Year: 2013

21 December 2013, 5:30 AM

Saab Wins Brazil’s Fighter for Gripen NG by Turning Over Recipe to Special Sauce

It’s been a long time coming, and through a number of odd twists and turns.

Earlier in the process, then Brazilian President Lula da Silva said that there was a deal with the French for the Dassault Rafale, largely for foreign policy reasons, but the defense establishment was fairly vehemently opposed to this, because of the much higher purchase and life cycle costs of the twin engine Rafale as compared to the single engine Gripen NG.

Still most of the stories seem to bury the lede:

Brazil has selected the Saab Gripen E/F for the 36 aircraft F-X2 requirement to replace its air force’s older combat types.

With an acquisition cost in the region of $4.5 billion, the Gripens will replace the Dassault Mirage 2000C fighters operated by the 1st Air Defence Group and a number of the modernised Northrop F-5EMs in four other Air Force squadrons.

The long-awaited announcement was made on 18 December by Brazilian defence minister Celso Amorim and Brazilian air force Chief Gen Juniti Saito.

The decision was driven by aircraft performance, transfer of technology and low through-life costs, according to the officials.

Contract negotiation is expected to last between 10 and 12 months.

Saab has guaranteed the total transfer of technology of “all systems” including the weapons command software, which will allow future integration of Brazilian-developed missiles and weapons.

(Emphasis Mine)

Both the F/A-18 E/F and the Rafale software suites are far more tightly integrated, and the software of the F-35 is even more tightly integrated, which makes it more difficult to modify to incorporate new systems.

Saab deliberately chose to put a firewall between flight critical and tactical software, meaning that crashing the latter won’t crash the whole aircraft, which creates an easier upgrade and testing path.

20 December 2013, 8:09 PM

Our Loquacious Neanderthal Progenitors

And yes, Neanderthal genes are in all of us, so they are in part our ancestors.

One of the enduring myths about Homo neanderthalensis (some would argue Homo sapiens neanderthalensis) is that they lacked the vocal structures to have our fluidity of speech.

30 years ago, the model that showed this was debunked because it was shown that it also prevented H neanderthalensis from swallowing.

The theory only barely passed the laugh test for about 5 years, but you still hear it coming up all the time.

One of the reasons for this is that the bone at the base of the tongue, the Hyloid is unattached to the rest of the skeleton, and fragile, so the fissile record is meager.

Well, they have found a Neanderthal hyloid, and it was very similar to ours, and now a group of scientist have modeled the Hyloid, and the surriounding soft tissues, and determined that they were very chatty folk:

An analysis of a Neanderthal’s fossilised hyoid bone – a horseshoe-shaped structure in the neck – suggests the species had the ability to speak.

This has been suspected since the 1989 discovery of a Neanderthal hyoid that looks just like a modern human’s.

But now computer modelling of how it works has shown this bone was also used in a very similar way.

Writing in journal Plos One, scientists say its study is “highly suggestive” of complex speech in Neanderthals.

The hyoid bone is crucial for speaking as it supports the root of the tongue. In non-human primates, it is not placed in the right position to vocalise like humans.

An international team of researchers analysed a fossil Neanderthal throat bone using 3D x-ray imaging and mechanical modelling.

This model allowed the group to see how the hyoid behaved in relation to the other surrounding bones.

Stephen Wroe, from the University of New England, Armidale, NSW, Australia, said: “We would argue that this is a very significant step forward. It shows that the Kebara 2 hyoid doesn’t just look like those of modern humans – it was used in a very similar way.”

Personally, I think that it is difference in fecundity that led to Neanderthals being supplanted by modern humans, but I am not a paleoanthropologist.

20 December 2013, 7:55 PM

Most Amazing Medical Development Ever Happened Wednesday

This guy turned 70 on Wednesday.

Considering the level of abuse that he has voluntarily inflicted on himself, he should have been found dead in his swimming pool about 40 years ago.

Somewhere in his genes is the making of an absolutely indestructible superhero, as well as a kick ass rhythm guitarist.

