That Book Kept Me Up All Night

Damn you, Atrios.  He’s been pushing that damn book by Bee Ridgway for the past couple of months.  It’s called The River of No Return. It just so happened that I was looking for a good book to read on Audible but it’s not out in recorded format yet.  So, I downloaded it to my iPad.  Just a few quick pages, I thought, before I clean out the garage.  Before I knew it, it was getting dark outside.  Then I just gave up all pretense and read the whole thing last night.  I couldn’t put it down.

Now, I’m going to be dragging my ass all day long and I still have to clean the garage.

If you like stories about time travel, creepy guys with dead eyes, and international conspiracies, combined with  a touch of wholesome, 19th century bodice ripping, check it out.

I smell a series.

{{snicker}}

Matt Taibbi writes:

Minds are changing on Too Big to Fail. A month ago, it was just something in the air. Now, it looks like we’re headed for a real legislative confrontation. And man, is the finance sector freaking.

Last week, on April 24th, Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Louisiana Republican David Vitter introduced legislation called the “Terminating Bailouts for Taxpayer Fairness Act of 2013 Act,” or the “Brown-Vitter TBTF Act” for short. The bill is a gun aimed directly at the head of the Too-Big-To-Fail beast.

[...]

The S&P report, entitled “Brown-Vitter Bill: Game-Changing Regulation For U.S. Banks”, is so incredibly hysterical in its tone that, reading it, one cannot help but deduce that people on Wall Street are genuinely afraid of this bill. The paper essentially hints that forcing banks to retain more capital could lead to world financial collapse, the onset of a new Ice Age, mammoths roaming Nebraska, etc. “The ratings implications of the Brown-Vitter bill, if enacted, for all U.S. banks would be neutral to negative,” the report read. In the second paragraph, it reads:

If congress enacts the bill as proposed, Standard and Poor’s Ratings Services would have concerns about the economic impact on banks’ creditworthiness stemming from the transition to substantially higher capital requirements.

Having a ratings agency bent to monopolistic bank influence give a bad rating to a piece of legislation designed to . . . curb monopolistic bank influence is a bad surrealistic joke, like a Rene Magritte take on lobbying – Ceci n‘est pas une Too-Big-To-Fail!

Of course, the Democrats are bound to blow this one.  They always do.  Heavy sigh.

And why do they always manage to blow it?  Greg Sergeant at The PlumLine provides a clue:

The New York Times and CBS News have released new poll findings that again confirm what other polls have showed: Large majorities agree with the Democratic position, and disagree with the Republican position, on key issues facing the country. But before delving into those numbers, I wanted to highlight this quote from a Republican voter — given to the Times in a follow up interview — because it perfectly captures what is currently causing all the gridlock and stalemate in Washington:

“Rick Buckman, 52, a Republican and an electrical engineer from Dallas, Pa., said that while he supported stricter gun legislation, he did not necessarily approve of the president’s approach. “I was really ticked off that the law didn’t pass,” Mr. Buckman said. “But I thought it was wrong of President Obama to get in front of the public and use people who had been damaged by gun violence as props.””

Obviously one doesn’t want to read too much into what one voter says, but this is just perfect. This Republican supports stricter gun laws, and was “ticked off” that they didn’t pass. But to this voter, when Obama gets out there and advocates for what he supports, the president is just grandstanding. What’s more, this voter has been seduced by a ridiculous and lurid line pushed by far right Senators and right wing media — that there’s something nefarious and cynical about Obama’s alliance with Newtown families in pushing for gun control, even though better gun laws are exactly what those families want, and even though they themselves first contacted the White House to get involved in the campaign to push for it.

Greg then goes on to suggest that this is because the president can talk a good game but can’t really do anything at the executive level.

I’m not buying it.  I think the real reason voters like the one quoted turn against Obama and the Democrats is because the right wing noise machine knows that its audience LOVES kicking losers when they’re down.  It’s human nature.  Democrats are always forced to compromise.  If  Democrats get caught doing sexytime without a license, they’re forced to resign, unlike Republicans who manage to turn indiscretions into milestones on their journey to self-discovery.  And punching Dirty Fucking Hippies has become a national pastime.  Democrats are praised for decking their own.  It makes Democrats look weak and who the hell wants to sit with a bunch of fricking losers?  Kicking, punching and dissing weak people develops a momentum of its own.

