Month: June 2017

Linkage

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Here is a decent primer on net neutrality:

The NRA is Racist at its Core

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Trevor Noah Noticed the Hypocrisy

The NRA can be relied upon to defend the most outrageous justifications for gun owners.

It famously had a nationwide advertising campaign describing federal agents as, “Jack Booted Thugs,” which led former President George H. W. Bush to resign his life time membership.

There is nothing that can stay the NRA’s absolutist rhetoric, the above case was a full throated endorses of the Branch Davidians in Wako, unless it involves a black person:

Amid the national fury over the death of Philando Castile at a traffic stop in July — a shooting made more horrific by his girlfriend’s Facebook Live broadcast of his final moments — some condemned the National Rifle Association’s near silence on the matter.

The organization had been quick to defend other gun owners who made national news. Castile had a valid permit for his firearm, reportedly told the officer about the gun to avoid a confrontation, and was fatally shot anyway after being told to hand over his license.

So some NRA members were furious when the organization released a tepid statement more than a day after the shooting that merely called it “troublesome” and promised that “the NRA will have more to say once all the facts are known.”

………

On Tuesday, video of the traffic stop was made public, showing Castile calmly telling the officer about his firearms — followed within seconds by the officer shooting him and cursing in what sounds like a panic.

So outrage is boiling again.

And still the NRA has nothing to say.

This is not a surprise.  The whole modern gun control debate has been steeped in racism.

The use of open carry by the Black Panthers in California led to the adoption of restrictive gun laws in California, signed into law by Ronald Reagan, and this led to the 1968 Gun Control Act, and then the NRA went insane, because they wanted guns to protect themselves from black people.

The silence of the NRA is not a bug, it’s a feature.

A Steaming Pile of Sh%$ Beats Nothing

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Actually, the greatest trick the Devil ever played was convincing Democrats their future lay in winning over moderate Republicans.

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) June 21, 2017

Best Tweet on This

As I had predicted,Ossoff lost in the GA-6 special election.

Not only did he lose, but it wasn’t particularly close:

President Trump’s hopes of steadying his presidency and his agenda on Capitol Hill were given a lift Tuesday when a Republican won a special congressional election in the Atlanta suburbs.

 Republican Karen Handel defeated Democrat Jon Ossoff in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District, retaining a seat that has been in GOP hands since 1979 after a grueling, four-month campaign that earned the distinction of being the most expensive House race in history.

 Handel won by almost 11,000 votes and by more than four percentage points, and Ossoff failed to reach the 48 percent mark that he topped in the initial round of voting in April.

 Handel’s win will bring fresh attention to a beleaguered Democratic Party that has suffered a string of defeats in special elections this year despite an angry and engaged base of voters who dislike Trump.

So, after over $50 million was spent in the district, Ossoff lost by about 3 times as badly as Hillary Clinton did to Trump in this district in November.

Just so you remember, Ossoff, unlike the other candidates in special elections, was opposed to single payer, and ambivalent on taxing the rich, and made his campaign about nothing.

BTW, the numbers in the above article are not the final ones. As Lambert Strether noted, “Ossoff loses GA-06, by 52.7 – 47.3 = 5.4% (Trump won the district by 1.5%). Not a good look.“

It should be noted that in all the other special elections, where candidates endorsed progressive positions and were ignored by the party establishment, significantly outperformed Hillary’s results in November.

How many times does the vacuous and empty 3rd Way have to fail before the Democrats take their soul out of hock to big money donors?

My guess is that this number is so big that if we were to use scientific notion, we would put the error term in the exponent as astronomers do.

The mainstream Democratic Party seems determined to pursue Rmoney voters, which is, like the bite of a dog into a stone, a stupidity.

After all, if they didn’t vote Obama in 2012, they aren’t voting for a Democrat ever.

Trolling Becomes Reality

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A week ago, I wrote admiringly of Jeremy Corbyn’s proposal to house people displaced by the fire at the Grenfell in empty luxury flats in the area.

