Year: 2019

Seriously?

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In a week where “Centrist” candidates for the Democratic nomination for President have embarrassed themselves, Pete Buttigieg takes it to a new leve when he suggests that the United States should invade Mexico:

South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg said at a Latino forum in Los Angeles on Sunday that he’d be willing to send U.S. troops into Mexico to combat gang and drug violence.

“There is a scenario where we could have security cooperation,” Buttigieg said.

Even so, he added a caveat: “I’d only order American troops into conflict if American lives were on the line and if it was necessary to meet treaty obligations.”

His campaign later clarified that Buttigieg would only be open to military use as a “last resort” in response to Mexican cartel violence or an outside threat that endangers the country’s security.

Buttigieg’s comments came in response to a question at an event hosted by ABC7 Eyewitness News, where he added he would work to “make drug trafficking less profitable by walking away from the failed war on drugs here in the United States.”

He was the only candidate asked directly about moving troops to Mexico.

On Saturday, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro said he disagreed with President Donald Trump’s call to help Mexico “wage war” on cartels following the massacre of nine U.S. women and children in northern Mexico earlier this month.

“I don’t think the United States should send its military down to Mexico. Mexico is a sovereign nation,” he said.

It appears that Mayor Pete has learned absolutely nothing from his experience in Afghanistan.

Deploying US troops is one of the most important actions a President can take, and this sort of blithe and facile response is profoundly troubling.

Not a Single Occurrence of the Word “Genocide”

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The New York Times has a blockbuster using leaked documents showing that China is using mass detentions in an attempt to eradicate the culture of its citizens in western China, most notably the Uighurs. (Long read)

Acting on this scale, there are somewhere around a million people in detention, one can only conclude that that this is a deliberate attempt to eliminate the ethnic character of the population that they are likening to a disease.

Why not a single quote from someone who would describe it as a “genocide”?

The students booked their tickets home at the end of the semester, hoping for a relaxing break after exams and a summer of happy reunions with family in China’s far west.

Instead, they would soon be told that their parents were gone, relatives had vanished and neighbors were missing — all of them locked up in an expanding network of detention camps built to hold Muslim ethnic minorities.

The authorities in the Xinjiang region worried the situation was a powder keg. And so they prepared.

The leadership distributed a classified directive advising local officials to corner returning students as soon as they arrived and keep them quiet. It included a chillingly bureaucratic guide for how to handle their anguished questions, beginning with the most obvious: Where is my family?

The directive was among 403 pages of internal documents that have been shared with The New York Times in one of the most significant leaks of government papers from inside China’s ruling Communist Party in decades. They provide an unprecedented inside view of the continuing clampdown in Xinjiang, in which the authorities have corralled as many as a million ethnic Uighurs, Kazakhs and others into internment camps and prisons over the past three years.

………

The leaked papers offer a striking picture of how the hidden machinery of the Chinese state carried out the country’s most far-reaching internment campaign since the Mao era. The key disclosures in the documents include:  

  • President Xi Jinping, the party chief, laid the groundwork for the crackdown in a series of speeches delivered in private to officials during and after a visit to Xinjiang in April 2014, just weeks after Uighur militants stabbed more than 150 people at a train station, killing 31. Mr. Xi called for an all-out “struggle against terrorism, infiltration and separatism” using the “organs of dictatorship,” and showing “absolutely no mercy.”

 ………

  • The crackdown encountered doubts and resistance from local officials who feared it would exacerbate ethnic tensions and stifle economic growth. Mr. Chen responded by purging officials suspected of standing in his way, including one county leader who was jailed after quietly releasing thousands of inmates from the camps.

    The leaked papers consist of 24 documents, some of which contain duplicated material. They include nearly 200 pages of internal speeches by Mr. Xi and other leaders, and more than 150 pages of directives and reports on the surveillance and control of the Uighur population in Xinjiang. There are also references to plans to extend restrictions on Islam to other parts of China.