I’ve said before that Democrats have to develop some muscularity, grow a unibrow and start taking prisoners.  Once we start screaming that we’re reinstituting Habeas Corpus, closing Guantanamo and approving Plan B for 2 year olds, whether right wing nuts like it or not, things will change.

Our biggest problem is convincing the student body types who populate the Democratic caucus to stop being such suckers and sell outs, and punch someone out.

Talking us down from the glyphosate ledge

Glyphosate. Not keeping me up at night.

Glyphosate is now the new cyclamate and we’re all supposed to be terrified to use it in agriculture.  Oh, please.  Check out this analysis of the glyphosate study by Derek Lowe at In the Pipeline, Is Glyphosate Poisoning Everyone?.  Here’s the money quote:

Now, that presumably sounds extremely detailed and impressive if you don’t know any toxicology. What you wouldn’t know from reading through all of it is that their reference 121 actually tested glyphosate against human CYP enzymes. In fact, you wouldn’t know that anyone has ever actually done such an experiment, because all the evidence adduced in the paper is indirect – this species does that, so humans might do this, and this might be that, because this other thing over here has been shown that it could be something else. But the direct evidence is available, and is not cited – in fact, it’s explicitly ignored. Reference 121 showed that glyphosate was inactive against all human CYP isoforms except 2C9, where it had in IC50 of 3.7 micromolar. You would also not know from this new paper that there is no way that ingested glyphosate could possibly reachlevels in humans to inhibit CYP2C9 at that potency.

In the pharma lab, if a compound had an IC50 of 3.7 micromolar against a target, we’d have to be desperate to call it a “hit”.  That level of activity means you’d have to choke down a lot of chocolate cookies before you’d be even mildly affected.

So, you can stop worrying about glyphosate poisoning.  That doesn’t mean everything in the world is safe to consume.  It’s just that glyphosate is no dioxin and you won’t have to superfund site a farm that uses it.

Lowe also has a post on the cost of cancer drugs that is worth reading.  It gems fairly nicely with my cynical theory of the current pharma business model, which goes like this: Once upon a time, big pharma made drugs for all kinds of ailments, like heart disease, schizophrenia, depression, reproductive health, antibiotics, diabetes, pain, inflammation, etc.  But over the last 30 years, it has become increasingly more difficult to get those drugs to market for a variety of reasons I won’t go into here.  Suffice it to say that the FDA doesn’t approve very many small molecule drugs anymore.  Like virtually none.  A pharma can spend a lot of money on research only to have a drug shot down at the approval stage.  So, how does a drug company make money if it can’t sell drugs?

Easy.  It concentrates on cancer and orphan drugs.  Orphan drugs are for diseases that are relatively rare.  For cancer drugs, the path to profit is pretty straightforward.  The patients are desperate. They’ll pay what the market will bear and then some.  Will they mortgage their houses?  Yeah, probably.  So, the market is there.  But it gets better.  Cancer drugs are fast tracked for approval and no one is overly concerned with toxicity.  In other words, there won’t be class action lawsuits because patients are grateful for any extension of life they get.  Even if the patient dies, their families are likely to consider their treatment as advancing the knowledge of science.  No one complains.  If you’re a bean counter, oncology drugs are as good as it gets.  They’re profitable, quickly approved, they don’t have to be perfect and no one will hold you accountable.  It’s probably the same situation for orphan drugs.

This is the financier’s mindset at work.  R&D people don’t think like this.  But in the end, there is a ceiling to the amount of money we as a society are willing to pay for potentially lifesaving drugs and  we are now up against it.  Meanwhile, if you are suffering from any other ailment, like bipolar disease or osteoporosis or some flesh eating bacterial infection, you’re going to be stuck with older drugs that are quickly becoming generics.  The good news is that the generics will be cheaper, well, at least for a little while longer.  I don’t think that can last as there won’t be enough profit in generics to keep the production facilities up to FDA standards. I can easily imagine some production facilities being taken offline a la the rolling blackouts of the California energy crisis 10 years ago.  Some jerk generics traders are going to be yucking it up about Granny not being able to afford her cholesterol lowering drugs.  Call me paranoid but as far as I know, there’s nothing to stop such scenarios from taking place and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s already happened.