Though I did not describe it as such, I felt that this proposal was a world class, and well deserved, troll, but that this would never happen.

I was wrong. The troll has become reality:

Sixty-eight flats in a luxury apartment complex where prices start at £1.6m are being made available to families displaced by the Grenfell Tower fire.

Families who escaped the tower blaze will be able to take up permanent occupation in July and August in the apartments in the Kensington Row scheme about 1.5 miles south of Grenfell, where last Wednesday’s blaze left 79 people dead and missing and presumed dead.

The homes are within the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea but in the more affluent south end of the borough. They have been purchased by the Corporation of London and will become part of its social housing stock.
Grenfell Tower fire: death toll raised to 79 as minute’s silence held
Read more

The most luxurious four-bedroom apartments are currently on sale in the development for £8.5m but the homes being released to Grenfell residents are part of the affordable quota being built and feature a more “straightforward” internal specification, but have the same build quality.

The complex includes a 24-hour concierge, swimming pool, sauna and spa and private cinema.

It is not yet clear if the Grenfell residents will have access to the facilities, which are normally not included for those in affordable housing.

“We’ve got to start by finding each of them a home,” said Tony Pidgley, chairman of the Berkeley Group, which built the homes. “Somewhere safe and supportive, close to their friends and the places they know, so they can start to rebuild their lives. We will work night and day to get these homes ready.”

The move follows calls by Jeremy Corbyn for luxury homes in the borough to be requisitioned.

Last week he said: “Kensington is a tale of two cities. The south part of Kensington is incredibly wealthy, it’s the wealthiest part of the whole country. The ward where this fire took place is, I think, the poorest ward in the whole country and properties must be found – requisitioned if necessary – to make sure those residents do get rehoused locally.”

My theory is that Coebyn’s proposal scared the hell out of the real estate community,  for whom empty buildings purchased by mobsters, despots, and other money launderers that is their bread and butter.

Had even one of these empty flats been requisitioned, the damage to the very high end London real estate market would have lasted for decades.

As Atrios Would Say, “Time for a Blogger Ethics Panel.”*

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The Wall Street Journal has just fired its chief foreign affairs correspondent because he was negotiating a business partnership with an arms merchant that he was also covering:

The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday fired its highly regarded chief foreign affairs correspondent after evidence emerged of his involvement in prospective commercial deals — including one involving arms sales to foreign governments — with an international businessman who was one of his key sources.

 The reporter, Jay Solomon, was offered a 10 percent stake in a fledgling company, Denx LLC, by Farhad Azima, an Iranian-born aviation magnate who has ferried weapons for the CIA. It was not clear whether Solomon ever received money or formally accepted a stake in the company.

 “We are dismayed by the actions and poor judgment of Jay Solomon,” Wall Street Journal spokesman Steve Severinghaus wrote in a statement to The Associated Press. “While our own investigation continues, we have concluded that Mr. Solomon violated his ethical obligations as a reporter, as well as our standards.”

 Azima was the subject of an AP investigative article published Tuesday. During the course of its investigation, the AP obtained emails and text messages between Azima and Solomon, as well as an operating agreement for Denx dated March 2015, which listed an apparent stake for Solomon.

………

Read some of the source documents here: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3871143-Jay-Solomon-Documents.html

This doesn’t just happen with people covering arms dealers. 

The very rich use their wealth to shape the news and bribe and or intimidate journalists routinely

*Atrios was early to the blogging phenomena, and noted how many in the MSM dismissed blogs because there were no editors, and thus no journalistic ethics. Whenever a mainstream reporter is shown to be corrupt, he ironically made this comment.

Oh No He Didn’t!