You can hover over the image with your cursor to get the answer if you do not recognize the guy.

20 December 2013, 7:42 PM

Uganda Passes “Kill the Gays Lite”

Life in prison for “aggravated homosexuality“:

Ugandan lawmakers Friday passed an anti-gay bill that calls for life imprisonment for certain homosexual acts, drawing criticism from rights campaigners who called it the worst such legislation in the world.

When the bill was first introduced in 2009, it was widely condemned for including the death penalty, but that was removed from the revised version passed by parliament.

Instead it sets life imprisonment as the penalty for a homosexual act in which one of the partners is infected with HIV, for sex with minors and the disabled, and for repeated sexual offenses among consenting adults, according to the office of a spokeswoman for Uganda’s parliament.

The bill also prescribes a seven-year jail term for a person who “conducts a marriage ceremony” for same-sex couples.

Lawmakers passed the bill unanimously, with no one voicing an objection.

President Yoweri Museveni must sign the bill within 30 days for it to become law. Although in the past he spoke disparagingly of gays, in recent times Museveni has softened his position on the matter, saying he is only opposed to gays who appear to “promote” themselves.

“In our society there were a few homosexuals,” Museveni said in March. “There was no persecution, no killings and no marginalization of these people, but they were regarded as deviants.”

The passage of the bill makes it “a truly terrifying day for human rights in Uganda,” said Frank Mugisha, a prominent Ugandan gay activist, who called the legislation “the worst anti-gay law in the world.” He urged the country’s president not to sign the bill into law.

“It will open a new era of fear and persecution,” he said. “If this law is signed by President Museveni, I’d be thrown in jail for life and in all likelihood killed.”

Understand that this is largely not a home grown movement. As Rachel Maddow so ably demonstrated, (vid here) much of the impetus has come from the shadowy American Christo-Fascist group known as “The Family,” has been aggressively lobbying for for anti-Gay legislation.

20 December 2013, 7:30 PM

Well, Duh

Eric Stern, a staffer for Brian Schweitzer, demonstrates how the NRA systematically ignores its alleged values to endorse Republicans:

………But when the NRA voter guide was published, Schweitzer received an F. He called the NRA to demand an explanation. They claimed they never received his questionnaire. It must have gotten lost in the mail, they told him. Schweitzer faxed them a copy, but they said it was too late.

………

Once again he mailed in his NRA survey, confident of an A (I believe that at the time, an A-plus rating was only achievable by answering “Yes” to the question, “Do you support the right to possess guns in all places, including schools?”).

For insurance, he met with NRA staff in Washington. They assured him that he was likely to receive the endorsement. But then the voter guide arrived, and the NRA had endorsed his opponent.

Again he demanded an explanation. The NRA said they’d decided that Schweitzer’s opponent “should get the benefit of the doubt” because he was an incumbent, whereas Schweitzer had never held office.

………

Schweitzer won that race narrowly, but rose to become a powerful political force in Montana, upending the old order, turning much of the state from red to blue, and pulling in many other democrats on his substantial coattails. He also revealed a distinctive quality: he sought revenge against anyone that crossed him, often without regard to the the political cost of doing so. So he naturally couldn’t resist bad-mouthing the NRA on the Bill Maher show one evening in 2007 when the subject of gun politics was raised, accusing the group of being “a fully owned division of the Republican Party…the National Republican Agency.”

This created an enjoyable situation when, in 2008, running for reelection as a virtually unbeatable incumbent, he notified the NRA that he not only expected an endorsement this time around, but that he wanted Wayne La Pierre, the NRA president, to come do it personally.

The NRA did everything they could to come up with an excuse to not grant the request, but ultimately they blinked. La Pierre, perhaps wary of Schweitzer’s penchant of creating a commotion if slighted, came to Billings in the summer of 2008 for a press conference at which he grudgingly told the TV cameras that Montana gun owners and hunters that should vote for Schweitzer. (Schweitzer’s challenger was already projected to lose by about 30 points, but for good measure Schweitzer rented a giant billboard right across the street from the guy’s campaign headquarters, with an ad boasting of the NRA’s endorsement.)

