Year: 2013

Words Cannot Express My Disgust

No Comments

Israel has been administering the Depo-Provera contraceptive to Ethiopian Women without their knowledge:

It isn’t an apology or an acceptance of responsibility. But for the first time, an Israeli government official has admitted what thousands of Ethiopian Jewish women have allegedly known for years – doctors in Israel have been injecting Ethiopian women with long-acting birth control medication known as Depo-Provera without the informed consent of the women. The effect of the shots lasts for months and the practice effectively sterilizes women for that period of time. Many Ethiopian women have reportedly received these shots for years with little or no say in the decision to receive them.

This is bigoted, and this is contemptible.

Whoever was behind this needs to be drummed out of the medical profession.

At least they have put an end to the practice:

Health Ministry Director General Prof. Ron Gamzu has instructed the four health maintenance organizations to stop the practice as a matter of course.

 The ministry and other state agencies had previously denied knowledge or responsibility for the practice, which was first reported five years ago.

 Gamzu’s letter instructs all gynecologists in the HMOs “not to renew prescriptions for Depo-Provera for women of Ethiopian origin if for any reason there is concern that they might not understand the ramifications of the treatment.

This is quite literally the least they could once this came to light.

In addition to being racist, it’s bad medicine. Depo-Provera has a lot of nasty side effects.

Patent Troll Loses Big

No Comments

Newegg has prevailed against a patent troll claiming patents on an online shopping court:

Anyone who visited Soverain Software’s website could be forgiven for believing it’s a real company. There are separate pages for “products,” “services,” and “solutions.” There’s the “About Us” page. There are phone numbers and e-mail addresses for sales and tech support. There’s even a login page for customers.

It’s all a sham. Court records show Soverain hasn’t made a sale—ever. The various voice mailboxes were all set up by Katherine Wolanyk, the former Latham & Watkins attorney who is a co-founder and partial owner of Soverain. And the impressive list of big corporate customers on its webpage? Those are deals struck with another company, more than a decade ago. That was OpenMarket, a software company that created these patents before going out of business in 2001. It sold its assets to a venture capital fund called divine interVentures, which in turn sold the OpenMarket patents to Soverain Software in 2003.

………

Soverain isn’t in the e-commerce business; it’s in the higher-margin business of filing patent lawsuits against e-commerce companies. And it has been quite successful until now. The company’s plan to extract a patent tax of about one percent of revenue from a huge swath of online retailers was snuffed out last week by Newegg and its lawyers, who won an appeal ruling [PDF] that invalidates the three patents Soverain used to spark a vast patent war.

………

For Newegg’s Chief Legal Officer Lee Cheng, it’s a huge validation of the strategy the company decided to pursue back in 2007: not to settle with patent trolls. Ever.

“We basically took a look at this situation and said, ‘This is bullsh%$,'” (%$ mine) said Cheng in an interview with Ars. “We saw that if we paid off this patent holder, we’d have to pay off every patent holder this same amount. This is the first case we took all the way to trial. And now, nobody has to pay Soverain jack squat for these patents.”

………

Soverain’s plans were always bigger than Amazon and Newegg. It wanted nothing less than to extract a patent tax from the entire retail sector, using three patents it claimed covered pretty much any use of “shopping cart” technology.

Just saying “do it on the Internet” isn’t a novel invention, the appeals court ruled [PDF]. The three-judge panel found that all of the “shopping cart” patent claims were rendered obvious in light of the CompuServe Mall.

I think that in the future, I’ll Newegg will be at the top of my list for shopping.

Hurrray for the ……………… Swiss?

No Comments

Switzerland citizens have petitioned binding shareholder votes on executive compensation to referendum:

In February 2008, Thomas Minder, a Swiss businessman whose family-owned company is best known for its old-fashioned herbal toothpaste, attacked his banker, UBS Chairman Marcel Ospel, as if he were a form of stubborn plaque. At a shareholders’ meeting in Basel, he stormed the podium as Ospel addressed the crowd. Ospel’s bodyguards grappled with Minder and wrestled him away before he could land his symbolic blow — he was trying to hand the embattled head of Switzerland’s largest bank a bound copy of Swiss company law, which codifies corporate temperance.

 “Gentlemen, you are responsible for the biggest write-downs in Swiss corporate history,” Minder had railed just a few minutes before, referring to UBS’s loss of $50 billion during the subprime meltdown that prompted it to seek a government bailout. “Put an end to the Americanization of UBS corporate philosophy!”