………

Since 2017, the authorities in Xinjiang have detained many hundreds of thousands of Uighurs, Kazakhs and other Muslims in internment camps. Inmates undergo months or years of indoctrination and interrogation aimed at transforming them into secular and loyal supporters of the party.

………

The guide recommended increasingly firm replies telling the students that their relatives had been “infected” by the “virus” of Islamic radicalism and must be quarantined and cured. Even grandparents and family members who seemed too old to carry out violence could not be spared, officials were directed to say.

“If they don’t undergo study and training, they’ll never thoroughly and fully understand the dangers of religious extremism,” one answer said, citing the civil war in Syria and the rise of the Islamic State. “No matter what age, anyone who has been infected by religious extremism must undergo study.”

I would note that the CCP already has a policy of aggressive immigration of Han Chinese into non-Han regions, so this is actually stage 2 of a policy that fits the UN definition of Genocide.

At the very least, the reporters could have brought in an export to bring up the genocidal aspects of what Beijing is doing.

In the Annals of Least Sincere Apologies………

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Michael Bloomberg’s apology for his aggressive support for stop and frisk of black and Hispanic men in New York is arguably the least sincere apology that I have heard this year:

Ahead of a potential Democratic presidential run, former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York on Sunday reversed his longstanding support of the aggressive “stop-and-frisk” policing strategy that he pursued for a decade and that led to the disproportionate stopping of black and Latino people across the city.

“I was wrong,” Mr. Bloomberg declared. “And I am sorry.”

The speech, Mr. Bloomberg’s first since he re-emerged as a possible presidential candidate, was a remarkable concession by a 77-year-old billionaire not known for self-doubt: that a pillar of his 12-year mayoralty was a mistake that he now regrets. It was also, in some ways, a last word on an era of aggressive policing in New York City that began a generation ago under former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani — though the fallout on neighborhoods is still felt to this day.

Speaking before the congregation at the Christian Cultural Center, a black megachurch in Brooklyn, Mr. Bloomberg delivered his apology in the heart of one of the communities most affected by his policing policies, and at a location that nodded to the fact that should he decide to run for president, African-American voters would be a crucial Democratic constituency that he would need to win over.

Seriously, how stupid does Bloomberg think that the average Democratic primary voter, of any skin color, is?

This is not a heartfelt apology, this is a transparent ploy.

Trump Went to Hospital Today

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Trump made an unscheduled trip to Walter Reed Hospital today.

The claim is that he was getting a jump on his annual physical, but I kind of doubt it.

President Trump underwent a two-hour doctor’s examination on Saturday at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, which the White House said was part of a routine annual physical and included lab work.

The appointment was not on the president’s schedule, in contrast to a previous physical that Mr. Trump had in February, also at Walter Reed outside Washington.

In a statement, Stephanie Grisham, the White House press secretary, said Mr. Trump, 73, was taking advantage of a free weekend to begin portions of his annual physical, and was anticipating a busy schedule in 2020. She did not specify what types of tests Mr. Trump had.

Yeah, sure.

This is what happened, because the White House is always completely honest about health issues with Presidents.

I Thought That Mike Bloomberg Was a Horror Show, but Deval Patrick………

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How is Deval Patrick a horrible candidate? Let me count the ways.

He is aggressively embracing super-PAC money in his campaign:

Former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick said he isn’t “crazy” about accepting support from super PACs, but he will as he seeks the Democratic presidential nomination.

Asked Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” by host Chuck Todd if he would swear off accepting super PAC money, Patrick said, “We need to do some catch-up, so I think we’ve got to follow and find all sorts of above-board strategies.”

Additionally,  Patrick made his fortune flacking for a rogues gallery of finance and industry industry, foreclosure mills, Bain private equity, big oil, and laundering anti-labor union death squads in Latin America:

In a Democratic presidential field rich with both centrist pragmatists and progressive warriors alike, former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick stands as the answer to a question no one has thought to ask: What does a former oil company executive and venture capitalist think?

