it pays the medical provider to buy the bill and what it is able to recover from the patient’s settlement.

It's a pretty good business that has become very good. In the past most funders bought bills owed by uninsured or underinsured patients with slip-and-fall, car accident and workers compensation suits. But now the money is in funding surgeries for patients involved in mass litigation over drugs and medical devices. 

And the really hot area is in operations to remove pelvic implants from women suing device makers. Now there are about 100,000 suits in state and federal courts. The cases so far have gone in favor of the women, who have won multimillion-dollar verdicts in 10 of the 13 suits that have gone to trial against manufacturers since 2012.

You can't manage what you don't measure

The Center for Disease Control (CDC) measures the number of people killed by guns in the U.S. each year. One problem is that it takes a while to publish the numbers; the most recent year for which numbers have been published is 2011. 

It's also a difficult task as agencies do not categorize data in the same way. Gun deaths can include suicides, homicides, accidental firearms discharges, and  legal killings. However, the number does not include county-level deaths because of privacy concerns. And who knows what the number of police shootings are. No one has a number that can be considered complete.

Supposedly, the number of people killed by firearms is greater than those killed in car accidents. Although, we again have a data problem. Deaths by car are as of 2012 and total 33,561; deaths by guns are as of 2011 and total 32,251. Part of the reasoning for this claim is that the number of fatalities on the roads in the United States has been going down for years as fewer young people drive, car safety technology improves, and gas prices climb.

Have a burger

Consumer Reports studied hamburgers, i.e. ground beef which can make us sick , particularly when it’s cooked at rare or medium-rare temperatures under 160° F. The CDC estimates that“Up to 28 percent of Americans eat ground beef that’s raw or undercooked.” 

Some numbers from the article

Between 2003 and 2012, there were almost 80 outbreaks of E. coli O157 due to tainted beef, sickening 1,144 people, putting 316 in the hospital, and killing five. Ground beef was the source of the majority of those outbreaks. 

The CDC thinks that very few cases of food poisoning are actually reported; it thinks only 4% are. Ground beef is more likely to cause food poisoning than basic beef. Bacteria can get on the meat during slaughter or processing. In whole cuts such as steak or roasts, the bacteria tend to stay on the surface, so when you cook them, the outside is likely to get hot enough to kill any bugs. But when beef is ground up, the bacteria get mixed throughout, contaminating all of the meat.

Consumer Reports looked at 458 pounds of beef. They found

• bacteria that signified fecal contamination (enterococcus and/or nontoxin-producing E. coli), which can cause blood or urinary tract infections. 
• Almost 20 percent contained C. perfringens, a bacteria that causes almost 1 million cases of food poisoning annually. 
• Ten percent of the samples had a strain of S. aureus bacteria that can produce a toxin that can make you sick. That toxin can’t be destroyed—even with proper cooking. 
• Just 1 percent of our samples contained salmonella. 

And now it's a beak

Tieta, a Brazilian toucan, lost part of its beak. Scientists used 3-D printing to create a prosthetic beak. Life for Tieta is back to normal.

Before

After

Using our money to lobby

Lockheed Martin runs Sandia National Labs for a fee of $2.4 billion a year. The world’s largest defense contractor was worried that the contract would not be renewed. So, naturally, the company hired a lobbyist and used government money to pay for the lobbying.  

The fine is $4.7 million.

Paying banks interest

Okay, most of us do. But the Fed does also. It paid the banks $25.2 billion in interest on reserves from 2008 to 2014. This interest is paid on the money the banks have at the Fed. They are required to have 10 percent of the value of  their loans parked at the Fed. Some have more. The rate is small - .25 percent - but the payment of any interest on funds held at the Fed did not come about until 2006, although the Fed was founded almost 100 years earlier.

Oliver on LGBT

Hearing Colors

The Connecticut River

Today is a day of wonder

The Pinellas County School Board abandoned integration in 2007. Was that the cause of this absolutely devastating article in the Tampa Bay Times.  Here are some excerpts: First a look at the situation in general.

• At the five schools where the population is mainly African-American children have been shoved, slapped, punched or kicked more than 7,500 times since 2010 — the equivalent of eight times a day, every day, for five years straight.
• Last year, there were more violent incidents at the five elementary schools than in all of the county’s 17 high schools combined. 
• Incidents at the schools have more than doubled since 2010, even as other schools in Pinellas saw a drop in violence.
• For years, district leaders gave the schools the same number of employees to handle eight times the amount of violence faced at other elementary schools. Teachers at the schools describe calling for help in their classrooms only to be ignored because no one was there to respond.
• Teachers are overwhelmed. Many said they had little training and no idea how to get students under control. More than half the teachers at the schools requested transfers in 2014. Several have been taken away in ambulances after suffering panic attacks or being injured by their students. 
• Until recently, district officials under-reported serious incidents to a state clearinghouse that tracks dangers in the classroom — an apparent violation of state law that made the schools seem safer than they really were.

