Amakudari

In economic theory, a moral hazard is a situation where a party will have a tendency to take risks because the costs that could incur will not be felt by the party taking the risk.  For example, persons with insurance against automobile theft may be less cautious about locking their cars because the negative consequences of vehicle theft are now (at least partially) the responsibility of the insurance company.  Once upon a time, in a quiet corner of the Middle East, there lived a shepherd named Gyges.  Despite hardships in his life, Gyges was relatively satisfied with his meager existence.  But one day he found a ring buried in a nearby cave — no ordinary ring, it rendered its wearer invisible.  [Where have I heard THAT plot line before?]  With this new power, Gyges became increasingly dissatisfied with his simple life.  Before long, he seduced the queen of the land and plotted her husband’s overthrow.  Finally, he placed the ring on his finger, sneaked into the royal palace, murdered the king, and married the queen.  This story replaces moral justification with practical efficiency: That Gyges was able to commit murder without getting caught, without real difficulty, doesn’t mean he was justified in doing so.  Comparison can be made between this myth and the moral dangers of employing precision guided munitions and drone technologies to target suspected terrorists.  What is distinctive about the tale of Gyges is the ease with which he can commit murder and get away scot-free.  The technological advantage provided by his ring to him serve as justification for its use.  Likewise, what is wrong with the use of unmanned aerial vehicles?  After all, they limit the cost of war, in terms of both blood and treasure.  What’s unsettling is that these facts can be confused for moral justification.  To say that we can target individuals without incurring troop casualties does not imply that we ought to.  Greater risks are now taken by individuals able to avoid shouldering the cost associated with those risks.  Precision-guided munitions and drones allow a society to fight perpetual asymmetric wars.  But using impressive technology doesn’t grant impressive moral insight.  The relatively low number of troop casualties for a military depending on drones means there’s relatively little domestic blowback against these little wars.  (Almost 3,000 civilians have been drone casualties in Pakistan alone.)  But the international media can overlook pesky little facts — like this slow accretion of foreign casualties.  This doesn’t seem like a good thing.

Jimmy Carter, 39th US president and recipient of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize says: “While the country has made mistakes in the past, the widespread abuse of human rights over the last decade has been a dramatic change from the past.  With leadership from the US, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in 1948 as 'the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world’, a bold and clear commitment that power would no longer serve as a cover to oppress or injure people; it established equal rights of all people to life, liberty, security of person, equal protection of law, and freedom from torture, arbitrary detention, or forced exile.  It is disturbing that, instead of strengthening these principles, our government’s counterterrorism policies are now clearly violating at least 10 of the declaration’s 30 articles, including the prohibition against “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”  In addition to American citizens’ being targeted for assassination or indefinite detention, recent laws have cancelled the restraints in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 to allow unprecedented violations of our rights to privacy through warrantless wiretapping and government mining of our electronic communications.  Popular state laws permit detaining individuals because of their appearance, where they worship or with whom they associate.  Despite an arbitrary rule that any man killed by drones is declared an enemy terrorist, the death of nearby innocent women and children is accepted as inevitable.  After more than 30 airstrikes on civilian homes this year in Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai has demanded that such attacks end, but the practice continues in areas of Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen that are not in any war zone.  We don’t know how many hundreds of innocent civilians have been killed in these attacks, each one approved by the highest authorities in Washington.  Meanwhile, the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, now houses 169 prisoners.  About half have been cleared for release, yet have little prospect of ever obtaining their freedom.  American authorities have revealed that, in order to obtain confessions, some of the few being tried (only in military courts) have been tortured by waterboarding more than 100 times or intimidated with semiautomatic weapons, power drills or threats to sexually assault their mothers.  Astoundingly, these facts cannot be used as a defense by the accused, because the government claims they occurred under the cover of national security.  Most of the other prisoners have no prospect of ever being charged or tried either.”