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John Oliver was covering the coal industry, and its rather silly PR efforts on his show, and a famously litigious coal company CEO sent a cease and desist to prevent the show from mocking him. Much hilarity ensues:

This past weekend on John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight, he took on the issue of “coal” and some politicians’ obsession with coal jobs as the only true “American” jobs. The whole segment is interesting, but obviously not the kind of thing we’d normally write up. What we do frequently write about, however, is censorious threats, often from wealthy execs, designed to try to silence people from commenting on issues regarding those doing the threatening. And, it appears that’s exactly what happened with coal exec Bob Murray, the CEO of Murray Energy, when he found out that John Oliver was doing a segment that included some bits about Murray.

I recommend watching the whole thing, but the parts about Murray include a brief bit around 4:45 in the video and then a much longer section starting around 12:30 in the video, where Oliver notes:

I’m going to need to be careful here, because when we contacted Murray Energy for this piece, they sent us a letter instructing us to “cease and desist from any effort to defame, harass, or otherwise injure Mr. Murray or Murray Energy” and telling us that “failure to do so will result in immediate litigation…”

This is like waving a red flag in front of a bull, and John Oliver decides to put the spurs to Mr. Murray.

He goes full talking squirrel (just watch the video) on Robert Murray’s flabby white ass:

Righteous!

Amazon Looked at How Loathed Comcast Is, and Thought, “Here, Hold My Beer.”

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No Mr. Bond, I Expect You to Die

Amazon just took out a patent to block you from comparison shopping on your smart phone while you are in their store:

As grocery shoppers work to digest Amazon’s massive acquisition of Whole Foods for $13.7 billion, the digital storefront recently scored a victory that aims to reinforce the company’s growing investments in brick-and-mortar retail.

Amazon was awarded a patent May 30 that could help it choke off a common issue faced by many physical stores: Customers’ use of smartphones to compare prices even as they walk around a shop. The phenomenon, often known as mobile “window shopping,” has contributed to a worrisome decline for traditional retailers.

But Amazon now has the technology to prevent that type of behavior when customers enter any of its physical stores and log onto the WiFi networks there. Titled “Physical Store Online Shopping Control,” Amazon’s patent describes a system that can identify a customer’s Internet traffic and sense when the smartphone user is trying to access a competitor’s website. (Amazon chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos is also the owner of The Washington Post.)

When that happens, Amazon may take one of several actions. It may block access to the competitor’s site, preventing customers from viewing comparable products from rivals. It might redirect the customer to Amazon’s own site or to other, Amazon-approved sites. It might notify an Amazon salesperson to approach the customer. Or it might send the customer’s smartphone a text message, coupon or other information designed to lure the person back into Amazon’s orbit.

This is the sort of sh%$ that makes Richard Bruce Cheney look like Pope Francis in comparison.

Good Point………

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Chris Dillow makes a very good point, that the fire at the Grenfill highlights an important point, that politics is actually a life and death, and not a chummy sporting event where civility is prized above all else.
While I disagree that with Mr. Dillow’s hope that this tragedy will lead to a change in politics is viewed by our politicians and pundits, he is right about the reality of politics.

This sh%$ is real:

There’s one aspect of the Grenfell catastrophe that is perhaps under-appreciated – that it should finally kill off what is perhaps the dominant conception of politics in the media.

I’m thinking here of the idea that politics is an Oxford Union-style game. There’s jockeying for position, gossip and backbiting in which (over)-confidence, fluency and a particular conception of “credibility” are prized above all, but the game is mostly among jolly good chaps. And it’s a low-stakes one. The worst crime is to conduct a “car crash” interview, and the losers retire to spend more time with their trust funds and sinecures.

We see this idea of politics in the matey undertow between presenters such as John Pienaar and Andrew Neil and their narrow roster of guests; the idea that politics is something that only happens in Westminster; the ostracism and patronizing of those whose class, gender or ethnicity excludes them from the game, such as John Prescott, Angela Rayner and Diane Abbott; and the popularity of Boris Johnson, the epitome of Oxford Union politics. One reason why John McDonnell is so hated is that he sees that politics is not just a debating game.