………

But in a campaign cycle where presidential candidates from every lane have denounced the outsized role of money in politics, the oil and natural gas industry, and “vulture capitalism,” Patrick’s résumé—marked by lucrative stints at Texaco, Bain Capital and subprime mortgage abattoir ACC Holdings—risks making him a foil for both progressive and centrist rivals for the nomination. Well-placed Democrats told The Daily Beast that the distance between the current mood of the Democratic presidential field and the controversial private sector industries where Patrick has made his living may be too vast to cover—and could make him little more than a punching bag for better-funded candidates.

Finally, after his then brother-in-law was convicted of rape in California, he fired the heads of the Massachusetts sex offender registry when they demanded that he register, because it was marital rape, and his sister had a reconciliation with him.  The kicker is that he has been convicted a 2nd time of rape:

Deval Patrick’s entry into the Democratic presidential contest has focused new attention on his 2014 decision as governor to push out two members of the Massachusetts Sex Offender Registry Board who had sought to put his brother-in-law on the registry due to a rape conviction.
The case has been in the news even before Patrick’s announcement because his brother-in-law earlier this year was convicted of raping Patrick’s sister for a second time. The first rape conviction occurred in 1993.

I agree with Matt Taibbi’s assessment that Deval Patrick’s Candidacy Is yet another example of how the party establishment is creating a complete sh%$ show of the primaries.  (Just read the whole thing)

The Democratic party establishment is desperately trying to find their next “Great White Hope”, and this will not work out well.

Little Bobby Droptables Lives!

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It looks like someone has been reading the “webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language, xkcd, and had developed, and has developed an SQL injection attack to wipe traffic cameras.

I am not sure if would actually work, but I am profoundly impressed about how life mirrors one of the most popular web-comics on the web:

Typical speed camera traps have built-in OCR software that is used to recognize license plates. A clever hacker decided to see if he could defeat the system by using SQL Injection…

The basic premise of this hack is that the hacker has created a simple SQL statement which will hopefully cause the database to delete any record of his license plate. Or so he (she?) hopes. Talk about getting off scot-free!

I do not know if it will work, but I am profoundly amused.

Link to XKCD cartoon:

Not a Surprise

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One of the selling points of the F-35 is that it supposed to be significantly more reliable than legacy aircraft.

Not so much:

The Pentagon’s chief weapons tester said the next-generation F-35 jet continues to fall short of full combat readiness targets and, despite some progress on reliability issues, all three versions of the fighter are breaking down “more often than planned.”

None of the Air Force, Marines and Navy variants of the Lockheed Martin Corp. fighter are meeting their five key “reliability or maintainability metrics,” Robert Behler, the Pentagon’s director of operational testing, said in prepared remarks Wednesday before two House Armed Services Committee panels.

………

“The operational suitability of the F-35 fleet remains at a level below service expectations,” Behler said in the prepared remarks. “In short, for all variants, aircraft are breaking down more often than planned and taking longer to fix.”

………

Even with that 2020 target approaching, analysis to date shows that neither the Marine Corps nor Navy F-35 models are currently “on track” to meet their reliability metrics even as they log more hours, according to the latest assessment.

Among the key lagging metrics cited by Behler are “mean flight hours between critical failure” — a data point that refers to the time between failures that result in the loss of capability to perform a mission-critical task, or mean time between part removals for replacement from the supply chain.

Significantly, while the F-35 fleet demonstrated, over short periods, “high mission capability” rates reflecting the percentage of time jets are safe to fly and able to perform at least one specific mission, the jets “lagged” by “a large margin” the more complete measure of “Full Mission Capable” status, he wrote.

That indicates “low readiness” for combat missions “that require operationally capable aircraft,” Behler said.

Something is seriously wrong with our whole weapons procurement and development process.