Five Myths about Water:

• We’re running out of water — actually, no.  Every day, the sun, the sea and evaporation combine to make 45,000 gallons of rainwater for each man, woman and child on Earth.  The problem is that we’ve built our communities, farms, and reservoirs in places we expect water to be.  Scarcity is a result (in part) of a shifting climate — it’s still raining, but it may not be raining in the watersheds of our reservoirs.  Water scarcity is also due to population growth; more people need more water.  And, as people get wealthier, they use more.
• Bottled water is better than tap water — tap water is much more closely monitored than bottled water.  Cities must test their water every few hours and report any safety issue within 48 hours.  Bottled-water companies are required to test their water only once a week, and aren’t required to report problems.  [Presumably this is true in the US — other places aren’t mentioned.]  Use a faucet filter if you’re worried.
• This is going to be a century of water wars — water is simply too cheap to fight over, and too hard to move around the world on demand.  [I’m not sure I completely agree with this argument — if any group of people are slowly dying of thirst or have no access to uncontaminated water, things may begin to look very different.  I think fighting in some places may be possible just because water can be very costly to move around from place to place in the short-term.]
• With more people and a growing economy, America is using more water all the time — since 1980, the United States has doubled the size of its economy and added 70 million people, yet uses 10% less water than 30 years ago.  [Possibly due to offshoring manufacturing?  Importing food?]  Even as total water use has fallen, water use at home has risen in the past 30 years.  Dom’t flush the toilet if you don’t need to [most US toilets don’t, for some reason, have half flushes], don’t try to grow a lush lawn in Phoenix.  [Oops, too late for many, although those with dead grass can opt to have their lawns painted green with non-toxic paint that can fool neighbours.]
• You need to drink 8 glasses a day — a body’s sense of thirst is incredibly alert, triggered if internal water balance gets just 1% out of kilter — unless you’re old — then, just hydrate on a regular basis.

Patients unable to breathe due to acute lung failure or obstructed airway need another way to get oxygen into their blood — and fast — to avoid cardiac arrest and brain injury.  Soon, tiny, gas-filled microparticles can be injected directly into the bloodstream to quickly oxygenate the blood.  The microparticles, helpful in situations in which the lungs are completely incapacitated, consist of a single layer of lipids (fatty molecules) that surround a tiny pocket of oxygen.  When the trachea was completely blocked — a dangerous “real world” scenario — the infusion kept the animals alive for 15 minutes without a single breath, and reduced the incidence of cardiac arrest and organ injury.  The microparticle solutions are portable and thus could stabilise patients in emergency situations, buying time for paramedics, emergency clinicians or intensive care clinicians to more safely place a breathing tube or perform other life-saving therapies.  The microparticles would likely only be administered for a short time — 15-30 minutes — because they’re carried in fluid that would overload the blood if used longer.  A device called a sonicator uses high-intensity sound waves to mix the oxygen and lipids together.  The process traps oxygen inside particles averaging 2-4 micrometres in size.  The resulting solution, with oxygen making up 70% of the volume, mixes efficiently with human blood.

Astronauts have consistently reported a strange odour after lengthy space walks, bringing it back in on their suits, helmets, gloves and tools.  It’s a bitter, smoky, metallic smell — like seared steak, hot metal and arc welding smoke all rolled into one.  NASA asked a chemist to reproduce the smell to use during acclimatisation training, mapping out the likely chemistry using natural materials to mimic the odour for accuracy.  It’s believed the smell is due to high-energy vibrations in particles mixing with indoor air when brought back inside.  In the future, perhaps it will be possible to recreate the smells of the moon, Mars, Mercury, or other places in the universe, given proper chemical information.  In fact, that could include the smell of the heart of the galaxy — astronomers searching for animo acids in Sagittarius B2, a vast dust cloud in the middle of the Milky Way, reported that, due to a substance called ethyl formate, it will smell, and taste, like raspberries and rum — much more pleasant than seared steak and metal.

The only extraterrestrial life detection experiments ever conducted were the 3 which were components of the 1976 Viking mission to Mars.  Of these, only the Labeled Release experiment obtained a clearly positive response.  In this experiment, nutrient was added to the Mars soil samples.  Active soils exhibited rapid, substantial gas release.  The gas was probably CO ².  Complexity analysis has now been applied to the Viking data.  (Measures of mathematical complexity permit deep analysis of data structure including signal to noise, entropy to negentropy, periodicity to aperiodicity, and order to disorder.)  Employing 7 complexity variables, it appears that the Viking active responses can be distinguished from controls via multiple techniques.  Furthermore, Martian active responses cluster with known biological responses while the control data cluster with other purely physical measures.  Scientists now conclude that the complexity pattern seen in the Mars data strongly suggests a robust biological response.  These analyses support the interpretation that Viking did detect microbial life on Mars.