 The bodyguards marched Minder out of the hall amid a chorus of boos and jeers. Two months later, Ospel was gone, taking the fall for UBS’s recklessness, but Minder’s campaign against big bonuses had only just begun; shortly after Ospel was ousted, Minder filed the 100,000 signatures needed to launch a referendum to impose some of the tightest controls on executive compensation in the world.

 Of the top 100 Swiss companies, 49 give shareholders a consulting vote on the pay of executives. A few other countries, including the United States and Germany, have introduced advisory “say on pay” votes in response to the anger over inequality and corporate excess that drove the Occupy Wall Street movement. Britain is also planning to implement rules in late 2013 that will give shareholders a binding vote on pay and “exit payments” at least every three years. Minder’s initiative goes further, forcing all listed companies to have binding votes on compensation for company managers and directors, and ban golden handshakes and parachutes. It would also ban bonus payments to managers if their companies are taken over, and impose severe penalties — including possible jail sentences and fines — for breaches of these new rules.

Honestly, I was hoping that someone would do this, but in my wildest dream, I would have not have thought that it was the Swiss who would be at the forefront of this movement.

It appears that I have some stereotypical views about the Swiss, basically as conventional banker types, which does not reflect the actual reality.  I’ve got to be more enlightened.

Contemptible

No Comments

Biotech firms are aggressively lobbying to ban the use of generic alternatives to their ruinously expensive drugs:

In statehouses around the country, some of the nation’s biggest biotechnology companies are lobbying intensively to limit generic competition to their blockbuster drugs, potentially cutting into the billions of dollars in savings on drug costs contemplated in the federal health care overhaul law.

The complex drugs, made in living cells instead of chemical factories, account for roughly one-quarter of the nation’s $320 billion in spending on drugs, according to IMS Health. And that percentage is growing. They include some of the world’s best-selling drugs, like the rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis drugs Humira and Enbrel and the cancer treatments Herceptin, Avastin and Rituxan. The drugs now cost patients — or their insurers — tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

Two companies, Amgen and Genentech, are proposing bills that would restrict the ability of pharmacists to substitute generic versions of biological drugs for brand name products.

Bills have been introduced in at least eight states since the new legislative sessions began this month. Others are pending.

Seriously. We need to move away from proprietary IP licensed drug development leveraging government research to another model.

The current one is not working.

They use monopoly rents to further expand their monopoly rents by capturing the political process, and we all pay, over, and over, and over, and over again.

Awsome!!!!!

No Comments

The WTO has just granted Antigua and Barbuda the right to ignore U.S. Copyrights because of our clamp-down on gambling:

A long-simmering trade conflict between the United States and Antigua and Barbuda appears to be boiling over.

Antigua and Barbuda, which has a $1 billion economy, is planning on getting legal retribution from the United States’ $15 trillion economy over its refusal to let Americans gamble at online sites based in the Caribbean nation — perhaps by offering downloads of American intellectual property, like Hollywood films, network television shows or hit pop songs. On Monday, the World Trade Organization gave its go-ahead for Antigua and Barbuda’s tentative plan.

“The economy of Antigua and Barbuda has been devastated by the United States government’s long campaign to prevent American consumers from gambling,” Harold Lovell, Antigua’s finance minister, said in a statement. “These aggressive efforts to shut down the remote gaming industry in Antigua have resulted in the loss of thousands of good-paying jobs and seizure by the Americans of billions of dollars belonging to gaming operators and their customers.”

The conflict’s roots are a decade old. The World Trade Organization said that the United States had violated its trade agreements by preventing Americans from betting at sites based in Antigua and Barbuda. Because Washington is unwilling to make the betting legal, the countries have been locked in a dispute over what constitutes fair trade practices and fair compensation.

The online gambling industry was at one point the second-largest employer in the Caribbean country, its government has said, and economists estimated its worth at $3.4 billion. Gambling employment has dropped to fewer than 500 people from more than 4,000 as a result of the United States’ trade policy, it said.

On Monday, a dispute settlement body in Geneva gave Antigua and Barbuda the nod to, in essence, violate American intellectual property rights to make up its losses, calculated at $21 million a year.

It remains murky just how the Antigua and Barbuda government might go about it. But trade watchers suggested it might set up a site where viewers could pay a pittance to watch a film or television show with an American copyright. The United States might not be able to shut the site down under international law.

BTW, it was the US that insisted on having cross-retaliation, where misbehavior in one industry could result in penalties at another industry.

In a best case scenario, I hope that this doesn’t get resolved, and the “content owners”  (actually the holders of exclusive licenses) find their stuff on the internet for next to nothing.

