Even a 2-year-old can shoot a gun

A mother from Idaho had a concealed weapons permit. So, she was within the law carrying a gun in her purse. She was shopping at Walmart's with her children. Somehow, the 2-year-old was able to find and pick up the gun in her purse. And somehow he was able to press the trigger. The woman died immediately when the bullet entered her body.

Be cold! Lose weight!

That's the mantra of an increasing number of scientists these days. The basic idea is that because your body uses energy to maintain a normal body temperature, exposure to cold expends calories. Ergo, you'll lose weight if you spend some time each day being cold. There is even a product to provide that daily cold. The ice vest is loaded with ice packs. The inventor of the product, a UCAL professor, claims that wearing it for an hour burns up to 250 calories. Do it twice a day and you've lost 500 calories.

The leader in this movement is Ray Cronise, a former NASA scientist, whose job was to keep astronauts healthy in sub-zero temperatures of space. Cronise's first test of his theory was to take cold showers and shirtless walks in winter, and he lost 26.7 pounds in six weeks. He points out that other animals make changes depending on the season, we don't because we live mainly in a warm environment. Note that Cronise is not saying we should try to live in very cold temperatures, the 50s are low enough for losing weight.

Should we worry about the fall in oil prices?

Pam Martens thinks so. She points out that the fall is not only in oil prices, industrial commodities in general have fallen dramatically. Where the price of domestic crude oil is down by 47% since June, iron ore is down 49% this year, copper 15%. Natural gas has dropped 30% in the past month. And wages still remain low. 

She compares the current situation to that of December 2008 and finds a lot of similarities. But the NY Times reports that consumer confidence has moved to pre-Great Recession levels. Who will be proven right? My money is on Martens as I think the economy is still in slow recovery mode

It's an ad but a good one

From our Plymouth, Mass. correspondent

Be thankful you don't abut a pig factory farm

For more on the F-35, click here.

The World's Most Admired Man and Woman

Every year Gallup publishes the results of a survey of Americans to determine the most admired man and woman in the world. Here are the results for 2014:

It certainly seems a strange list to me, particularly the last man on the list.

Next up: Climate Change

Pope Francis has spoken out on a number of issues confronting us. Now, he's telling us what he intends to speak on in 2015 - climate change. He will issue an encyclical on the subject, attend the UN Assembly in September to lobby for new anti-poverty and environmental goals and also address the body, he will call a summit of the world’s main religions. And he will try to influence a UN climate meeting in Paris, when countries will try to conclude 20 years of fraught negotiations with a universal commitment to reduce emissions.

He certainly is a different pope.

The Atlantic and The Military

The January/February issue of The Atlantic has a lot to say about the inadequacies of our military. James Fallows talks about the dangers inherent in the separation of the military and the people. Robert Scales criticizes our failures to provide adequate guns to infantrymen. And Joseph Epstein tells us how important being drafted was to him and can be to our country.

Fallows has a fairly long article, but definitely worth reading in its entirety. His basic point is that we are so separated from our soldiers that we no longer evaluate their successes and failures as we did for just about every 20th century war. Fallows places great emphasis on the word "chickenhawk", which describes a person who strongly supports war or other military action (i.e., a war hawk), yet who actively avoids or avoided military service when of age.

To quote Fallows: "Ours is the best-equipped fighting force in history, and it is incomparably the most expensive. By all measures, today’s professionalized military is also better trained, motivated, and disciplined than during the draft-army years. No decent person who is exposed to today’s troops can be anything but respectful of them and grateful for what they do. Yet repeatedly this force has been defeated by less modern, worse-equipped, barely funded foes. Or it has won skirmishes and battles only to lose or get bogged down in a larger war."

Leaving the question of the draft alone for now, one of the primary problems we have is that our politicians use the Pentagon budget to bring federal contracts and money to their districts. There is no attempt at analyzing the use of the money or whether the district and the nation might be better off without spending money this way. For example, much of the budget is spent on high tech weapons which may or may not work some day (vide the F-35) and we ignore such basics as providing proper guns to infantrymen.

