Varna in Violet

I went to see Hillary today in downtown Pittsburgh. If you follow my Twitter stream, you can get caught up with what happened. I’ll have more on it tomorrow. Tonight, I’m a little tired from standing for about 4 hours. If you have a chance to see her, you won’t regret it. She’s inspiring.

Tonight, I leave you with something really lovely and the ideal American-Russian collaboration. Joy Womack recently competed in the international ballet competition in Varna, Bulgaria. Varna is a biggy in the Ballet world. To perform well in Varna can have a profound effect on your career. Joy took silver. That’s fantastic considering how many dancers were competing.

Joy dances at the Kremlin Ballet in the heart of Moscow. She speaks fluent Russian and is a Bolshoi trained dancer. Her dance partner, Mikail Martynyuk, who did not compete, and her ballet teacher Zhanna (very long Russian last name I have to look up) went to Varna with her. Zhanna must be very proud of her student. And Misha is Joy’s rock. A talented dancer on his own, Misha is a tightly coiled spring and a sympathetic partner.

Here is their first round dance, the pas de deux from Le Corsaire. Relax and enjoy on a cloud of violet vapor.

Tonight is the End of the Beginning

Emily Bazelon, one of the GabFest Trio who week to week drives me nutz with her own personal demands for political purity, seems to have grown a heart in the last several days. By golly, I think Emily finally gets it.

Emily says that tonight, Hillary begins the battle of her life. I couldn’t agree more. It’s dumbfounding that this race should even be close. But there are millions of people out there, especially men, who seem to hate Hillary more than they love their freedom from irresponsible megalomania. They seem eager to aggressively pounce on Hillary and stomp the s^&* out of her.

It’s going to get very, very ugly. 

But tonight, I hope she can put that aside and bask in adulation. She has accomplished so much. She has taken on a role that transcends Hillary Clinton. I believe it is more of a triumph than what Obama accomplished 8 years ago because we have never had a woman get this far. It’s exciting because there’s a mystery there. How will she govern? What will she do differently? What will her priorities be?

I have no doubt that she will work her heart out for us. We may not always agree with everything she does but we will never be able to say she didn’t try.

But first we have to get her there. And for once, I agree heartily with the Obamas. AS Michelle says, “When they go low, we go high”. And as Barack asks, we will carry her.

Tonight we celebrate, tomorrow we go win this thing.

PUMA to Bernie People

Let’s put aside your increasingly delusional thinking about how EEEEEVIL Hillary is with her wicked neoliberal machinations that she is going to gag you with.

If you voted for Obama in 2008 and didn’t think the system was rigged and never raised your voice when the evidence of the rigging was staring you in the face from your TV during the Rules Committee meeting in May 2008 as Harold Ickes furiously said “You bet your ass I’m angry”, then you weren’t paying attention. It was deeply unfair and rigged, especially when the candidates went to the convention in a statistical deadheat in elected delegates but a plan by the DNC to cover it up denied Hillary a real role call vote.

Oh, but that was OK because it was Hillary, right?

I suppose you’re going to tell me that we should ignore all of the primary state votes this year and that only caucus states are holy and inviolable because, after all, this is Hillary we are talking about.

And it was perfectly OK with you that the woman who had won the popular vote in 2008 but through elected delegate reapportionment in Michigan for a candidate who wasn’t even on the effing ballot, lost the elected delegate count by a tiny, tiny amount, was abandoned by the superdelegates en masse and in vastly dispproportionate numbers to her delegate count. Those superdelegates, if they were following rules you insisted on this year, would have given her the win in 2008. One of those disloyal superdelegates broke the news to Hillary that they were leaving her. Do you know who that person was? Debbie Wasserman Shultz. But that’s OK because it’s just Hillary we are talking about.

Do you know WHY we went PUMA in 2008? It wasn’t about Hillary. It was about how a bunch of arrogant, militant, temper tantrum throwing mostly male voters decided to substitute their judgement for the judgement of 18,000,000 voters who did not vote for the candidate of THEIR choosing. And the DNC approved that message. It was because rigging the primary was setting a bad precedent and as Ickes said, was a bad way to start down the road to party unity. In fact, I might argue that it was that very Rules Committee meeting back in 2008 that makes you think that if you just make enough noise, you can get any primary outcome overturned. Because it’s just Hillary.

Compared to the PUMAs of 2008, you have no right to complain. She. Won. Nothing Debbie said or emailed changes that. Even if there were no superdelegates, she still won. It wasn’t even close. Every vote for her was a legitimate vote and the sum of those legitimate votes was greater than the sum of his legitimate votes.

This is not a childhood organized sport where everyone gets an award. In this game, there can be only one clear winner and this year, there was no cheating. Even if Debbie gave you every delegate from Nevada like the DNC gave an overwhelming number of delegates from Michigan to Obama, Bernie still would have lost.  This year there were no reasons for dirty tricks because it was never close.

And here we are AGAIN, the votes of 16.5 million people held hostage by a bunch of arrogant voters from the other candidate’s side who are convinced beyond all reason that Hillary is some kind of demon incarnate who is going to jump on us while we’re sleeping and suck out our political souls. Not all of Bernie’s people of course. Some of them are old enough to remember when primaries that resulted in a clear winner meant “Better luck next time”.

This year, like 2008, it is not about Hillary vs her opponent. It is about one group of voters arrogantly demanding that they substitute their judgment for everyone else’s because they know what’s good for us. OUR votes are negligible, YOUR votes are the only ones that count.

Vote for whoever you like in the fall. Nothing we do or say is going to persuade you otherwise. Your vote is your own.

But if you think the Clinton supporters at this year’s convention are going to let you get away with invalidating our choices and make a spectacle out of the proceedings, you may be very surprised by what happens next.