This idea of politics is, though, a lie. The truth is that politics has always been a matter of life and death – especially (though not only) for the worst off.

For me, one of the most memorable political exchanges of the 1980s was when a heckler shouted to Neil Kinnock that Thatcher had “showed guts”, to which Kinnock replied: “It’s a pity others had to leave theirs on the ground at Goose Green to prove it.” That retort caused outrage because it reminded the political class of the nasty fact that political decisions, rightly or wrongly, have lethal consequences.

………

Herein lies my hope. Grenfell might – just might – be a turning point. It shows that politics can no longer be seen as a debating game from which the poor are excluded. It must instead become a serious matter which has life and death consequences, in which the interests and voices of the worst off are finally given full value, and in which there’s no place for childish games.

I hopes that this horrific event will lead the political class, will take politics more seriously as a result.

I despair of this ever happening.

This is a Feature, Not a Bug

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Over at Bloomberg, we have a bit of history which describes how US Chipmakers dealt with the toxicity of their manufacturing processes by moving overseas, where they could harm brown people and no one would care:

Results in epidemiology often are equivocal, and money can cloud science (see: tobacco companies vs. cancer researchers). Clear-cut cases are rare. Yet just such a case showed up one day in 1984 in the office of Harris Pastides, a recently appointed associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

………

SIA, representing International Business Machines Corp., Intel Corp., and about a dozen other top technology companies, established a task force, and its experts flew to Windsor Locks, Conn., to meet Pastides at a hotel near Bradley International Airport. It was Super Bowl Sunday, January 1987. “That was a day I remember being at a tribunal,” Pastides says. The atmosphere “bordered on hostility. I remember being shellshocked.” Soon after the meeting the panel formally concluded that the study contained “significant deficiencies,” according to internal SIA records. Nevertheless, facing public pressure, SIA’s member companies agreed to fund more research.

………

Pastides felt vindicated. More than that, he considered the entire episode one of the greatest successes in public-health history, as do others. Despite industry skepticism, three scientific studies led to changes that helped generations of women. “That’s almost a fairy tale in public health,” Pastides says.

Two decades later, the ending to the story looks like a different kind of tale. As semiconductor production shifted to less expensive countries, the industry’s promised fixes do not appear to have made the same journey, at least not in full. Confidential data reviewed by Bloomberg Businessweek show that thousands of women and their unborn children continued to face potential exposure to the same toxins until at least 2015. Some are probably still being exposed today. Separate evidence shows the same reproductive-health effects also persisted across the decades.

The risks are exacerbated by secrecy—the industry may be using toxins that still haven’t been disclosed. This is the price paid by generations of women making the devices at the heart of the global economy.

………

Yet in virtually every study published since the 1990s, Kim read one form or other of the same phrase: The global semiconductor industry had phased out EGEs in the mid-1990s, signaling the end of reproductive-health concerns. The statements made sense. Not only had IBM and other companies publicly announced that the use of EGEs had been discontinued, but the chemicals also had become classified as Category 1 reproductive toxins under international standards, and European regulators had placed them on a list of the most highly toxic chemicals known to science, designating them Substances of Very High Concern.

Still, something nagged at Kim. In focus groups, young South Korean women working in chip plants told Kim’s colleagues it was not uncommon to go months, or even a year, without menstruating. (Some saw these potentially ominous changes to their reproductive systems as blessings, not warnings. It was just easier not to have periods.) As in the U.S., women dominated production jobs in South Korea’s microelectronics industry, which employs more than 120,000 of them, mostly of childbearing age; they’re often recruited right out of high school. Kim and a colleague decided they needed to conduct a new reproductive-health study. They faced a challenge, however, that Pastides and the other U.S. researchers hadn’t, at least on the front end: a lack of industry cooperation.