The Law of the Sea Treaty, which entered into force in 1994 and has been signed and ratified by 162 countries, establishes international laws governing the maritime rights of countries.  The treaty has been signed but not ratified by the US, which requires at least 67% approval by the Senate.  Critics of the treaty argue that it would subject US sovereignty to an international body, require American businesses to pay royalties for resource exploitation, and subject the US to unwieldy environmental regulations.  Proponents argue that by ratifying the treaty, the US would protect its claims and rights to mine America’s continental sea shelves and offshore waters for natural resources without interference.  The US Chamber of Commerce supports the treaty, saying it would provide domestic companies “the legal certainty and stability they need to hire and invest.”  Hundreds of US-flagged ships and ships owned by US companies rely on freedom of navigation rights codified in the treaty while crossing the world’s oceans.  Joining with the international community would establish and protect their lawful passage on the high seas.  However, according to Donald Rumsfeld, the Law of the Sea Treaty is a new concept that says the riches of the oceans beyond national boundaries are the “common heritage of mankind” and thus are owned in common by all people.  This novel idea of “ownership” requires anyone who finds a way to make use of such riches to pay royalties of unknown amounts – potentially tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars — for redistribution to less-developed nations.  He says the newly created International Seabed Authority, effectively a United Nations agency, would be empowered to regulate all mining, and oil and gas activity on the high seas.  This could seriously hamper development.  The treaty supporters making the argument for world ownership of the deep seabed could make similar arguments for outer space in the future, slowing the pace of space exploration and development.  As always, the question is — which weighs more [and by what standards], cost or benefit?

To maintain living standards into old age one needs roughly 20 times annual income in financial wealth.  If you earn $100,000 at retirement, you need about $2 million beyond what you will receive from your superannuation.  If you have an income-producing partner and a paid-off house, you need less.  But the stone-cold fact is that most people aged 50-64 have nothing or next to nothing in retirement accounts and thus will rely solely on superannuation.  Some have a fantasy — that of working longer.  After all, people hear that 70 is the new 50 — and if people work until age 70, they’ll most likely have enough to retire on.  Unfortunately, this ignores the fact that unemployment rates for those over 50 are increasing faster than for any other group and that displaced older workers face a higher risk of long-term unemployment than their younger counterparts.  If those workers ever do get rehired, it’s not without taking at least a 25% wage cut.  But the idea is tempting; people say they don’t want to retire and feel useless.  Professionals say they can keep going, “maybe do some consulting” or find some other way to generate income well into their late 60s.  They rarely admit that many people retire earlier than they want because they’re laid off or their spouse becomes sick.  The chance to work into one’s 70s primarily belongs to the most well off.  Medical technology has helped extend life by helping older people survive longer with illnesses and by helping others stay active.  Gains in longevity in the last two decades almost all went to people earning more than average.  It makes perfect sense for human beings to think each of us is special and can work forever.  To admit you can’t, or might not be able to, is hard, and denial and magical thinking are underrated human coping devices in response to helplessness and fear.

I suppose the above means these timepieces are timeless…  I only marginally like steampunk, but I found the watch on the left to be artistically graceful.  (I suppose it actually works.)  The watch on the right is acceptable as well.

No two subway systems have the same design.  New York City’s haphazard rail system differs markedly from the highly organised Moscow Metro (left), or the tangled spaghetti of Tokyo’s network.  Each system’s design is the result of many factors: local geography, city layout, traffic distribution, politics, culture and degree of urban planning.  But subway networks may be an emergent phenomenon of large cities; each network is the product of hundreds of rational but uncoordinated decisions that take place over many years.  Whereas small cities rarely have subway networks, 25% of medium-sized cities (with populations of 1-2 million) do.  Most of the world’s megacities — those with populations of 10 million or more — have them.  If subways are emergent properties of cities, “you can forget about details” — differences in politics, population density, or planning are already encoded within the structures.  Indeed, analysis reveals that “as systems get larger and more mature, they converge on a similar topology”:

• The “core” typically sits beneath the city’s centre and stations usually form a ring shape; the branches are more linear, extending outward from the core in many directions.
• Branches tend to be about twice as long as the width of the core.  The number of branches corresponds roughly with the square root of the number of stations.
• An average of 20% of the stations in the core link two or more subway lines, allowing people to make transfers.