Abolish the Patent Court

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Since its founding in 1982, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, aka “The Patent Court” has been a morass of sloppy patent maximalist jurisprudence.

This is why the Supreme Court has been routinely overturning their rulings over the past few years.

Whenever the Supreme Court agrees to review a case from the patent court, there is some sort of reversal in the works, and likely a significant amount of shade thrown at back at the court.

Now SCOTUS will review one of the worst opinions of the Patent Court, Google v. Oracle, where it was determined that programming interfaces (APIs) were subject to copyright, which has the effect of making program interoperability unlawful:

Some big news out of the Supreme Court this morning, as it has agreed to hear the appeal in the never-ending Oracle v. Google lawsuit regarding whether or not copyright applies to APIs (the case is now captioned as Google v. Oracle, since it was Google asking the Supreme Court to hear the appeal). We’ve been covering the case and all its permutations for many years now, and it’s notable that the Supreme Court is going to consider both of the questions that Google petitioned over. Specifically:

  1. Whether copyright protection extends to a software interface. 
  2. Whether, as the jury found, petitioner’s use of a software interface in the context of creating a new computer program constitutes fair use. 

………

To me, as I always point out in this case, the key element will be getting the Supreme Court to recognize that an API is not software. Oracle and its supporters keep trying to insist that an API and executable code are one and the same, and I worry that the Supreme Court will not fully understand the differences, though I am sure that there will be compelling amici briefs trying to explain this point to them. 

It’s clear that SCOTUS is looking to slap down the patent court again.

If you are not sure what a API is, it is a set of specifications that describe how programs talk with each other.

For example, if you wanted the square route of a number, you might do it by sqrt(#) or  [#]squareroute.

They both mean exactly the same thing, but one will work with a program, and the other won’t.

Essentially, Oracle is claiming copyright of program compatibility, and the patent court swallowed it hook line and sinker.

It’s an Old Story

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Journalists get a list of police officers who have been convicted of serious crimes, the state Attorney General threatens jail for possession of the list, and so the journalists publish the list online in a searchable format:

The list of convicted cops the California Attorney General tried to keep secret has just been made searchable by the Sacramento Bee. It contains hundreds of current and former police officers who’ve been convicted of criminal acts over the last ten years.

This collaboration of multiple newsrooms and journalism advocates began with an unforced error by a state agency. Taking advantage of a new state law allowing the public to access police misconduct records, journalists asked the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training for relevant documents. The agency handed over a list of 12,000 former and current officers — a list that apparently was never supposed to be made public.

The state’s Attorney General claimed the journalists had broken the law simply by possessing a document the Commission never should have given them. This couldn’t be further from the truth, but AG Xavier Becerra continued to make this claim, as though it were possible to codify something just by saying it out loud often enough.

I can see why AG Becerra wants this list buried. There’s nothing on it that makes cops or their oversight (which includes Becerra) look good. While the 12,000 officers in the database are a small percentage of the total number of California law enforcement officers employed over the past ten years, this small portion includes a number of cops who were never fired from their agencies despite committing criminal acts that would have put regular people out of a job.

Good.

Good Political Strategy

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One of the concerns about Brexit is the future of both the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) as well as their price controls on drugs.

Jeremy Corbyn is now explicitly promising that neither the NHS nor drug price controls will even be brought up in trade negotiations with the US.

In fact, he his proposing legislation to explicitly prohibit any such negotiations:

UK opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn said the Labour Party will exclude Britain’s National Health Service and medicines from trade deals with the United States, as he accused Prime Minister Boris Johnson of covering up “secret talks” on the NHS.  

………

“Our public services are not bargaining chips to be traded in secret deals. I pledge a Labour government will exclude the NHS, medicines and public services from any trade deals – and make that binding in law”, he added.

It’s good policy and good politics.