At some point, the price of generics will start to rise and in some cases, they haven’t really dropped all that much yet.   There won’t be a steady stream of new and improved drugs coming from the pipeline.  It will be more of a thin trickle.  The public has spoken.  It doesn’t want me-too drugs even if they are better than what’s already on the market, and it doesn’t want any drug that’s less than 100% perfect and free from all side effects.  Whether this combination of financier morality and public skittishness is good for medicine, science or society are questions we haven’t even considered yet.  No one, it seems, except the displaced scientists from Pharmageddon seem to be discussing those issues.  Someday, the Ezra Kleins and Duncan Blacks will wonder how that happened but it’s already almost too late to do anything about the coming Dark Ages of pharmaceutical medicine.

So, if you’re rich and you have cancer, you’re probably going to be Ok.  If not, well, it’s just another symptom of being in the 99%.

I came, I saw, I mowed

This weekend I bought a lawnmower and cut the grass.  It turns out I have a lot of grass.  Halfway through, a neighbor introduced himself and admired the new Briggs and Stratton engine.  Hoo-Hoo!  We discussed basements, landscaping and sump pumps, a topic with which I am all too familiar.  He told me he had pitbulls and a 21 year old son with a shiny red convertible.  I told him I would try to keep my 17 year old daughter away from both.

At some point during the two hours of cutting and trimming, I started to wonder just why it was I wanted so much lawn.  Oh, yeah, raised beds.

I’d show you a picture of the beautifully cut backyard with the perfectly straight diagonal mower lines but I was too tired to take a picture.  Speaking of mower widths, I found myself in the aisle of the local big box store questioning two employees, “Do 2 inches really make that much difference?”.  Funny looks.

The kid came with me this time.  She made herself busy raking the flower beds and bagging leaves.  I took her to a wallpaper store and she picked out some samples. We pulled up the carpets on the second floor and stairs.  Why do people pick ugly carpets, she asked.  Good question. Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder or the previous owners couldn’t see too good.

On Saturday, I visited the DMV and handed over all of my documents to a one eyed, leather vested, Harvey-Davidson afficianado listening to Casey Kasem replays on an XM radio.  It was 1976 again, the same year I got my first license in Pennsylvania.  We chit-chatted while he checked my information and assigned me the same driver’s license number I had before.  I surrendered my New Jersey license and he punched a hole in it.  Then he handed it to me and a yellow form for my temporary license and said, “Welcome back.”

Ahhh.

Reaping, Sowing, whatever

Obama and the Democrats are less than useless.  Film at eleven.

Oh, well, if only we could have done something about this situation back in 2011 before they took us for granted…

The Most Shameful Picture

I picked up on this at Eschaton but it needs to go viral.

There was a Congressional hearing on Long Term Unemployment and here’s what it looked like:

That’s right.  ONE lawmaker showed up.  ONE.

This is how much American politicians care about the millions of people thrown out of work by the reckless gambling of our financial class.  This is how much consideration hundreds of thousands of unemployed scientists get from their government.

The whole lot of them need to lose their own jobs and see how it feels to make ends meet on their dwindling savings and part time work.

There are no words that adequately describe how disgusted I am.

Revealing, Sickening or Scarily Incompetent?

Someone hacked the AP Twitter account today and tweeted that the White House was bombed and Obama was badly injured.

The stock market took a dive.  In a matter of minutes, the market plunged almost 100 points.

That’s not a precedent I would have liked to have set.  Maybe next time, they’ll hack Reuters, MSNBC, CNN, Al Jazeera and the State Department.

(and what exactly were they dumping that seemed to so heavily rely on Obama? Curiouser and curiouser…)

The people who run the economy should be sacked.