The Moscow Metro is also something of an outlier, in that its branches are 3 times longer than the core, and 50% of its core stations connect multiple trains.  Levinson chalks up these differences to strong Soviet-era central planning; in contrast, many of the other cities’ networks were built by private companies in piecemeal fashion.

Already, NASA has lost data from some of its earliest missions to the moon because the machines used to read the tapes were scrapped and cannot be rebuilt.  A wise librarian will wish to keep in working order a few antique computers that can read such ancient technologies as CDs and USB thumb-drives.  But even that may not be enough.  Computer files are not worth anything without software to open them.  One way around that is to print everything out.  If you use durable acid-free paper, this will reach at least the level of accessibility of medieval manuscripts, handwritten on vellum.  But printouts of digital material are a second-best solution.  They risk losing the metadata that make documents interesting — and only in digitised form can data be sifted and crunched.  National libraries have the right to demand a copy of every printed book published on their territory.  In Britain the government wants to make it compulsory for publishers, including software-makers, to provide the British Library with a copy of the finished version of everything they produce within a month of publication.  The proposed law will allow the library to harvest web pages and material hidden behind paywalls or login requirements.  The sole exceptions are social networks and sites comprising only video or music.  The stakes are high.  Without a wider mandate for libraries, giving them the right to store both digital materials and the tools to open it, historians of the future will be unable to reconstruct our times.  They may not even know what they’ve lost.

You know those little stickers on fruits and veggies?  They’re called price look-up (PLU) codes and they contain numbers that cashiers use to ring you up.  But you can also use them to make sure you’re getting what you paid for.  Here’s what to look for:

• A 5-digit number that starts with a 9 means the item is organic.
• A 4-digit code beginning with a 3 or a 4 means the produce is probably conventionally grown.  For example, regular small lemons sold in the US are labeled 4033, large are 4053; small organic lemons are coded 94033, large are 94053.
• A 5-digit code that starts with an 8 means the item is genetically modified (it has genes from other organisms).  You won’t see many of those because only genetically modified versions of corn, soybeans, canola, cotton, papaya, and squash are now widely sold.  And because PLU codes aren’t mandatory, companies can (and do) label those items as conventional.

At 5 weeks, the embryo is approximately 9 millimetres long.  A face develops, with openings for the mouth, the nostrils and eyes.  (In only 3 more weeks, the face will be quite recognisable as such.)  When pictures of developing embryos were published in Life magazine in 1965, they caused a sensation.  Within days, the entire print run of 8,000,000 had sold out.  More than 40 years later, the photographs have lost none of their power.  A time-lapse animation has now been made of the face forming, based on human embryo scans captured between 1 and 3 months after conception.

Do you ever feel like you’re addicted to email or twitter or texting?  Do you find it impossible to ignore your email if you see that there are messages in your inbox?  Have you ever gone to Google to look up some information and 30 minutes later you realise that you’ve been reading and linking, and searching around for a long time, and you are now searching for something totally different than before?  [This happens to me multiple times a day.]  These are all examples of your dopamine system at work.  The latest research shows that dopamine causes seeking behaviour.  Dopamine causes us to want, desire, seek out, and search.  It increases our general level of arousal and our goal-directed behaviour.  (From an evolutionary stand-point this is critical.  The dopamine seeking system keeps us motivated to move through our world, learn, and survive.)  It’s not just about physical needs such as food, or sex, but also about abstract concepts.  Dopamine makes us curious about ideas and fuels our search for information.  The latest research shows that it is the opioid system (separate from dopamine) that makes us feel pleasure.  These two systems, the “wanting” (dopamine) and the “liking” (opioid) are complementary.  The wanting system propels us to action and the liking system makes us feel satisfied and therefore pause our seeking.  If our seeking isn’t turned off at least for a little while, then we start to run in an endless loop.  The latest research shows that the dopamine system is stronger than the opioid system.  We seek more than we are satisfied.