You Don’t Do Good by Doing Bad

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In what has been an increasingly common story, both Amnesty International and the Southern Poverty Law Center have been found to violate their employees labor organizing rights:

The U.S. arm of Amnesty International, the global human rights group, broke the law by threatening its own employees, a National Labor Relations Board judge has ruled.

 Managers at Amnesty International USA violated the law that protects employees’ right to organize for improved working conditions, Administrative Law Judge Michael Rosas wrote in a decision issued Tuesday.

 According to the ruling, last year a group of unpaid interns, with support from some of Amnesty’s unionized permanent employees, drafted a petition to their supervisor asking to be paid. “Amnesty International’s commitment to human rights should be proven from within first,” they wrote, according to the ruling.

 In response, Amnesty’s executive director held meetings in which she made implied threats; told employees to make workplace complaints verbally before putting them in writing; equated their organizing with disloyalty; and asked staff to report co-workers’ activism to management.

 All of those actions violated the National Labor Relations Act, the judge concluded.

and for the SPLC:

Southern Poverty Law Center management said Tuesday they would not voluntarily recognize a union organized by employees at the civil rights nonprofit and have hired a Virginia law firm whose website boasts about victories over labor organization attempts.

………
The SPLC Union said in a statement Tuesday it was “disappointed” in the decision but that it would go through an election, if necessary.

“Management’s refusal to voluntarily recognize the union and decision to hire a law firm that specializes in ‘union avoidance strategies’ are counter to SPLC’s values,” the statement said. “The Center cannot truly claim to support workers’ rights, while also hiring a ‘union avoidance’ law firm to prevent its own workers from exercising our right to collective bargaining.”

It’s the hypocrisy, stupid.

Another Uber Setback

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Now that governments are no longer terrified of Uber, much of the regulatory forbearance that has been essential to the success of their business is ending.

Case in point, New Jersey is now demanding back taxes and fines in the amount of $650,000,000.00:

Uber Technologies Inc. has been hit with an almost $650 million bill in unpaid employment taxes and fines from New Jersey, marking another setback for the ride-sharing firm as it struggles to prevent its drivers from being classified as employees.

Earlier this week, the state’s Department of Labor and Workforce Development demanded Uber and a subsidiary, Rasier LLC, hand over the amount for failing to pay employment taxes by, the state argues, misclassifying drivers as independent contractors.

The Labor Department said in letters sent to the firms that they owe $523 million in unemployment and disability insurance taxes for 2014 through 2018. The state added $119 million in penalties and interest.

………

New Jersey officials say that misclassifying employees isn’t fair to workers. They also estimate that misclassification across the workforce costs the state’s almost 250,000 employers an additional $300 per employee because of insufficient funding of the state’s unemployment insurance trust fund.

This is a company whose business plan was dependent on impunity for law breaking for their success, and now that regulators are no longer looking the other way, they are in a world of well-deserved hurt.

So, It’s Down to One Guy

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It turns out that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is responsible for most of the anti-vax ads on Facebook.

I always knew that he was a nut-job about this, but I underestimated the depth of his influence:

Just two organizations were responsible for the majority of anti-vaccine advertisements on Facebook before the social media giant restricted such content in March of this year, according to a November 13 study in the journal Vaccine.

Of 145 anti-vaccine Facebook advertisements that ran between May 31, 2017 and February 22, 2019, the World Mercury Project and a group called Stop Mandatory Vaccination together ran 54% of them. 

The World Mercury Project, which ran the most ads of any single source, is an organization closely aligned with the anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense. Both are spearheaded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmental lawyer turned prolific peddler of dangerous anti-vaccine misinformation. He and his organizations promote conspiracy theories about vaccine safety, including the roundly debunked claim that safe, life-saving immunizations are linked to autism. More recently, Kennedy has become a prominent opponent of laws aimed at increasing vaccination rates among school children.