Hollywood and Silicon Valley will doubtless freak out, but if this continues down this path, and Antigua does distribute IP protected content, the US is forbidden from retaliating, so we see what happens if a bit of IP sanity breaks out.

My guess is that it won’t be the apocalypse that the MPAA and the RIAA predicts, and maybe they will be viewed like the proverbial “Boy Who Cried Wolf.”

My previous posts about this are here, and it appears to me that this is moving very slowly, my earliest post is from 2007(!), and the complaint, and the remedy, remain the same as my original post, but we now finally have a ruling.

Quote of the Day

No Comments

As I’ve written previously, we are past the point in this country now where one’s views on homosexuality can be called a “matter of conscience.” No. Being against equality here isn’t a matter of conscience anymore than having been against racial equality in 1955 was. It is just bigotry plain and simple. Enough. Piss off. Go form your own Boy Scouts. Go form your own stupid country. You aren’t America anymore.

—Michael Tomasky

We Love Those Little Fuzzy Murderous Psychopaths

No Comments

Awww!!! It’s so cute!!!

A new study has revealed that cats are merciless killing machines cutting a wide swath through indigenous wildlife:

For all the adorable images of cats that play the piano, flush the toilet, mew melodiously and find their way back home over hundreds of miles, scientists have identified a shocking new truth: cats are far deadlier than anyone realized.

In a report that scaled up local surveys and pilot studies to national dimensions, scientists from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that domestic cats in the United States — both the pet Fluffies that spend part of the day outdoors and the unnamed strays and ferals that never leave it — kill a median of 2.4 billion birds and 12.3 billion mammals a year, most of them native mammals like shrews, chipmunks and voles rather than introduced pests like the Norway rat.

The estimated kill rates are two to four times higher than mortality figures previously bandied about, and position the domestic cat as one of the single greatest human-linked threats to wildlife in the nation. More birds and mammals die at the mouths of cats, the report said, than from automobile strikes, pesticides and poisons, collisions with skyscrapers and windmills and other so-called anthropogenic causes.

Peter Marra of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and an author of the report, said the mortality figures that emerge from the new model “are shockingly high.”

I loves my cute little black hearted merciless killing machines.

They are so cute.  Squeeee!!!!

Iceland Wins in Court Over Icesave Deposite Guarantees

No Comments

I’m not particularly surprised:

A European court has cleared the Icelandic government of failing to guarantee minimum levels of compensation for UK and Dutch savers in the collapsed Icesave bank.

Icesave, run by the Icelandic Landsbanki, collapsed in 2008 along with all of Iceland’s banking system.

The UK and Dutch savers were bailed out completely by their governments.

The ruling may halt the UK’s attempt to get all of its money back from the Icelandic government.

………

The Icelandic government said it took “considerable satisfaction” from the ruling from the European Free Trade Agreement (EFTA) Court.

“Iceland has from the start maintained that there is legal uncertainty as to whether a state is responsible for ensuring payments of minimum guarantees to depositors using its own funds and has stressed the importance of having this issue clarified in court,” it said.

………

The EFTA judgement stated: “The Court holds that the Directive does not envisage that the defendant itself must ensure payments to depositors in the Icesave branches in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, in accordance with Articles 7 and 10 of the Directive, in a systemic crisis of the magnitude experienced in Iceland.”

What’s the core issue here is that Iceland guaranteed these accounts up to £16,300, but the British and Dutch cover the whole account, and demanded that Iceland pay the whole amount.

This is separate from the attempts to make the bondholders whole, for which there is no legal obligation whatsoever.

Things to do in Boise When You’re Dead*

No Comments

OK,there is no actual dying involved, but I will be in Boise, Idaho for about 30 hours on business (Sunday night through about Noon on Tuesday) next week.

It’s a work thing, but I figure that I’ll have Monday evening off.

Any suggestions of things to do?  I’ve been told that there are some good Basque restaurants in the area, though I haven’t got any specific names.

*Truth be told, I’ve never seen the movie Things to do in Denver When You’re Dead, but the title has stuck in my head.

This is Called Circling the Drain

No Comments

The Army has decided to delay its Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV) program:

Army acquisition leaders moved Jan. 16 to delay its top modernization program, the Ground Combat Vehicle, in hopes of making it more viable in the face of expected defense budget cuts.

The Army issued a memorandum Jan. 16 announcing the addition of a six-month extension of the Technology Development phase of the GCV Infantry Fighting Vehicle program. Defense companies will have more time to “refine vehicle designs,” according to an Army statement.