When the NRA voting guide arrived that fall, there were Montana candidates endorsed for Senate, Congress, Attorney General….but no Governor. Schweitzer called once again for an explanation. They told him that they had no idea how this had happened. The printer must have screwed up. It was a regrettable mix up, and they would try to correct it immediately.

But of course, they didn’t.

Brian Schweitzer is seriously considering a Presidential run in 2016, and the fact that he might have a Lyndon Baines Johnson level of vindictiveness makes me look upon her more favorable.

19 December 2013, 9:48 PM

I Think that Chris Christie now has a “-Gate” Scandal on His Hands

Pass the Popcorn

Christie’s two recently resigned political appointees to the Port Authority have lawyered up:

Two appointees of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie who recently resigned amid a controversy over lane closures at the George Washington Bridge have retained private attorneys, according to correspondence reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Bill Baroni and David Wildstein, former executives at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, have sought outside counsel amid an investigation into why traffic lanes leading to the nation’s busiest bridge were closed, the documents showed.

The hirings came as correspondence and documents related to the bridge controversy are due to be delivered soon to a legislative inquiry of the state Assembly.

The Democrat-led Transportation Committee subpoenaed documents from people involved in the incident, including Messrs. Baroni and Wildstein and leadership of the authority, seeking more information about how the lanes were closed and why.

Mr. Wildstein recently hired Alan L. Zegas, a criminal lawyer from Chatham, N.J., to represent him, according to an email sent from Mr. Zegas to the state Legislature Tuesday.

Mr. Zegas was co-counsel to former Newark Mayor Sharpe James in 2008 in response to federal corruption charges brought by Mr. Christie when he served as the U.S. Attorney in New Jersey, according to Mr. Zegas’s biography.

Mr. Baroni retained Michael Himmel, of Lowenstein Sandler LLP. Mr. Himmel works at the firm’s New York City and Roseland, N.J. offices, and specializes in white collar crime, according to his biography.

I figure that this will eventually degenerate into finger pointing, and the question is whether it will just involve Mssrs Baroni and Wildstein, or if it will go higher.

19 December 2013, 9:25 PM

As Much as I Like Liz Warren, I Wish that Martha Coakley Had Beaten Scott Brown in the Senate Race in 2010

She ran a truly horrible campaign, but her tenure as Massachusetts AG has generally been pretty positive.

Case in point, her most recent report showing that not-for-profits pay obscene remuneration to their top executives, and proposing changes in corporate governance:

Nonprofit groups in Massachusetts are paying their chief executives huge amounts of money and giving them lavish perks unavailable to most workers, according to a new report from Attorney General Martha Coakley’s office that calls for reform in the way groups disclose executive compensation.

The 92-page study, which covered 25 large charitable organizations in Massachusetts, mainly hospitals, insurers and colleges, found all of them paid their leaders at least a half-million dollars a year in total compensation. And many of the organizations offered their executives an assortment of other benefits, including bonuses, deferred compensation, auto allowances, financial planning, life insurance and other benefits that are more commonly associated with corporate leaders.

Even when executives retire, they often leave with hefty severance or consulting deals that allow them to earn millions more. The executives covered by the report each received between $487,000 and $8.8 million in total compensation each year between 2009 and 2011 — pay levels that Coakley’s office said should cause concern in some cases.

“It is not always clear that large compensation benefits packages are actually necessary to attract and retain talent,” the report argued.

Gee, you think?

Doubtless, there is some politics involved here, Coakley is looking to run for Governor, but when we are talking about tax-exempt organizations, there is a direct governmental interests, because it is the taxpayer who pays for these excesses.

19 December 2013, 7:55 PM

Deep Thought

Seen on Facebook.