In 2013 they persuaded a member of South Korea’s parliament to pry loose national health-insurance data. They got five years of physician-reimbursement records through 2012 for women of childbearing age working at plants owned by the country’s three largest microelectronics companies: Samsung, SK Hynix, and LG. Samsung and SK Hynix accounted for the vast majority of women in the study, as the two have long been among the world’s largest chipmakers. The data covered an average of 38,000 women per year. From that number, the researchers looked at the records of those who had gone to doctors for miscarriages.

The results were both undeniable and shocking to Kim, just as they had been for Pastides almost three decades earlier. She found significantly elevated miscarriage rates and a rate for those in their 30s almost as high as in the U.S. factories. And the findings were conservative, because many women don’t go to the doctor for miscarriages, and because production workers couldn’t be separated in the study from those who worked in offices. “This was not the result I had expected,” Kim says.

As an aside here, this is another argument for single payer in some form, it creates a demographic database that is both available and universal that can be used to find problems like these.

………

After the outcry in the U.S. in the 1990s, chemical companies said they’d changed the formulations for the photoresists and other products they supplied to chipmakers, including those in Asia. But testing data obtained by Bloomberg Businessweek show that changes weren’t made quickly or, in some cases, completely.

………

Kim, the epidemiologist, says the secrecy of these settlements is a reason there was so little discussion for so long of the risks in chipmaking. “It was not published in academic papers,” she says. “Just some hidden settlements between the companies and some victims.”

Even today, the chipmakers themselves sometimes don’t know what they’re bringing into their facilities and exposing their workers to. That’s what SK Hynix discovered in 2015 after hiring a team of university scientists to assess the toxic risks in two of its plants.

Some of their results were made public in Korean, but many of the findings remain confidential. An extract of the research reviewed by Bloomberg Businessweek shows scientists found that the plants used about 430 different chemical products each. These included more than 130 deemed to be dangerous enough that employees exposed to them must undergo special health checks; those chemicals are called CMR agents—shorthand for carcinogens, mutagens, and reproductive toxins. In addition to benzene and EGEs, they’ve historically included arsenic, hydrofluoric acid, and trichloroethylene.

The ability to directly or indirectly poison unsuspecting employees is one of the goals of globalization.  It’s all about labor and regulatory arbitrage, which is why promises of labor, safety, and environmental protections that we hear about whenever they want to push through a trade deal are empty.

Allowing the 1% to f%$# the rest of us is the goal of modern trade deals, so it’s no surprise that this is their actual effect.

Neat Tech

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The good folks at the Air Force Research Laboratory have been working on a radar that uses liquid metal to allow for on the fly reconfiguration:

The US Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) is building antennas using liquid metal to enable changes to the size, shape, and functionality of the electrical wiring.

 Currently, the research effort is using gallium, which is known for its use in radars (gallium arsenide and gallium nitride types) and sensors.

 “What we are doing here is using the gallium as a metal itself,” Christopher Tabor, materials research scientist, AFRL, told Jane’s at the US Department of Defense (DoD) Lab Day, held on 18 May at the Pentagon in Washington, DC.

 “Gallium by itself melts at about 87° Fahrenheit [30.5° Celsius]. If you blend in materials like Indium it becomes a eutectic alloy that will melt at much lower temperatures,” Tabor said. “So this is a conductive fluid below room temperature.”

 Pre-designed channels inside structural composites are filled with liquid metal to produce an embedded, physically reconfigurable antenna, according to AFRL.

We are all familiar with liquid metals, as the liquid metal in “Mercury” thermometers is now the alloy Galinstan, an alloy of Gallium, Indium, and Tin, and is a liquid from around between -19° and 1300°C.

The theory here is that you could have a series of channels and valves (or perhaps fluidic controls) that would allow a radar to change its shape dynamically, which would eliminate the need for actuators found in more conventional radars.

I call this neat stuff.

The Germans are Getting Nervous

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The Germans don’t want a Brexit, but if it happens, they want to be sure that it is painful for the British, and they also want to be sure that it won’t upset the existing political consensus.