Stop Mandatory Vaccination is a for-profit venture run by a man named Larry Cook. He, too, trumpets vaccine misinformation and fear-mongers. On Facebook and other platforms, Cook runs advertisements and campaigns making dubious links between the vaccines and tragic baby deaths. One such ad was banned by the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority last year. The regulator determined the ad to be “misleading,” “unsubstantiated,” and “likely to cause undue distress.” In other instances, he has claimed that the pro-vaccine medical community is covering up the “slaughter” of children.

These folks need to be shunned by all people of good conscience, and a fraud investigation or three might be good too.

Took Long Enough

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After a half century of rat-f%$#ery and malice, Roger Stone has finally been convicted of lying to Congress.

Given the volume and intensity of his lies over the years, there is a certain symmetry to this:

For decades, Roger J. Stone Jr. played politics as a kind of performance art, starring himself as a professional lord of mischief, as a friend once called him. He tossed bombs and spun tales from the political periphery with no real reckoning, burnishing a reputation as a dirty trickster.

On Friday morning, a reckoning arrived, the consequence of his efforts to sabotage a congressional investigation that threatened his longtime friend President Trump.

Mr. Stone, 67, was convicted in federal court of seven felonies for obstructing the congressional inquiry, lying to investigators under oath and trying to block the testimony of a witness whose account would have exposed his lies. Jurors deliberated for a little over seven hours before convicting him on all counts. Together, the charges carry a maximum prison term of 50 years.

In a last-minute bid for salvation, prosecutors said, Mr. Stone appealed to Mr. Trump for a pardon on Thursday, using a right-wing conspiracy theorist who runs the website Infowars as his proxy. Mr. Trump attacked the guilty verdict against Mr. Stone in a tweet on Friday but made no mention of a pardon.

………

Mr. Stone joins a notable list of former Trump aides who either pleaded guilty or were convicted of federal crimes in cases stemming from Mr. Mueller’s work. It includes Mr. Gates; Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser; Michael D. Cohen, the president’s longtime fixer; George Papadopoulos, a former Trump campaign aide; and Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman and Mr. Stone’s onetime partner in a political consulting firm.

This is a guy who literally has a tattoo of Richard Nixon on his back, and now he is going to suffer the fate of Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Mitchell.

A Week Ago, I Could Not Find the Evil in This

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I literally wrote, “I Cannot Find the Evil Here,” regarding the Trump Administration’s move against Gilead for violating the CDC’s patent on “Truvada for PrEP,” which used the drug as a prophylactic treatment for HIV.

Well, it turns out that the nature of the CDC patent is such that their attempted enforcement of their claims would allow big Pharma to “Evergreen” (maintain their drug monopoly) basically forever.

It turns out that the patent is not on the drug, but on the fact that taking one pill a day will prevent HIV infection.

This is wrong on a number of levels.

First, the PrEP treatment was not an invention, it was a discovery, which should not be patentable, and second, if upheld, this will provide drug makers with the ability to acquire IP based exclusivity forever:

The Trump administration appeared this month to finally act on a campaign promise to lower drug prices by taking the maker of an HIV drug to court for violating a government patent.

But as with all things Trump, what you see on the surface is not all that’s actually going on.

First, this is only about one drug, a crucial drug to prevent HIV, that was developed with taxpayer money. Its high price has been targeted by well-organized activists for the HIV/AIDS community because it costs more than 300 times as much in the United States as in Africa.

Second, and more importantly, the federal complaint may well help drug companies extend their patents and years of sales at inflated monopoly prices.

“Evergreening” patents and sales exclusivity by the pharmaceutical industry is one of key factors in the high price of prescription drugs in the United States. It keeps cheaper generics medicines off the market.

The specific patent that the U.S. government wants to protect, and get paid for, is one of the controversial group of patents for a process. It covers the prescribed regimen that says the patient must take one pill daily—but not the pill itself.

………

Critics think the government patent is weak. But they also worry that a court decision may validate patents for the regimen, which could create a government-supported precedent allowing drug companies to maintain monopoly prices for decades and possibly forever.