18 December 2013, 8:57 PM

Frau Merkel Speaks the “S-Word” to Barack Obama

No, I don’t mean the word, “Sh%$,” though the Germans have many words for excrement, I mean the word Stasi, as in the East German secret police:

The dispute also reflects very different views of how far the state should go in conducting surveillance, both at home and abroad.

In an angry conversation with Mr. Obama in October after the phone monitoring was revealed, Ms. Merkel said that the N.S.A.’s activities reminded her of growing up as the daughter of a Protestant minister in East Germany. “She told him, ‘This is like the Stasi,’ ” said one person who had discussed the conversation with the chancellor.

Another person familiar with the conversation said Ms. Merkel had told Mr. Obama that she was particularly angry that, based on the disclosures, “the N.S.A. clearly couldn’t be trusted with private information, because they let Snowden clean them out.”

This is, to quote Joe Biden, a “Big f%$#ing deal.”

Angela Merkel grew up in the DDR, and this likely not a term that she invokes lightly.

The capabilities of our state security apparatus are remarkable, but the custodians of those capabilities, the NSA, CIA, and the rest of the three letter acronyms, cannot be trusted to deploy these capabilities in the best interest of the United States.

They are simply too enamored of their abilities, and so act without regard to the consequences of a potential failure.

18 December 2013, 8:16 PM

Bush Used Phoney National Security Excuse to Cover Up For His Saudi Buddies

I am so not surprised by this. There is a reason why Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz Al Saudr, is also known as “Bandar Bush” for his close ties to the Bush Crime Family.

We know that the Bush administration flew members of the Saudi royal family out of the US following 911, and now we know that they redacted all references to the House of Saud funding terrorism from the 911 report:

With relationships changing between the US and major actors in the Middle East, perhaps it is inevitable that the issue of Saudi Arabia’s funding of terrorism in the US is being revisited.
George W Bush in the Oval Office

Congressmembers Walter B. Jones (R-N.C.) and Stephen Lynch (D-Mass) recently got access to unredacted copies of the 2002 report of the Joint Intelligence Committee Inquiry (JICI) on 9/11. You may recall that 28 pages of that document had been redacted by George W. Bush for “national security purposes”. It has been widely reported that the 28 missing pages of the JICI report document a money trail from the Saudi Royal Family to the 9/11 hijackers.

‘I was absolutely shocked by what I read,’ Jones told International Business Times. ‘What was so surprising was that those whom we thought we could trust really disappointed me. I cannot go into it any more than that. I had to sign an oath that what I read had to remain confidential. But the information I read disappointed me greatly.’

This is no new revelation. At the time of the JICI report’s initial release, there was controversy about the extensive redactions and the information that was being withheld. Fourty-six Senators (all Democrats but one) signed a letter asking Bush to release the 28 pages. Bush refused.

The Congressmen Jones and Lynch (The Dem, Lynch, is also pretty right-wing, FYI) are doing their level best to say that Bush covered up for the House of Saud without actually revealing technically classified data.

I do not expect Obama do declassify this.

First, his actions over the past 5 years indicate that he has no interest at all in transparency, and 2^nd, he is not sutpid, and he understands taht there is an implicit contract between him, and George W. Bush, and whoever is Obama’s eventual successor, that dirty laundry will not be revealed.

17 December 2013, 9:50 PM

Quote of the Day

And here’s the thing: Republicans don’t want to help the unfortunate.

—Paul Krugman

17 December 2013, 9:41 PM

Pope Francis Walks the Walk

For all that Pope Francis has said about changing the focus of the church from right wing agitprop to helping the poor and doing good, it is in the bureaucracy, particularly the personnel structures where change has to be made.

Well the rubber has officially met the road, as he canned a notoriously right wing Cardinal from his position on the Congregation for Bishops, which is responsible for selecting new Bishops:

Pope Francis moved on Monday against a conservative American cardinal who has been an outspoken critic of abortion and same-sex marriage, by replacing him on a powerful Vatican committee with another American who is less identified with the culture wars within the Roman Catholic Church.

