A Costly Mistake

With all the problems JPMorgan has, it now has to eat $1.5 billion. Because of a failure to catch an error by GM's lawyers, JP's loan to GM was transferred from secured to unsecured. This happened just before GM declared bankruptcy in which unsecured loans were terminated.

The 2005 Congress Acts

A different world

The annual salary of Xi Jinping, the president of China, about 5% of Obama's salary, $22,000 vs. $400,000. Note that this is below our median wage of $28,031. It is also less than that needed to rent an apartment in Beijing. While Obama gets housing, entertainment, travel, use of a vacation home as part of his compensation, Mr. Xi has to be satisfied living at a leadership compound in central Beijing, or he can spend the night at the Xi family home, a grand traditional walled compound in the fashionable Nanlouguxiang neighborhood. And he might find a better deal at the tasteful and leafy Guanyuan complex, considering his older sister and brother-in-law were the property owners.

The TPP and the Internet

A different way to learn?

Practicing for an operation

And it's a serious operation - on a young girl's brain. That's what the doctors at Children's Hospital do - practice for an operation. What do they practice on? an organ, such as a brain, printed with a 3-D printer. 

They have built over 170 models over the past 18 months; in addition to brains they have built skulls, spines, rib cages, and blood vessels. The hospital is using the printers to avoid surgical complications, reduce the length of operations, and ultimately cut costs.

Here's a model of a brain:

Is Line 61 worse than Keystone?

The Keystone pipeline has certainly been in the news for quite a while. Well, it turns out that there is a pipeline running the length of Wisconsin carrying tar sands crude; its name is Line 61. The company owning Line 61, Enbridge, a $40 billion Canadian company, does not have a very good record vis-a-vis spills. They've had several hundred spills in the past decade, including the largest and most expensive inland oil spill in American history.

Now, they want to increase Line 61’s capacity threefold, making it a third larger than the projected Keystone. Furthermore, a spill from tar sands crude, which Line 61 carries, can be much more destructive than that coming through Keystone.

Bad parents

Holder makes a wise decision

Think calmly. Think rationally

That's Steven Walt's advice relative to the Hebdo and similar incidents. His theory is that the perpetrators of these incidents want us to get all het up about it and start doing things we shouldn't do, like going to war with the Islamist world instead of focusing on the bad actors. Such an act would make them heroes and aid in recruiting. The perpetrators do not now have the weapons or the backing to seriously harm us. 

Martin Wolf recommends six things we should and can do:

First, accept that we are playing the long game of containment.

Second, recognise that the heart of the struggle is elsewhere. The west can help. But it cannot win those wars.

Third, offer the lived idea of equality as citizens as an alternative to violent jihad.

Fourth, appreciate and respond to the frustrations many now feel.

Fifth, accept the need for measures to provide security. But remember that absolute safety is never achievable.

Finally, remain true to our beliefs, since without them we have nothing to offer in this struggle. We must not abandon either the rule of law or the ban on torture. Once we do, we have already lost this war of ideals and ideas.

$456,669 down the drain

The Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR) published another dispiriting report.  In 2012 we signed a fixed price contract with Qesmatullah Nasrat Construction Company (QNCC) to build a dry fire range (DFR) at the Afghan Special Police Training Center. The DFR replicates a typical Afghan village and is used to conduct simulated police search and clearance exercises. Four months after the project was completed, the DFR’s buildings began to disintegrate. Why? Because the contractor did not comply with contractual requirements and used substandard bricks and other building materials. Plus, in the words of SIGAR "this problem was compounded by poor oversight on the part of the responsible U.S. government officials." 

This is not the only botched contract in this botched war.

Why not get your eyes tattooed?

This guy obviously loves tattoos. He has even had his right eye tattooed so that it is all black. I knew tattoos were quite common among the younger crowd, but I never dreamed someone would allow a needle to be placed in his eye simply to "beautify' themself. And it takes more than one needle - in fact, several - to do the job fully. Apparently this trend started with the movie "Dune" where some characters had eyes that were fully colored.