Everyone probably expects this anyway, but…  Anti-gay bias is linked to a combination of lack of awareness of one’s sexual orientation and also authoritarian parenting, a series of psychology studies demonstrates.  Homophobia is more pronounced in individuals with an unacknowledged attraction to the same sex and who grew up with authoritarian parents who forbade such desires.  The study is the first to document the role that both parenting and sexual orientation play in the formation of intense and visceral fear of homosexuals, including self-reported homophobic attitudes, discriminatory bias, implicit hostility towards gays, and endorsement of anti-gay policies.  In many cases these are people who are at war with themselves and they are turning this internal conflict outward.  Controlling parenting leads to poorer self-acceptance and difficulty valuing oneself unconditionally.  The findings may help to explain the personal dynamics behind some bullying and hate crimes directed at gays and lesbians.  Media coverage of gay-related hate crimes suggests that attackers often perceive some level of threat from homosexuals.  People in denial about their sexual orientation may lash out because gay targets threaten and bring this internal conflict to the forefront.  We laugh at or make fun of such blatant hypocrisy, but in a real way, these people may often themselves be victims of repression and experience exaggerated feelings of threat.  Homophobia is not a laughing matter.  It can sometimes have tragic consequences.  Across all the studies, participants with supportive and accepting parents were more in touch with their implicit sexual orientation, while participants from authoritarian homes revealed the most discrepancy between explicit and implicit attraction.  Older adults who have had more time to establish lives independent of their parents may have attitudes that have changed over time.

New Zealand’s favourite poo-like sandwich spread is called Marmite.  Australians don’t like it, preferring Vegemite.  Made from brewer’s yeast, it’s like spreading a bouillon cube on a piece of bread — way too salty and just off-putting in general.  Everyone in NZ is distressed right now over Marmageddon — the Marmite supplier has temporarily run out of stock — the manufacturer, Sanitarium, shut down its only production line in Christchurch after the factory’s chimneys cracked in one of the many earthquakes.  Its own stocks have run out and the production line hasn’t run since (though it’s expected to resume any day now).  Some supermarkets reported at the time that they were already out of stock, leading to the dubbing of Marmite as “black gold”.  The distinctive product is British, but a version with a different flavour (with sugar, caramel, and more potassium added) has been made in NZ since 1919; this is the dominant version throughout the southern Pacific.  “Marmite” is French for a large covered cooking pot.  Initially, it (in all its versions) was popular with vegetarians as a meat-free alternative to beef extract (indeed, the NZ version is made by Seventh-Day Adventists, who don’t eat meat).  In August 2006, as part of the launch of squeezy Marmite (the British version), celebrity chef Gary Rhodes created a dessert consisting of coffee ice cream topped with chocolate sauce with a dash of Marmite.  It was served for one week only in his London restaurant.  (I wouldn’t eat it if you paid me.)

• The e-book is usually said to have been invented in 1971, when an undergrad at the University of Illinois, Michael S Hart, decided to upload The Declaration of Independence onto an ARPAnet server.  Few saw the revolutionary implications of his actions until years later, when his Project Gutenberg — which by then had uploaded thousands of books — began to attract copyright lawsuits and became a figurehead for the fledgling hacktivist and open source movements.  For Hart, who died last fall, books were not sacred.  They were simply easily digitizable objects.  Inspired by the “replicator” devices he saw on Star Trek, Hart wanted to make all of the world’s design objects — anything that could be scanned and reproduced — available for free on the internet, where they could then be downloaded and reconstituted using 3D printers.  He called this shift the “Neo-Industrial Revolution,” and predicted it would occur by the year 2040.  And today?
• Our Choice, a multimedia book app from PushPop Press, opens with a video of Al Gore.  When Gore says it’s “interactive,” he isn’t exaggerating.  Inset into the text of each page are photos, which can be unfolded and enlarged by unpinching your fingertips.  Occasionally, these images lurch to life as BBC News-style videos, audio slideshows, or brilliantly conceived infographics.  Other times, they open into pixelated computer animations that look like they were ported in from The Sims.  In a particularly clever infographic about wind energy, the reader can blow on the iPad’s screen and prompt a windmill to spin.
• The problem with Our Choice is that among the hi-def images and infographics, the text gets buried.  Reading it feels like flipping through a coffee table book: grazing the lush images, you avoid eye contact with the daunting gray bricks of text.  If this is the future of the book, then the book is indeed doomed.  Writing is a miraculous technology all its own — a code that, when input through the optic nerve, induces structured, coherent hallucinations.  An equivalent experience does not exist.  Words have shape and musicality.  They almost have a flavour.  But they’re too easily drowned out by stronger stimuli.  The danger of Our Choice is not that it’s bad, but that it does a bad thing so well.  The more innovative the e-book, it seems, the more it falls apart.