I think that the disaster for Theresa May, particularly in context of the German dogma for austerity, has shaken the German establishment, which is why Wolfgang Schäuble is now talking about how all will be forgiven if Britain decides to forgo leaving the EU:

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said that the U.K. would be welcomed back to the European Union if the British decided they no longer wanted to quit the bloc.

French President Emmanuel Macron also said the “door is open” for a return, but warned that it would be much harder to achieve once negotiations have started.

In his first public comments on the matter since the U.K. election, Schaeuble said that “it’s up to the British government to take their own decisions” on Brexit. He said he had discussed the surprise election outcome with Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond the day after the vote, and concluded that “we have to leave them some days” to decide on the way forward.

Asked if the government might reverse its decision to quit the EU, he said it “would not be helpful” to speculate whether that will happen or not. “The British government has said we will stay with the Brexit,” Schaeuble said in the interview during Bloomberg’s G-20 Germany Day. “We take the decision as a matter of respect. But if they wanted to change their decision, of course, they would find open doors.”

I think that they are afraid that if Brexit happens, and Labour ends up in charge, it won’t be a complete clusterf%$#, and could lead to other countries to pulling back from the EU.

Yeah, This is Reassuring

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The founder of chat app Telegram has publicly claimed that feds pressured the company to weaken its encryption or install a backdoor.

“During our team’s 1-week visit to the US last year we had two attempts to bribe our devs by US agencies + pressure on me from the FBI,” Pavel Durov said on Twitter. “It would be naive to think you can run an independent/secure cryptoapp based in the US,” he added.

Durov’s comments follow earlier unsubstantiated claims that arch-rival Signal was compromised.

“The encryption of Signal (=WhatsApp, FB) was funded by the US Government. I predict a backdoor will be found there within 5 years from now,” Durov claimed.

 Live in obedient fear, citizen.

They Would Have to Put Half a Dozen Children on a Spit and Toast Them at the Flame That Comes out of Their Mouth?

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Over at the New York Times, Gretchen Morgenson observes that the CEO of United Airlines was fired for paying bribes to politicians, and was allowed to keep his performance bonuses, and asks, “How Badly Must a C.E.O. Behave Before His Pay Is Clawed Back?“

You see, Jeffery Smisek got to keep his bonuses and his generous golden parachute:

United Airlines’ contempt for customers was on full display in April, when it dragged a passenger from an overbooked plane, bloodying him in the process.

Since then, shares of United Continental Holdings, the airline’s parent, have rebounded smartly, so perhaps investors consider the incident an anomaly.

But those who do may want to check out a lawsuit unfolding in Delaware Chancery Court, one that involves the former chief executive of United and a prime figure in the Bridgegate scandal that has dogged Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey. The facts of the case reflect a similar disdain for United’s shareholders by the corporate board members who are supposed to serve them.

At the heart of the lawsuit is the refusal by United’s directors to retrieve any of the $28.6 million received by Jeffery A. Smisek, United’s former chief executive, when he was defenestrated in 2015 amid a federal corruption investigation.

………

These tawdry events have disturbed at least one of United’s institutional shareholders: the City of Tamarac, Fla., Firefighters Pension Trust Fund. In a litigation demand, it requested that the company’s board claw back the severance pay given to the executives who took part in the bribery scandal. By doing so, United’s board would correct its breach of fiduciary duty and prevent “the unjust enrichment” of company executives.

Seems fair enough. But United’s board has refused. Its justification for not recouping the pay is, well, pretty rich.

In a letter to the pension fund, a lawyer for United explained that it would harm the company to give the board “unfettered discretion to recoup compensation” in cases involving wrongdoing. “Where such discretion is out of step with industry norms,” the letter said, it would “make it difficult for United to recruit and retain top talent, particularly at the senior management level.”

Murder parent? Check.

Ask for mercy as an orphan? Check.