Death comes to us all

Comments of Inspector General re supervising JPMorgan

The Inspector General of the Fed has published a report of FRB New York's supervision of JPM. Its basic conclusion: "The Board Should Enhance Its Supervisory Processes as a Result of Lessons Learned From the Federal Reserve’s Supervision of JPMorgan Chase Company’s Chief Investment Office."

The bases for this conclusion are:

there was a missed opportunity for the consolidated supervisor and the primary supervisor to discuss risks related to the CIO and to consider how to deploy the agencies’ collective resources most effectively.
Second, we found that Federal Reserve and OCC staff lacked a common understanding of the Federal Reserve’s approach for examining Edge Act corporations. In our opinion, this disconnect could result in gaps in supervisory coverage or duplication of efforts.
Third, we found that FRB New York staff were not clear about the expected deliverables resulting from continuous monitoring activities. Enhanced clarity concerning the expected deliverables could improve the effectiveness of this supervisory activity.
Finally, we found that FRB New York’s JPMC supervisory teams appeared to exhibit key-person dependencies. In our opinion, these dependencies heightened FRB New York’s vulnerability to the loss of institutional knowledge.

An inch here, an inch there...

...and pretty soon you might have two quadrillion gallons of sea water, or enough to fill three billion Olympic-size swimming pools. The inch being measured is the rise of seas. A new study claims that the seas actually rose five - not six - inches in the 20th century. 

The study resolves concerns as to previous measurements where the measure of the rise from a tidal perspective disagreed from that calculated by scientists. The new method results in the same answer. However, the researchers say, “One of the main takeaway messages is that sea level is really complicated. We don’t have a complete understanding of what’s been happening.” Yet, this finding does not negate the view that oceans are rising and we will be in serious trouble in this century unless we smarten up.

Nature at work

Governed by the rich

At least as measured by net worth. The Center for Responsive Politics has published its latest survey of the net worth of our Congressmen and Senators.

The survey for 2013 shows that the median net worth of a member of Congress was $1,029,505 — a 2.5 percent increase from 2012 — compared with an average American household’s median net worth of $56,355.  That is it would take 18 average American households to equal the wealth of 1 Congressional household. Fifty percent of our Congressmen are millionaires; that's obviously not the case with we average Joes.

As is pretty obvious things are not getting better for us. The median net worth of an American family has declined by nearly one-third between 2007 and 2013. Guess what? The change for our leaders was positive, not negative. The Senate’s median net worth went from $2.3 million to $2.8 million over that period, while for members of the House the numbers went from $708,500 to $843,507.

A Counter-Recruiter

That's what Rory Fanning calls himself. Although he was deployed twice to Afghanistan, he wants to dissuade people from being recruited into the military service. He has written his pitch in "An Open Letter to a Young Army Ranger, From an Old One: Why the War On Terror Isn’t Your Battle."

Two key excerpts:

If you are shipped off to Iraq for our latest war there, remember that the Sunni population you will be targeting is reacting to a U.S.-backed Shia regime in Baghdad that’s done them dirty for years. ISIS exists to a significant degree because the largely secular members of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath party were labeled the enemy as they tried to surrender after the U.S. invasion of 2003. Many of them had the urge to be reincorporated into a functioning society, but no such luck; and then, of course, the key official the Bush administration sent to Baghdad simply disbanded Saddam Hussein’s army and tossed its 400,000 troops out onto the streets at a time of mass unemployment.

Here’s an interesting fact that you might consider, if spreading freedom and democracy around the world was on your mind. Though records are incomplete on the subject, the police have killed something like 5,000 people in this country since 9/11—more, in other words, than the number of American soldiers killed by “insurgents” in the same period. In those same years, outfits like the Rangers and the rest of the U.S. military have killed countless numbers of people worldwide, targeting the poorest people on the planet. And are there fewer terrorists around? Does all this really make a lot of sense to you?

Thoughts on Keystone

Have you had the conversation?