And now for some individual examples:

• At Campbell Park, a second-grader threatened to kill and rape two girls while brandishing a kitchen knife he carried to school in his backpack. 
• At Fairmount Park, a 9-year-old hit a pair of kindergartners in the head with a souvenir baseball bat. 
• At Maximo, a group of kindergartners pinned a classmate down on the playground, pulled off her pants and fondled her.
• At Maximo in 2012, an 11-year-old repeatedly harassed a female classmate, telling her he wanted to have sex with her. Then he threatened to kill them both so they “could be married in hell,” according to a police report. 
• The next year, at the same school, a 10-year-old was slapped, punched, choked, body-slammed, stomped and kicked in the face in a cafeteria fight over a Lego action figure. 
• At Campbell Park in 2010, a second-grader took a 6-inch, serrated kitchen knife to school and told classmates he was going to stab a girl in the back because she liked another boy.

Do you believe it or not?

It being a study by Adam Lankford, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Alabama, which will be presented at 110th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association this week. Lankford concludes that although the U.S. only makes up 5 percent of the global population, the country has seen 31 percent of global public mass shootings between 1966 and 2012. He concluded this based on "data from the New York City Police Department's 2012 active shooter report, the FBI's 2014 active shooter report, and multiple international sources." The report does not include gang related crime, drive-by shootings, hostage situations and robberies.

Return to the ideals of Jefferson

William Astore is a retired military officer and also taught at the Air Force Academy. He has some profound things to say about our military and our attitude toward it. His article is based on two quotes from Jefferson that appear on the walls of West Point:

• "The power of making war often prevents it, and in our case would give efficacy to our desire of peace." 
• "I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us that the less we use our power, the greater it will be." 

Here are some of his concluding remarks:

Can we connect this behavior to the faults of the service academies? Careerism. Parochialism. Technocratic tendencies. Elitism. A focus on image rather than on substance. Lots of busywork and far too much praise for our ascetic warrior-heroes, results be damned. A tendency to close ranks rather than take responsibility. Buck-passing, not bucking the system. The urge to get those golden slots on graduation and the desire for golden parachutes into a lucrative world of corporate boards and consultancies after "retirement," not to speak of those glowing appearances as military experts on major TV and cable networks.
America's military academies are supposed to be educating and developing leaders of character. If they're not doing that, why have them? America's senior military leaders are supposed to be winning wars, not losing them. (Please feel free to name one recent victory by the U.S. military that hasn't been of the Pyrrhic variety.) So why do we idolize them? And why do we fail to hold them accountable?

These are more than rhetorical questions. They cut to the heart of an American culture that celebrates its military cadets as its finest young citizens, a culture that lauds its generals even as they fail to accept responsibility for wars that end not in victory but - well, come to think of it, they just never end.

The way forward: I don't have to point the way because Thomas Jefferson already did. Just read his quotations in the West Point library: we need to become a peace-loving nation again; we need to act as if war were our last resort, not our first impulse; we need to recognize that war is corrosive to democracy and that the more military power is exercised the weaker we grow as a democratic society.

Jefferson's wisdom, enshrined at West Point, shouldn't be entombed there. We need a new generation of cadets - and a few renegade generals of my generation as well - who want to serve us by not going to war, who know that a military is a burden to democracy even when victorious, and especially when it's not. Otherwise, we're in trouble in ways we haven't yet begun to imagine.

Stacking the deck

Academics are under a lot of pressure to publish. But, as we've seen, sometimes this pressure causes some to try to ensure that their article will be published in the right journal. The latest episode of this is the retraction of 64 articles by one of the world’s largest academic publishers, Springer, because the peer reviews related to these articles were linked to fake e-mail addresses. Fake peer reviews have generated the founding of a number of services selling names and contact information for made-up experts guaranteed to give an expedited, positive review.

There's something wrong in academia.

It's a dog's life

JFK Airport is building what it calls "the ARK". Perhaps the name was chosen with reference to Noah's Ark for it is a 178,000-square-foot terminal exclusively for animals; the initial estimate of cost is $48,000,000.

The most common customers are expected to be dogs. They will have a 20,000-square-foot luxury "resort" run by the company Paradise 4 Paws with flat-screen TVs, a bone-shaped swimming pool, massage therapy, and "pawdicures." 

Cats will get their own trees to climb; horses, cows, and other animals will have their own specially customized areas with private stalls and showers.  There will be a holding pen for goats, pigs, and sheep, as well as a space dedicated to giving penguins "mating privacy". There are even webcams in the suites where owners can maintain some contact with their pets.