We really need to start throwing executives in jail for this sh%$.

0 for 6 This Session

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For the 6th time, the Supreme Court has reversed a decision from the Federal Circuit (Patent Court):

Yesterday the Supreme Court vacated in part and reversed in part the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit’s decision in the consolidated patent cases Sandoz v. Amgen and Amgen v. Sandoz, completing the specialized circuit’s dismal 0-for-6 record in patent cases at the court this year.

The case involved another skirmish in the long-running battle between research pharmaceutical companies, which tend to seek more intellectual property and regulatory protections for their innovations, and generic pharmaceutical companies, which typically seek to curb intellectual property and regulatory protections.

………

Sandoz emerged as the clear victor in the case, winning the right to bring “biosimilar” versions of complex biologic drugs to market sooner and also gaining a small but potentially important procedural right for future litigations.

………

The first specific legal issue in the case was whether, when Sandoz filed an FDA application to market a biosimilar to Amgen’s biologic drug, Amgen was entitled to obtain Sandoz’s application. On this question, the court provided only a partial answer. It held that Amgen could not get a federal injunction to force Sandoz to turn over the application.

The Federal Circuit had also reached that conclusion, but the Supreme Court did not agree with the lower court’s reasoning. Although the Federal Circuit held that federal injunctive relief was foreclosed by Section 271(e) in the Patent Act (35 U.S.C. § 271(e)), the Supreme Court relied exclusively on 42 U.S.C. § 262(l)(9)(C), which is the provision in the Biologics Act that authorizes research pharmaceutical companies such as Amgen to sue for declaratory injunctions if generic companies such as Sandoz do not turn over their biosimilar applications.

………

The second issue decided by the court was whether Sandoz provided Amgen the proper notice of its intent to market a biosimilar. The Biologics Act requires companies seeking to market biosimilars to provide notice to the first biologics company “not later than 180 days before the date of the first commercial marketing of the [biosimilar] product licensed [by the FDA].”

Sandoz sent Amgen notice while its biosimilar application was still pending before the FDA, and the Federal Circuit held that Sandoz had provided the notice too early. The court of appeals believed that the notice would have “to follow [FDA] licensure, at which time the product, its therapeutic uses, and its manufacturing processes are fixed.”

That holding of the Federal Circuit was the financial crux of the case. A delay of 180 days (approximately half a year) can mean hundreds of millions of dollars in additional revenue for a drug company that retains exclusivity over the original biologic. The Federal Circuit’s ruling meant that any company seeking to market a biosimilar would have to stay out of the market for the entire time of the FDA’s licensing process plus another 180 days after the FDA issued the license.

The Supreme Court reversed the Federal Circuit on this issue and held that “the applicant may provide notice either before or after receiving FDA approval.” To the justices, that result followed from the language of the statute, which imposes only a “single timing requirement” (180 days before commercial marketing of the biosimilar) not “two timing requirements” (after FDA licensure and 180 days before commercial marketing).

To simplify this, once again the Patent Court went with a position that favored the IP holder that had no justification in the statute (they do a lot of that), and then SCOTUS slapped them down.

It’s getting to be a regular thing, because the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit is completely out of control.  Case in point, this court has literally allowed for the patenting of a rainy day.

This court really needs to be shut down, and its judges transferred to Dancing with the Stars or somesuch.

Payback is a Bitch, Corporate Edition

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No, I am not referring to Uber, but rather the moral reprobates who comprise Mylan NV board of directors.

You remember Mylan, don’t you? They are the ones who jacked up the price of the EpiPen and defrauded Medicaid.

Now their board is facing a shareholder challenge:

An influential advisory firm, the Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS), has urged Mylan’s already mutinous shareholders to vote against the company’s incumbent board of directors following the damaging EpiPen scandal and exorbitant executive salaries, Reuters and Bloomberg report.