They have been playing around with all sorts of whiz bang technology, the weight has ballooned to that of an M-1 tank, and there have been repeated delays and cancellations. (Background here)

This is a clusterf%$#, and it will continue to be a clusterf%$#, and the best case will be an over priced, under performing, Byzantinely complex and hard to support system.

Read Charlie Pierce

No Comments

He says it all on the recent DC Court of Appeals ruling:

David Sentelle Is A Hack

By Charles P. Pierce

The next time I hear some lefty mooing about the president’s having let down the side on something or another, it better be about something of substance, like the Keystone XL pipeline, or I’m going to boot said lefty’s hindquarters in the general direction of the federal appeals court of the District Of Columbia, which today laid down the most singular piece of partisan hackery to come out of a court since Antonin Scalia picked the previous president. For precise legal analysis, I’ll leave it to Scott at LG&M to explain. This, children, is what you get when you operate politically under the theory that They’re All The Same. You get 20 or 30 years of primarily Republican judges acting primarily as Republicans, drawn from the legal chop-shops in the conservative movement bubble, and doing their partisan duty like performing seals.

………

Read the rest.

Geithner As Sociopath: The Interview

No Comments

In an interview with Liaquat Ahamed at The New Republic Timothy Geithner reveals his good German.

In response to the idea of justice, his response was that it, “wasn’t his thing.”

LA: One of the ways that people have figured out in the past to reconcile the politics was to go populist. That was what Roosevelt did. You, on the other hand, had been resolutely against that. You refer to it as Old Testament justice, implying that while it may be emotionally satisfying, it doesn’t serve any purpose.

 TG: I never used that phrase as a pejorative description. I just used it as a simple shorthand to refer to the understandable need people had for justice. But the President didn’t ask me to come do this to be the architect of a political strategy. I never felt that was my thing. I had some views on the issue, but I didn’t give them much weight. I thought my job was to figure out the financial parts.

(emphasis mine)

Justice doesn’t matter, and notwithstanding his protestations, he ridiculed it as, “Old Testament justice”.

He knows that his job is to be the lick-spittle watchdog for the banksters.

Note however that the Cossacks work for the Czar

I Guess that Texas Was Sick of Being a Laughing Stock

No Comments

This is why the Texas legislature took the power to select textbooks away from Texas Board of Education:

Much has changed since then. In 2011, the Texas Legislature shifted authority to order textbooks from the state to individual school districts with Senate Bill 6. The law deprived the board of its final say-so. Now, school districts have control over how they spend their almost $800 million on learning materials.

“It’s pretty clear that it reduces our authority in the sense that we’re not the only game in town,” board member Michael Soto, D-San Antonio told the Austin American-Statesman.

Filmmaker Scott Thurman describes it this way: Before, “the textbook publishers had to meet 100 percent of the TEKS [Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills standards]. In The Revisionaries, I follow the process of making those standards. Now, they only have to meet 50 percent of the standards…Textbook publishers have a little more wiggle room.”

He speculates that SB6 was passed because of the controversy the board raised in 2009 and 2010. “According to moderate members of the board, the far right didn’t like this at all. They wanted complete control. They wanted to lock in those standards and not allow textbook publishers to work around it.”

Yes, having a Board of Ed that is batsh%$ insane is a problem, particularly when, before the new law, they dictated text books for 5 million students in one fell swoop, which would lead text book publishers to make their books for everyone match the frequently nonsensical requirements of this body.

This is very good news for education in the US.

Reid Never Intended to Reform the filibuster

No Comments

The problem is that he has gone native:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell have come to a deal on filibuster reform. The deal is this: The filibuster will not be reformed. But the way the Senate moves to consider new legislation and most nominees will be.

“I’m not personally, at this stage, ready to get rid of the 60-vote threshold,” Reid (D-Nev.) told me this morning, referring to the number of votes needed to halt a filibuster. “With the history of the Senate, we have to understand the Senate isn’t and shouldn’t be like the House.”

What will be reformed is how the Senate moves to consider new legislation, the process by which all nominees — except Cabinet-level appointments and Supreme Court nominations — are considered, and the number of times the filibuster can be used against a conference report. You can read the full text of the compromise, which was sent out to Senate offices this morning, here (pdf).

But even those reforms don’t go as far as they might. Take the changes to the motion to proceed, by which the Senate moves to consider a new bill. Reid seemed genuinely outraged over the way the process has bogged down in recent years.Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell have come to a deal on filibuster reform. The deal is this: The filibuster will not be reformed. But the way the Senate moves to consider new legislation and most nominees will be.