More Red Cross questionable actions

The latest is an attempt to kill a GAO inquiry into Red Cross activity. Gail McGovern, the president of the Red Cross, wrote the following to the Congressman who had initiated the inquiry, “I would like to respectfully request that you consider us meeting face-to-face rather than requesting information via letter and end the GAO inquiry that is currently underway.” This despite an earlier statement from her lauding the organization's transparency, “we made a commitment that we want to lead the effort in transparency.” Plus, the fact that the GAO is explicitly empowered to investigate the group.

Will they ever smarten up?

Doing God's Work

Come visit West Texas

From our Pauling correspondent

Relax with John Pizzarelli

More waste

This time it's Afghanistan and an electrical plant we paid for. The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction says that the plant, Tarakhil, which cost $335,000,000, is at risk of ‘catastrophic failure’. It does not run very much, it's at less than 1% of its capacity. Because it does not run constantly, the plant “has resulted in more frequent starts and stops, which place greater wear and tear on the machinery.” Strangely, the plant can only run on diesel fuel, which is expensive and and dangerous to transport in Afghanistan.

Who said this?

“…our basic trouble was not an insufficiency of capital. It was an insufficient distribution of buying power coupled with an over-sufficient speculation in production. While wages rose in many of our industries, they did not as a whole rise proportionately to the reward to capital, and at the same time the purchasing power of other great groups of our population was permitted to shrink. We accumulated such a superabundance of capital that our great bankers were vying with each other, some of them employing questionable methods, in their efforts to lend this capital at home and abroad. I believe that we are at the threshold of a fundamental change in our popular economic thought, that in the future we are going to think less about the producer and more about the consumer. Do what we may have to do to inject life into our ailing economic order, we cannot make it endure for long unless we can bring about a wiser, more equitable distribution of the national income.”

The speaker was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the subject The Depression.

Are his words relevant today?

Poverty in the U.S.

The Century Fund has published a report, "Architecture and Segregation", that comes to several negative conclusions about America in the 21st century: 

• There was a dramatic increase in the number of high-poverty neighborhoods. The number of people living in high-poverty ghettos, barrios, and slums has nearly doubled since 2000, rising from 7.2 million to 13.8 million. 
• These increases were well under way before the Great Recession began. 
• Poverty became more concentrated—more than one in four of the black poor and nearly one in six of the Hispanic poor lives in a neighborhood of extreme poverty, compared to one in thirteen of the white poor. 
• To make matters worse, poor children are more likely to reside in high-poverty neighborhoods than poor adults. 
• The fastest growth in black concentration of poverty (12.6 percentage points) since 2000 was not in the largest cities, but in metropolitan areas with 500,000 to 1 million persons.

How much has changed in 50 years?

Who is considered unemployed?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics counts as employed someone who works for a family business or farm for at least 15 hours a week. Whether or not the person takes home any money is unimportant. Also the BLS considers employed anyone who works at least one hour pr week and makes at least $20. 

Let's look at the situation from a different point of view - the labor force participation rate, which  refers to the number of people who are either employed or are actively looking for work. The participation rate on Friday's report was at a 38-year low of 62.6 percent. The BLS states that 93,770,000 individuals not in the labor force. That compares with 90,451,000 not in the labor force in July 2014.

Comparing the Gulf War to the Iraq War

That's what former Ambassador Joseph Wilson does in today's Boston Globe. Wilson was our ambassador to Iraq during the 1990-1991 Gulf War. Unlike the Iraq War, the Gulf War was not fought mainly by us; 32 nations contributed troops; 90 percent of the costs of the war were borne by other nations; and 12 resolutions were passed by the UN Security Council. That's because the administration of George H. W. Bush was filled with realists and pragmatists. And the important result of "operating on the basis of international consensus, law, and convention led to our enhancing our national security, strategic position, and prestige."

Contrast that with "Fortunately, unlike today, in the aftermath of the Gulf War we never had to suffer the ignominy of preening political peacocks abusing their congressional power to seek partisan advantage."

Nagasaki

Here's what it looked like before and after "Fat Man" fell.

An excerpt from the official report of the incident by the Nagasaki Prefecture:

Within a radius of 1 kilometer from ground zero, men and animals died almost instantaneously from the tremendous blast pressure and heat; houses and other structures were smashed, crushed and scattered; and fires broke out. The strong complex steel members of the structures of the Mitsubishi Steel Works were bent and twisted like jelly and the roofs of the reinforced concrete National Schools were crumpled and collapsed, indicating a force beyond imagination. Trees of all sizes lost their branches or were uprooted or broken off at the trunk.

Testing Health Insurance Exchanges

The GAO recently did a small test of the exchanges and was not pleased with the results. The exchanges provided subsidized coverage for 11 of 12 fictitious GAO applicants for 2014. A majority of the applications dud not provide all the required information, yet were approved. For 7 of the 11 successful fictitious applicants, GAO intentionally did not submit all required verification documentation to the Marketplace. Also, the supposed in-person assistance provided by the exchanges was not as forthcoming as it should have been.