The ostensible price gouging and greed of the incumbent board led to “significant destruction in shareholder value” and “long-term reputational damage,” ISS wrote in an e-mailed report. In an unusually aggressive move, it urged shareholders to try to oust ten Mylan director nominees, including Chief Executive Heather Bresch, President Rajiv Malik, and Chairman Robert Coury, as well as the compensation committee members.

“All incumbent directors should be considered accountable for material failures of risk oversight over a number of years, when warning signs were available to the company but no actions appear to have been taken,” the firm concluded.

In addition, ISS called executive compensation decisions “egregious,” urging shareholders to reject the company’s compensation packages. Those included paying Coury more than $160 million in compensation and payments last year.

The recommendations from ISS echo that of a campaign from a group of shareholders, who urged their fellow investors to vote against the board, which the group said “reached new lows in corporate stewardship in 2016.” It also follows a government report that Mylan overcharged taxpayers up to $1.27 billion over 10 years by misclassifying EpiPens under the Medicaid Drug Rebate Program. Mylan had previously agreed to settle the matter with the federal government for just $465 million.

Unfortunately, it requires a ⅔ super-majority to remove a member of the board, but the fact that there is a challenge, and that a well respected firm has called them irresponsible in no uncertain terms, means that the writing is on the wall.

If this gets enough ink in their official headquarter nation of the Netherlands, (particularly if the outrageous executive compensation levels) then they might see some regulatory actions on that end.

I Don’t Expect This to Last

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In response to the shooting of a Republican Congressman at a baseball practice in Arlington, Virginia, Ted Nugent is now saying that people should be more civil in discussing politics, and he said that this would apply to him.

I expect the aging rocker to break his promise before Labor Day:

Singer Ted Nugent claims that he has seen the light and will stop using toxic rhetoric to attack Democrats.

In a Thursday interview with 77WABC Radio, Nugent swore that he has “reevaluated” his language and would refrain from saying “anything that can be interpreted as condoning or referencing violence.”

“At the tender age of 69, my wife has convinced me I just can’t use those harsh terms,” he admitted. “I cannot and will not and I encourage even my friends/enemies on the left, in the Democrat and liberal world, that we have got to be civil to each other.”

Nugent is well known for attacking Democrats, particularly former Secretary Hillary Clinton, former President Barack Obama and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). He once referred to the former president as “a piece of sh*t” and “sub-human mongrel” and urged him to “suck on my machine gun.” He then went on to encourage Clinton to “ride one of these into the sunset, you worthless b*tch.”

Anyone want to set up an office pool on when Nugent goes all assassination again?

Linkage

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This cure for IT department bullsh%$ both works, and shows the inanity of many IT department policies:

IT upgraded our computer so now the mouse has to keep moving so it doesn’t go into sleep mode during the run. #LabHack pic.twitter.com/PNcVbwtKha

— Karine (@KarineReiter1) June 9, 2017

World Class Trolling

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In response to a Trump lawyer suggesting that former FBI Director James Comey should be prosecuted for leaking his notes about the Trump meeting, Vladimir Putin has offered him political asylum in Russia.

This is is truly inspired trolling:

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday offered to give political asylum to former FBI Director James Comey, poking at tensions between Comey and President Trump.

“If Comey will be under the threat of political persecution, we are ready to accept him here,” Putin said at a press conference, according to Russian state media outlet TASS.

Comey testified last week that Trump pressured him to “let go” of the FBI investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn before Trump fired him. Comey acknowledged leaking his personal memos about his conversations with Trump to the media, which the White House has seized on to attack the former FBI head’s credibility.

Putin compared Comey’s decision to leak details of conversations with Trump to the actions of Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency leaker who was granted asylum by Russia.

It appears that KGB training includes a 300 level course in training, because is the best trolling I have seen since Jeremy Corbyn suggested that the displaced Grenfell fire victims be lodged in empty houses bought as investments by rich people in the neighborhood.

Daym!  This has been a good week for trolling.