………

Prevention is a secondary use of Truvada. Patents for secondary uses, or for processes—telling patients what pill to take and when—have given drug companies essentially eternal monopolies on sales of those medicines.

“If the government protects this kind of patent, it could ultimately serve drug makers and enable them to keep recycling old patents,” said Love. His non-profit organization has been in the front of efforts to push Congress to force the Bush, Obama and now the Trump administrations to stop giving profitable, semi-permanent patent protection to makers of drugs developed through taxpayer-funded research.

………

The U.S. Government has rarely fought a major pharmaceutical corporation for royalties, though groups such as KEI and Public Citizen have been pushing for aggressive action related to drugs largely funded by American taxpayers.

………

Gilead charges American patients with AIDS about $20,000 per year for the drug Truvada. The same/version of the drug sells in Africa for $60 per year. Truvada for PrEP is the term for applying the drug to prevent AIDS infection. PrEP is an acronym for pre-exposure prophylaxis. This preventive usage is crucial for public health strategies to eradicate HIV and AIDS by 2030, a target announced by Donald Trump this year.

………

Yale University’s Global Health Justice Program leadership, during Congressional hearings in May on PrEP access and costs, slammed Gilead for its refusal to share the proceeds from its sales of Truvada with the government or to significantly lower the price for patients in the United States.

In a letter to the House Oversight Committee, Yale’s health justice team also raised questions about the government’s patent of the secondary use and the treatment process. “We have serious concerns about the value that method of treatment patents like the CDC’s patents for PrEP (and still more other “secondary” patents),” the team wrote.

“Indeed, they are regularly used by the pharmaceutical industry to artificially extend patent protection on expensive brand name drug products, delay generic competition, and keep prices high,” the Yale letter continued.
………

KEI’s Love said the government has been slow to act. “HHS could have exercised march-in rights three years ago on this drug paid for by U.S. taxpayers,” Love said. The government could have applied for a patent that guaranteed the royalty payments to America, not profits to Gilead. “But getting a patent for the procedure is another way of “evergreening” a patent – it makes the United States a patent troll.”

FYI, “March-In Rights” are a provision of Bayh-Dole, the 1980 law that privatized the proceeds of most federally funded research.

The “March-In Rights” allow the federal government to license patents to other entities if the patent holder fails to meet the, “Health and safety needs of consumers.”

Despite the egregious actions of big pharma, “March-In” has never been applied.

I would prefer for the Bayh-Dole to be completely repealed, but the case for “March-In” is incontrovertible.

The Onion Abides

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There are times that it appears to be the only real news source in America, as evidenced by this headline:

Washington Post’ Impeachment Critic Gives Insipid Day One Inquiry 2 Out Of 5 Andrew Johnsons

I would note that The Onion‘s article is really not that different from some press coverage calling the impeachment hearings a “snoozer”.

Seriously, what the f%$# is wrong with the journalism schools?

God Bless America

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Thank God that the NRA is here to protect us from common sense gun laws:

Authorities said the shooting at Saugus High School that left two students dead and three wounded occurred over a 16-second period in which a classmate pulled out a gun in the quad area and opened fire.

The gunfire broke out at 7:30 a.m., when students at the school were scheduled to be in their first-period classes, said Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva.

Paramedics rushed onto the campus, treating the wounded, and law enforcement officers searched nearby neighborhoods for a 16-year-old boy they thought had fled after the shooting. Authorities later said the suspect, identified by neighbors and sheriff’s officials as Nathaniel Berhow, was found on campus with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

Officials said he was taken to a hospital and is in grave condition. Authorities said a message referencing the shooting, thought to have been posted before the attack, appeared on an Instagram account believed to be linked to the suspect. But Instagram said late Thursday, as first reported by BuzzFeed News, that the account didn’t belong to the teenager. A company representative said via email that the account has since been disabled “for violating our policies.”