Hey, who’s that over there? Researchers in Italy instructed dozens of participants to look out for a small target to appear onscreen each trial, either on the left side or the right.  When it appeared, participants were to press the space bar as quickly as possible.  To make it easier, the word,“left” or “right” appeared first, giving participants accurate advance warning as to the side on which the target would show.  In another run of trials, there was no need for a warning because the target always appeared on the same side.  The only complicating factor — a crucial one — is that after the direction word had disappeared (on trials where there was one) and before the target appeared, a cartoon face popped up looking either in the correct direction or the opposite direction.  In other versions, rather than a face, an arrow appeared, pointing either towards the correct side or away.  Participants were told explicitly to ignore the faces and arrows.  But they couldn’t.  When the cartoon face looked in the opposite direction to the side the target was to appear on, participants were significantly slower to spot the target and press the space bar.  It was the same with arrows pointing in the wrong direction — as if faces and arrows irresistibly grab attention, even if it sent their gaze momentarily in the wrong direction.  Processes underlying the pulling power of gaze and arrows are not the same — the pull of another’s gaze is apparent in the looking behaviour of new-born babies aged just 2 days, suggestive of an innate mechanism.  The power of arrows, by contrast, is based on learned symbolism.  And oddly, the social identity of a gazer influences the attention-grabbing power of one’s gaze.  A study published last year found that right-wing participants were more affected by the gaze direction of Silvio Berlusconi than were left-wing participants.

A man steering his conked-out car while his mates pushed it toward a petrol station has been convicted of drink-driving.  Russell Hakiwai, 52, was found by police beside his Isuzu 4WD.  He claimed to have been a passenger in the car when it ran out of petrol.  He said he and a group of friends decided to push the car several kilometres backwards to a service station.  Hakiwai was half in the car and steering while looking out the driver’s window when he lost control and the car smashed into a pedestrian crossing barrier.  He recorded a reading of 180 milligrams of alcohol per 100 millilitres of blood (more than twice the legal limit of 80 milligrams).  When the incident occurred, Hakiwai had been awaiting sentencing on an earlier charge of driving while disqualified.  His lawyer said Hakiwai had denied being the driver of the car when it was still running and police could only establish that he had been “manipulating the wheel after the car had run out of petrol”.  The judge said it was curious as to why Hakiwai didn’t walk back to get the petrol he needed.  He sentenced Hikawai to 2 years and 4 months’ prison and disqualified him from driving for 3 years.  This was Hakiwai’s 15th charge of drink-driving and his 32nd and 33rd charges of driving while disqualified.  Driving, as defined in NZ case law is a combination of acts which produces the result of the controlled movement of the vehicle (whether it is running or not).  Those acts must be voluntary.  It’s possible for two people to be controlling a vehicle so that each is “driving” it, where one person steers and the other operates other controls.

After a stroke, debilitating depression, and attempted suicide, Christie Carr found new meaning volunteering at an Oklahoma wildlife refuge, where she met Irwin, a 5-month-old kangaroo who had partially paralysed himself after hopping into a fence and breaking his neck.  The town of Broken Arrow unanimously voted to create an exemption to their exotic animals ordinance so that the inseparable Carr and Irwin could continue their lives together.  Native to Australia, healthy male great red kangaroos can grow up to 7 feet tall, weigh more than 200 pounds and bound 25 feet in a single leap, though Irwin isn’t expected to grow above about 50 pounds.  Irwin can’t stand or walk on his own, although he can hop with assistance.  Carr straps him into a child’s booster seat and takes him for rides in her car.  He wears clothes and diapers and lives indoors, even sleeping in a bed.  Apparently this hasn’t pleased Broken Arrow’s animal control division, who worry that the kangaroo could become a public safety risk and have now threatened to remove him, even though Carr’s therapist has certified the animal as a therapy pet under the Americans with Disabilities Act.  To protect Irwin, Carr has now moved with him from Broken Arrow (which requires liability insurance that Carr says she can’t afford) to McAlester (that apparently dooesn’t require insurance) to stay with her parents.  (Somehow, this saga seems unlikely to have a happy ending.)