“I’m not personally, at this stage, ready to get rid of the 60-vote threshold,” Reid (D-Nev.) told me this morning, referring to the number of votes needed to halt a filibuster. “With the history of the Senate, we have to understand the Senate isn’t and shouldn’t be like the House.”

What will be reformed is how the Senate moves to consider new legislation, the process by which all nominees — except Cabinet-level appointments and Supreme Court nominations — are considered, and the number of times the filibuster can be used against a conference report. You can read the full text of the compromise, which was sent out to Senate offices this morning, here (pdf).

But even those reforms don’t go as far as they might. Take the changes to the motion to proceed, by which the Senate moves to consider a new bill. Reid seemed genuinely outraged over the way the process has bogged down in recent years.

The Republicans have created a new reality in the Senate, and the older Democratic Senators do not realize that it’s not going back to the way it was before.

We need new leadership in the Senate.

This is All F%$#ed Up and Sh%$

No Comments

I am referring, of course, to Israel’s election results:

Coalition talks have begun in Israel after near-complete general election results gave right-wing and centre-left blocs 60 seats each in parliament.

President Shimon Peres is expected to ask Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to attempt to form a new government.

His Likud-Beitenu alliance lost a quarter of its seats in the Knesset but remains the largest grouping with 31.

He has offered to work with the newly-formed Yesh Atid party, which shocked observers by coming second with 19.

However, its leader, popular former TV presenter Yair Lapid, has demanded reform of a law under which ultra-Orthodox Jewish seminary students can defer their military service. Religious parties in the current governing coalition are strongly opposed to any changes.

Mr Lapid has also said he would only join a government that was committed to reviving the peace process with the Palestinians.

In 3rd place again is labor, and Kadima, formerly the leading opposition party, is down to just two seats.

I’m hoping that Yesh Atid gets into the coalition (does not look likely), because it has a strongly secular platform, and ending the draft exemption and subsidies to the Ultra-Orthodox would be a very good thing.

As to figuring out what this all means, I’m not sure that anyone knows what it means.

Certainly, I cannot figure out how this will all sort out.

More Agreement With the IMF

No Comments

They are saying that Britain should back off its austerity policies:

Britain should tone down its austerity plans to help the struggling economy, the International Monetary Fund’s chief economist has suggested.

Olivier Blanchard said the budget in March would be a good time for George Osborne to “take stock” of his plan A.

The comments, in an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, came after the IMF trimmed its forecasts for the UK and global growth. The British economy is now expected to expand by 1% rather than 1.1% this year, and 1.9% rather than 2.2% next year.

Twice in a day I agree with them.

Go figure.

The IMF Gets One Right

No Comments

IMF chief Christine Lagarde is calling for increases in the minimum wage, strengthening the social safety net, and reining in bankers pay:

Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the IMF, has warned that “corrosive” inequality was hindering the world’s economic recovery.

 In a combative speech to an audience of some of the world’s wealthiest financiers at the World Economic Forum, [Davos] Ms Lagarde said that bankers’ pay should be cut to close the gap between the rich and poor. “Excessive inequality is corrosive to growth; it is corrosive to society. I believe that the economics profession and the policy community have downplayed inequality for too long” she said.

 Ms Lagarde, a former French finance minister who was appointed head of the International Monetary Fund in 2011, added that it might be necessary for nations to impose minimum wages in order to reduce income gaps.

 II believe policies such as robust social safety nets, extending the reach of credit, and – in some cases – minimum wages can help” she told the audience of business and political leaders in the Swiss ski resort of Davos. Ms Lagarde also warned that necessary reforms of the multinational banking sector, which plunged the Western world into recession in 2008-09, were being watered down by industry lobbying.

 ………

 Ms Lagarde told delegates that bankers’ pay is too high. “We must move in the direction of more prudent compensation practices” she said. “Ultimately, this is all about accountability: we need a financial sector that is accountable to the real economy– one that adds value, not destroys it”.

Your mouth to God’s ear, ma’am.

Good Riddance

No Comments

Lanny Breuer, head of the criminal division at the Department of Justice and pimp for the banksters, has resigned:

Lanny Breuer is out as head of the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice, according to the Washington Post. After his ratlike performance on Frontline (transcript here) it won’t be long before we find him at some creepy New York or DC law firm defending his best friends, the banks and their sleazy employees. His legacy is simple: too big to fail banks can’t possibly commit crimes, so minor civil fines and false promises of reform are punishment enough. Jamie Dimon couldn’t have put it better.

BTW, the Department of Justice has said that they would never work with the producer of the segment ever again:

He’s gone, but I’m certain that he’s going to a cushy Wall Street gig where he will make millions of dollars.

It’s how back loaded bribery works.