The pope’s decision to remove Cardinal Raymond L. Burke from the Congregation for Bishops was taken by church experts to be a signal that Francis is willing to disrupt the Vatican establishment in order to be more inclusive.

Even so, many saw the move less as an effort to change doctrine on specific social issues than an attempt to bring a stylistic and pastoral consistency to the church’s leadership.

“He is saying that you don’t need to be a conservative to become a bishop,” said Alberto Melloni, the director of the John XXIII Foundation for Religious Studies in Bologna, Italy, a liberal Catholic research institute. “He wants good bishops, regardless of how conservative or liberal they are.”

………

Cardinal Burke still serves as the prefect of the Vatican’s highest canonical court, but analysts say his removal from the Congregation for Bishops will sharply reduce his influence, especially over personnel changes in American churches.

“The Congregation for Bishops is the most important congregation in the Vatican,” said the Rev. Thomas J. Reese, a Jesuit priest and the author of “Inside the Vatican: The Politics and Organization of the Catholic Church.”

“It decides who are going to be the bishops all over the world,” he added. “This is what has the most direct impact on the life of the local church.”

Note that when Archbishop of S. Louis, Burke publicly announced that he was refusing communion to John Kerry.

This is a substantive change, assuming that he lives long enough,^* for them to take.

^*I am not suggesting a Da Vinci Code type conspiracy, I am merely observing that he is 75 years old.

17 December 2013, 9:23 PM

The Rotational Velocity of Kafka and Orwell Has Slowed a Bit

The military commission in Guantanamo has decided that the defendants recollection of their own torture is not classified, so they can testify about their own experiences:

MILITARY COMMISSION RETREATS ON CLASSIFICATION OF TORTURE MEMORIES FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Media contact: James Connell 011(5399) 5168

Alternate: Erin Daste 011(5399) 5321

GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA Today, the military commission in the 9/11 case issued several orders (AE200II, AE 013CCC, and AE013DDD) which lift the provision classifying the “observations and experiences” of defendants formerly held by the CIA. Defense attorneys are still required to treat CIA information as classified, but the military commission acknowledged that it had limited authority to control defendants’ thoughts and memories.

“This ruling is an important step forward in accountability for torture,” said James Connell, attorney for Ammar al Baluchi. “The real question is whether the prison will allow the prisoners to communicate with foreign government officials, medical care providers, human rights authorities, and media.”
This ruling is the latest vindication of a series of defense challenges to the United States’ authority to classify the thoughts, memories, and statements of the former CIA prisoners. In September 2012, the government abandoned its long-held policy of “presumptive classification,” in which every statement of former CIA prisoners was considered classified, but substituted a provision defining all prisoner observations and experiences on CIA detention as classified. Defense attorneys challenged that provision as violating the Convention Against Torture. Today’s ruling, which the prosecution strenuously opposed, lifts that restriction.

“People who have been abused by officials have a right to tell human rights organizations, medical care providers, and others about their torture,” said Lt Col Sterling Thomas, United States Air Force, military attorney for Mr. al Baluchi. “If governments are allowed to keep allegations of torture secret, the protection against torture is worthless.”

Now to prosecute, or at least pull the security clearances, of everyone who had anything to do with conducting, managing, or approving torture.

17 December 2013, 8:59 PM

Create a Bogus Right Wing Trope, and Get a Slap on the Wrist

Lara Logan to return to ’60 Minutes’.

Nothing to see here, move along.

17 December 2013, 8:53 PM

Thank Edward Snowden for this Court Ruling

Yesterday, Federal Judge Richard Leon ruled that the NSA’s bulk gathering of phone records was probably unconstitutional.

There are a fair number of points that were made.

The first was that the data release by Edward Snowden, and its publication by Glenn Greenwald made the fact that the NSA was collecting everyone’s phone records a matter of public record, and hence that the litigants had standing because they knew that their data was being collected.

Basically, he is saying that the ruling in Clapper v. Amnesty international, that people could not challenge secret surveillance, because it was secret, so they had no standing.