It sounds like the system needs to be strengthened in some basic ways.

A somewhat rare zinnia with 3 seed pods

Grown by a master gardener residing here at Duncaster

Seems appropriate

Good Bye

More on Homan Square

About six months ago I wrote about Homan Square, a warehouse used by the Chicago Police. The thrust of the article was that at that site the police are breaking the law and violating the Constitution.  My source, The Guardian, has continued to push - via Freedom of Information requests - the police to reveal just what is going on there.

Here are some more findings: 

• At least 3,500 Americans have been detained at Homan Square. 82% were black. Only three received documented visits from an attorney.
• The charges are mostly forms of drug possession but also for minor infractions such as traffic violations, public urination and driving without a seat belt. 
• Over two-thirds of the arrests at Homan Square thus far revealed occurred under the tenure of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the former top aide to Barack Obama who has said of Homan Square that the police working under him “follow all the rules”.

70 years later

“The crux of the matter is whether total war in its present form is justifiable, even when it serves a just purpose. Does it not have material and spiritual evil as its consequences which far exceed whatever good might result?” John Hersey

When will Citigroup clean up its act?

In May it pleaded guilty to a felony count of rigging foreign currency trading and was put on a three year probation. 

In July it reached a settlement with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) over charges of bilking its credit card customers. The bank was ordered to return $700 million to 8.8 million customers and pay a penalty of $35 million. It was learned that Citi is also under another criminal money laundering probe by the Justice Department for its Mexican-based Banamex unit.

In August it settled allegations of money laundering with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Commissioner of the California Department of Business Oversight involving its Banamex USA unit. The bank paid a penalty of $140 million and avoided an admission of guilt. CFPB was opening a new investigation into Citigroup’s abuse of student loans held by struggling college students.

What will September bring?

Police on the job in 2015

We need police. Over the past year or so a few policemen apparently feel they don't need us, as there have been many incidents of illegal and immoral police behavior. This video of the Santa Ana police department is especially revolting.

California has elected to allow pot to be sold legally. Some people are doing so without having the necessary permits. Santa Ana, California, police decided that it had too many pot dispensaries operating in the city without a permit. Rather than simply warn or arrest the violators who committed a misdemeanor, the police decided to raid a store. This video records the raid.



The police have filed a lawsuit to prevent Santa Ana Police Department internal-affairs investigators from using the video.

Now, it's pills

Every week it seems as though there is a new 3D printer application. Today, it's a drug developed by Aprecia Pharmaceuticals to control seizures brought on by epilepsy.  With the 3D printer, the drugs can be packaged more tightly in precise dosages, which means that the dose could be customized for individual patients with just a few lines of code.

What's next?

One tree - Forty Fruits

Headlines

From the Columbia Journalism Review

Derivatives are very much alive...

...and the Big 4, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup hold 91.3 percent of all derivatives on the books of all 6,419 insured banks. Put into dollars, these four banks hold $185 trillion in derivatives. Graphically, you could represent this as follows:

I know the above is hard to distinguish but it breaks down derivatives into four types. The last box is the total of all derivatives.

You think there is an element of risk here?

Name that church

Some people have given odd names to their churches. Here are a few:

• Intercourse United Methodist Church
• Flippin Church of God
• Little Hope Baptist Church
• Church of God-Zillah
• Boring United Methodist Church
• Martini Lutheran Church
• Hell for Certain Church
• Half Way Baptist Church
• Scum of the Earth Church
• Solomon's Porch
• Faith Free Lutheran Church
• Matthew's Party
• Salvage Yard Church
• Guts Church

Government by the people

What country is this?

Libations over time

The spinal cord and legs

Dr. V. Reggie Edgerton has spent his career studying how neural networks in the spinal cord can regain voluntary control of movement after paralysis. He's developed something called transcutaneous stimulation, which stimulates the spinal cord. Here's a video showing the results of using this technique on five men who have been paralyzed for years.

Is HAMP working?

HAMP is the Home Affordable Modification Program that was enacted in 2009 to enable borrowers to modify their mortgage and, thus, lower their costs. The special inspector general of the Troubled Asset Relief Program which recently issued a report on HAMP does not think so.

First of all, there are only 887,001 borrowers participating in the program. The banks participating in HAMP have rejected 72% of the four million requests for help. Since there are no standards for processing the requests, banks are calling the shots. A problem in this is that there have been a number of errors made by the banks, such as not realizing a borrower is married, or losing the application data, etc.

Of course, the banks dispute the findings of the report. Surprisingly, the Treasury also has problems with the report.

Who is right?