Sheriff’s Capt. Kent Wegener said the teen was standing in the quad when he pulled a .45-caliber handgun from his backpack and opened fire on other students before turning the gun on himself. It was the suspect’s 16th birthday, authorities said.

What the f%$# is wrong with this country?

Not Had the Time to Read Up on the First Day of Impeachment Hearings

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I listened to them for about 15 minutes while I was grabbing lunch, NPR had them on, and my take, such as it is, is that the Republicans are complete prats, but that is neither surprising nor new.

An interesting side story is that it appears that Trump is considering firing Nick Mulvaney as his chief of staff, but people are trying to stop this because they are concerned that if fired, he would flip on Trump.

At least that’s the context of that I read into that article:

President Trump has been threatening for weeks to fire acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, but senior advisers have counseled him to hold off on such a drastic step amid a high-stakes impeachment probe, according to three people familiar with the discussions.

Trump has expressed particular anger over Mulvaney’s performance in an Oct. 17 news conference in which Mulvaney stunned White House aides by saying military aid to Ukraine was withheld to pressure its government to launch investigations that could politically benefit Trump, two of the people said. Later, Mulvaney issued a statement saying the media had misconstrued his televised comments and that “there was absolutely no quid pro quo.”

Senior advisers have cautioned Trump that removing Mulvaney at such a sensitive time could be perilous, the people said — both because Mulvaney played an integral role in the decision to freeze the aid, and because of the disruption that would be caused by replacing one of Trump’s most senior aides.

………

Mulvaney had direct talks with Trump about the president’s desire to withhold nearly $400 million in security aid to Ukraine, The Washington Post has reported. At the same time, Trump and other allies were pressuring Ukraine to open an investigation of Democratic rival Joe Biden and of theories about the country’s role in the 2016 election, according to congressional testimony in the impeachment inquiry.

Trump’s advisers have cited as a cautionary tale the example of national security adviser John Bolton, who was dismissed in September. Bolton is now a sought-after witness for Democrats, and despite White House instructions to defy a congressional subpoena has expressed a willingness to testify if cleared by a judge.

Translation:

Don’t Fire Him, He Knows Where the Bodies Are Buried!!!!

It’s going to be interesting to see all the rats come after Donald Trump.

In the Old Days, It Was Phone Jamming

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For 2 days in a row, the Labour Party in the UK has been hit with DDoS attacks, and while no data has thought to have been lost, it HAS interfered with access to their site and their electoral tools:

The Labour party has faced a second cyber-attack, a day after experiencing what it called a “sophisticated and large-scale” attempt to disrupt its digital systems.

It is understood the party was the subject of a second distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on Tuesday afternoon. Such attacks use “botnets” – networks of compromised computers – to flood a server with requests that overwhelm it.

………

Labour has not said who it suspects is behind the attacks, but said it was confident its security systems ensured there was no data breach.

………

Labour has not said which digital platforms were targeted, but it is understood some of them were election and campaigning tools, which would contain details about voters. The party has sent a message to campaigners to say what happened and to explain why the systems were working slowly on Monday.

This raises the obvious questions of who did this, and why did they do it now?

There is actually a fairly simple answer:  A deadline is coming up for “Freepost” (in the US, they would be called “Business Reply Mail” leaflets, and currently the system to submit and gain approval for these mailers is offline.

Someone is monkey wrenching Labour voter organizing efforts.

Does anyone know about Labour candidates having big problems with party’s leaflet-creating website? One local campaign chief says: “it hasn’t been working properly & has now completely failed. Candidates can’t get their leaflets off it & approved. It appears to have been hacked.”

— Michael Crick (@MichaelLCrick) November 11, 2019

— Michael Crick (@MichaelLCrick) November 11, 2019

I’m told that some Labour candidates fear that unless the party can resolve the problem very soon, then they could miss the deadline for getting their Freepost leaflets written, designed and approved

— Michael Crick (@MichaelLCrick) November 11, 2019