As Charlie Pierce notes, this makes for a game changer:

Let us be clear. No matter what you think of Snowden, or Glenn Greenwald, and no matter what you think of what they did, this ruling does not happen if the NSA doesn’t let a contractor walk out of the joint with the family jewels on a flash drive. This ruling does not happen if we do not know what we now know, and we don’t know any of that unless Snowden gathers the data and leaks it to the Guardian.

His next point illustrates just how 6 degrees of separation works:

“Suppose, for instance, that there is a person living in New York City who has a phone number that meets the RAS standard and is approved as a ‘seed,’ ” Judge Richard Leon writes in a broad opinion finding that the National Security Agency’s “telephony metadata” program is likely unconstitutional. An R.A.S. is a “reasonable, articulable suspicion” that someone might have something to do with terrorism; a seed is a search term, perhaps a telephone number, that the N.S.A. plugs into a database of hundreds of millions of phone records it has collected indiscriminately. “And suppose this person, who may or may not actually be associated with any terrorist organization, calls or receives calls from 100 unique numbers, as in my example. But now suppose that one of the numbers he calls is his neighborhood Domino’s Pizza shop,” Judge Leon continues:

The Court won’t hazard a guess as to how many different phone numbers might dial a given Domino’s Pizza outlet in New York City in a five-year period, but to take a page from the Government’s book of understatement, it’s “substantially larger” than the 100 in the second hop of my example, and would therefore most likely result in exponential growth in the scope of the query and lead to millions of records being captured by the third hop.

It is also interesting to note that Judge Leon specifically noted that the intelligence drift net did not get any meaningful results:

A warrantless, suspicionless search that abridges a legitimate expectation of privacy might be “reasonable” if it was justified by a compelling security interest that cannot be addressed any other way. In perhaps the strongest passages of Justice Leon’s opinion, he persuasively argues that there is no such interest in this case. The government has simply not shown that these intrusive searches are justified as counterterrorism measures. While the government argues that these warrantless searches are necessary for reasons of efficiency, they simply haven’t made the case:

…the Government does not cite a single instance in which analysis of the NSA’s bulk metadata collection actually stopped an imminent attack, or otherwise aided the Government in achieving any objective that was time-sensitive in nature. In fact, none of the three “recent episodes” cited by the Government that supposedly “illustrate the role that telephony metadata analysis can play in preventing and protecting against terrorist attack” involved any apparent urgency.

I hope that his ruling will stand, but I fear that it won’t.

17 December 2013, 8:22 PM

OK, I Get That This Guy Was Scum Who Ripped off the EPA

But it seems that every story is some variant of, “EPA reels as climate-change expert awaits sentencing for $1m CIA fraud.”

This is simply not true. Not the “fraud” part, nor the “EPA” part, nor the “CIA”, part, they are all true:

It is a story that flummoxed investigators – how a highly paid climate-change expert at the Environmental Protection Agency managed to defraud the government of nearly $1m, by pretending for a decade to be an undercover CIA agent.

John Beale, 65, is to undergo sentencing in a DC federal court on Wednesday, after pleading guilty to defrauding the government of $900,000 in salary and other benefits. Beale, who used his ruse to disappear for months at a time, has agreed to pay some $1.3m in restitution. He faces up to three years in jail.

The scandal could rebound against the current administrator of the EPA, Gina McCarthy, and her efforts to carry out President Barack Obama’s climate-change agenda. Last week, an official investigation found that she knew of the fraud for more than a year. Other officials who worked with Beale at the agency are under investigation and in a report last week, the EPA inspector general said senior agency officials had “enabled” Beale by failing to challenge any of his stories or expense claims amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

Beale, who retired last April after learning he was under investigation, earned salary and bonuses of $206,000 a year, far more than his supervisors. His fraud consisted largely of failing to turn up for work – in one instance for 18 months – and offering excuses connected to his fake intelligence role at the CIA.