Fallows thinks a start on rectifying the problem is to adopt three of the recommendations of a group chaired by Gary Hart which was appointed by Obama in 2011:

Appoint a commission to assess the long wars. This commission should undertake a dispassionate effort to learn lessons from Afghanistan and Iraq concerning the nature of irregular, unconventional conflict, command structures, intelligence effectiveness, indigenous cultural factors, training of local forces, and effective combat unit performance. Such a commission will greatly enhance our ability to know when, where, how, and whether to launch future interventions. Clarify the decision-making process for use of force. Such critical decisions, currently ad hoc, should instead be made in a systematic way by the appropriate authority or authorities based on the most dependable and persuasive information available and an understanding of our national interests based on 21st-century realities. Restore the civil-military relationship. The President, in his capacity as commander-in-chief, must explain the role of the soldier to the citizen and the citizen to the soldier. The traditional civil-military relationship is frayed and ill-defined. Our military and defense structures are increasingly remote from the society they protect, and each must be brought back into harmony with the other.

Scales, a retired major general, speaks of the vast superiority of the AK-47 to the M-14 used by our troops. Epstein gives his personal experience as a draftee to describe the personal beenfits that the draft provided him.

The largest law enforcement agency in the U.S. and maybe the world

That would be Customs and Border Protection, or, as it is more commonly known, the Border Patrol. There are 46,000 gun-carrying Customs officers and Border Patrol agents, plus another 14,000 or so ancillary employees. Its budget of $12.4 billion annual budget is more than the combined budgets of the FBI, ATF, DEA, Secret Service and U.S. Marshals—plus the entire NYPD annual budget. To protect our borders the agency uses cars, trucks, boats, helicopters, planes, drones, and a blimp. Since 9/11, we have spent more than $100 billion in border and immigration control.

What is wrong with us?

Another job automated

What's with airplanes in Indonesia?

In March a Malaysia Airlines plane was lost and has yet to be found. Yesterday, an Air Asia plane traveling from Indonesia to Singapore with 162 on board was lost forty minutes after take-off. Apparently most carriers from Indonesia have been barred from Europe by the European Union.

A brief look at the Gardner Gardens

The Judge Rotenberg Center is still active

I wrote fairly often about the center from 2007 to 2011. In 2011 the founder of the center retired when he was facing criminal charges stemming from the center's champining of “aversive” therapy, using pain or other negative stimuli to change behavior. Its signature approach is to apply a two-second electric shock to students’ skin. The center has received a number of negative reports from federal and state authorities as well as the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on torture.

Although the center is located in Massachusetts, its primary market is New York City; 90% of the center's students are from the city. including 29 who enrolled this year. It costs the city's taxpayers $30 million a year. The city and the state have tried various means to prevent its students from going to the center, but they have been unsuccessful. 

Hawk vs. Drone

Get a job

The street is filled with money in Hong Kong

A Russian 3-year Old Plays

From our Plymouth, Ma. correspondent

Another bubble?

Car Title loans have become big business. The car's title is the collateral. The loans can be made for a month up to 2 years. Not only are the loans short-term, the interest rate is astronomical, ranging from 80 percent to more than 500 percent. Many borrowers have to renew the loan; one company is able to renew many loans eight times. The amount of the loan is a function of the car's resale value. Yet, more than 1.1 million households used auto title loans in 2013. About one in every six borrowers who take out title loans have their cars repossessed.

Try something different

With regard to the opening to Cuba, Mr. Obama has been quoted as saying "if you've done the same thing for 50 years and nothing has changed, you should try something different," It may seem strange but maybe he could also try something different with North Korea, as I recently suggested. Back in 1953 we, as representatives of the UN, signed a temporary cease-fire agreement with a promise to sign a peace treaty. Well, 61 years later the treaty has not been signed or even broached. Some have suggested that that is the main reason North Korea has invested so much of its meager capital in militarization.