(emphasis mine)

It’s the “climate change expert” bit that is wrong. He’s not a scientist, his background in public affairs and law, with a Master’s Degree from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and a Law Degree from New York University (PDF, and here is the Google cache if they purge it).

Yes, this sh%$ is mind boggling, but this guy managed (when he was actually, like, you know, there) the office.

But every story that I’ve seen has something like, “Lead Scientist,” or “Lead Expert.”

Still, engineering what is in effect a no show job for over a decade is a pretty remarkable bit of bureaucratic Jiujitsu.

16 December 2013, 9:08 PM

Your Moment of Kafka, No-Fly List Edition

There is now a distinct possibility in the lawsuit filed by Rahinah Ibrahim about her being on the no-fly list, the verdict might be kept secret. (My prior post on the trial is here.)

That’s right, win or lose, Rahinah Ibrahim, and the general public, may never know if she was on the list, if she is on the list, or whether her name has been removed from the list:

Is former Stanford University scholar Rahinah Ibrahim connected to Malaysian jihadists, as the FBI once suggested, or is she the victim of misguided U.S. bureaucrats who erroneously placed her on a U.S. terror watchlist? Is she even on a watchlist at all?

Those are the lingering unanswered questions in the first-of-its kind federal trial challenging a traveler’s alleged placement on America’s notorious no-fly list. The 48-year-old Malaysian woman’s case against the U.S. government — in which she seeks solely to clear her name — is awaiting a judge’s verdict after a week of testimony, the bulk of it classified and given behind closed doors here in a San Francisco federal courtroom.

But underscoring the Kafkaesque flavor of the trial, there’s a real possibility the verdict itself will be kept a secret, even from Ibrahim.

“It is conceivable? If the government continues to keep this information secret from her and the public, and the judge sustains that objection, it is possible we can have a ruling in this case and she would not know the result,” Elizabeth Marie Pipkin, Ibrahim’s pro-bono attorney, said in a telephone interview.

You can call it Kafkaesque, or you can call it Orwellian, or you can call it police state tactics, but in any case, this really, really, wrong.

16 December 2013, 8:51 PM

Because It is too Expensive, and the Side Effects are too Extreme

Over at “Even the Liberal” New Republic, Eric Sasson finds a new drug that reduces the chance of HIV transmission by nearly 99%.

He is perplexed ans surprised that there has been little in the way of publicity or action regarding the now FDA approved drug, Truvada.

The answer to this question is simple. In addition to nasty , potentially lethal blood chemistry changes, osteoporosis, liver problems, hepatitis B infections getting worse, Neausea, vomiting, diarrhea, headache, dizziness, joint pain, trouble sleeping, and back pain, this drug has an extremely high price, to the tune of over $1200 a month.

This is yet another example of how an over broad IP regime.

The retail price, set by the manufacturer by virtue of their monopoly rights under patent, is preventing it from having a meaningful impact on the AIDS epidemic

The solution here is to make patents, particularly those for drugs, less expansive (also, end evergreening), along with an aggressive regime of compulsory licensing.

16 December 2013, 8:07 PM

Time for Another Blogger Ethics Panel………

60 minutes just did a laudatory story on the NSA showing.

They show how this heroic group of people just want to protect us.

Well, now we know why. It turns out that the host of that segment previously wrked for the office of the Director of National Intelligence, and was Looking at leaving journalism to take a job as spokesman for the NY Police intelligence unit:

“60 Minutes” received another round of criticism Sunday for what critics called soft coverage of the National Security Agency — and the next morning, the host of that segment was reported to be taking a job in intelligence or counterterrorism.

The news program was given “unprecedented access” to the agency and its employees, said host John Miller at the outset of the report — where he did note that he had formerly worked in the office of the Director of National Intelligence.

But the Daily Beast and Huffington Post have reported in recent days that Miller was under consideration for a job at the NYPD in an intelligence or counterterrorism role. On Monday, the New York Post’s Page Six reported that Miller was on the verge of taking such a job.

Revolving door journalism.

Yet one more way that certain members of the 4^th betray their profession.