 

Four Tweets and Two Interviews

About a week ago, this tweet showed up in my stream and summarized everything that is worng with our current economy:

Here’s what happened next:

And after that?

{{crickets}}

That’s because when anyone has to actually sit down and think about it, the Gig Economy is only good for investors with a lot of money who can afford to dump a start-up when it doesn’t turn out to be the “get rich quick” scheme they thought it was.

The idea that some guy in his 20s is going to want to become a journeyman tech worker indefinitely is unrealistic. No one wants to live in a micro apartment forever. If you want a spouse and kids and a house, you can not do it if you are constantly looking for your next job that might be in another city where your spouse might not be able to find work or have to leave their own career behind. You can’t drag kids from one insecure gig to another and keep them in school without facing significant consequences down the road. (Take if from a Navy brat who still has problems with simple arithmetic. Thank god for calculators.)

Other things you can’t do in the Gig Economy as a tech worker: It’s hard to justify owning a house.How can you reasonably apply for a 30 yr mortgage if you don’t know when or where you’ll be working? It’s hard to save for retirement. Even if you are paid well, and some Accenture people I know are paid very well, you need to keep a significant chunk of liquid assets in case you’re laid off for extended periods of time. It used to be 6 months of salary. I’d say the actual amount is closer to two years. You just never know.

And add to that the stress of always shopping for a new job, updating your LinkedIn profile, networking, paying thousands of dollars for meaningless certifications, never getting enough experience or getting experience and then having to leave it all behind when the contract runs out.

IT IS THE STUPIDEST WAY TO RUN AN ECONOMY.

Yeah, if you’re an entrepreneur and you have a flexible morality that allows you to take advantage of “ease of migration” and “fluid labor laws” while benefitting from the “rule of law” and other nice infrastructure that everyone else pays for with their taxes, then it’s a sweeeeet deal. Good for Marc Andreeson! I used to admire the team who came up with Mosaic, the first browser I ever wrote HTML pages for back in 1995. But he is symptomatic of many people who think that just because this economy is working swell for him that we can all jump on the “I wanna be a rich entrepreneur!” bandwagon.

As I’ve pointed out before, biopharma R&D is a team sport, a collaborative activity where the credit is spread among many people. It does not adapt well to a start up economy where there are promises of fabulous riches made to a select few people of “talent”. Sure , there will be exceptions but what Marc will never know is how many cures did not get made because the research was not sexy enough to get the funding it needed.

And don’t even get me started about the companies and universities that make you sign over your patent rights as a condition of employment. When we were all in corporate labs with mostly stable jobs and a decent standard of living, we didn’t think twice about it. The company paid for the capital and overhead, we gave them a patent. It was fair. Now, all the risk is born by the researcher and they can’t keep their intellectual property.

Anyway, I won’t go on and on about it because you’ve heard it all before. My point is that as much as the candidates talk about retraining and having the work force catch up with technology, they seem to be ignoring the fact that there are millions of highly trained tech and R&D workers with all of the tech skills a company could want who are forced into lives that are pretty similar to migrant labor. Sure, the pay might be good for short periods of time but stretch that out over 40 years of a typical worker’s life and it’s a bad deal. There is so much uncertainty that it is going to have, and is currently having, a significant impact on the economy going forward.

We need to do something about those fluid labor laws where it is easy to lay people off for no good reason at any time, and we need to give foreign workers green cards when they are hired here so that their lives are not subject to the whims of vulture capitalism. If we really, really need highly educated foreign born citizens, then they are valuable enough to treat them as human beings, decently, with an opportunity to find other jobs if they are laid off due to no fault of their own.

Which one of our candidates is getting a clue?

I submit to you two recent interviews that Hillary has given recently. One is with Ezra Klein where they talked about policy. When I heard this, I could swear she’s been reading this blog for the last several years. She uses the words like “churn” to refer to the practice of large corporations to be perpetually overturning their work force every couple of years.

The other is the interview she gave to Charlie Rose last week where she says that “income insecurity” is a big problem. If she really means it, she will also have to acknowledge that profit sharing does NOT lead to secure incomes. She’s going to have to go back and talk to the Andreesons and other Obama’s supporters and tell them that’s not going to cut it.

The best thing about these interviews besides her command of policy, her confidence and her passion, is that she seems to have really started to listen. America is not as dark and foreboding as Trump would make us believe. But all is not well in terms of the economy and work and no one believes the current administration’s rosy scenarios and PR team. That is where the anger is coming from. We get a steady stream of Pravda media and it isn’t squaring with our own lives. Politicians, and by that I mean Republicans and some student body president Democrats, can only pull this off for so long before the electorate throws them all out.

She’s getting it. Good. That’s what I want to hear.

Gently Smiling Jaws

Getty Images

We had to wait until almost 2pm before Hillary and Tim Kaine showed up at the field house. There she was, cheery in robin’s egg blue. He was tall and relaxed in an open collar shirt. She gave a very pointed speech about Trump and his rule of one. There were some memorable lines. And then she did a magic trick.

Tim Kaine took the podium and nailed it.

Wasn’t that awesome? And there was Hillary sitting in back on her stool, looking perfectly content to let him have the stage and grinning from ear to ear as if to say, “Do I know how to pick them or what??”

She does indeed. Between the two of them, they have every branch of government covered except the Supreme Court. These are the two people who will get to nominate the next justices. Woot!

Meanwhile, Kaine gave his biography. He’s a really decent guy. Even his colleague Republican Senator Jeff Flake congratulated him. He also ticks every possible box Hillary Clinton could want in a VP pick:

• From a battleground state- Virginia
• Former Mayor and Governor
• Faced a serious gun related incident during his tenure that compelled him to…
• Take on the NRA to prevent guns from falling into the wrong hands
• Roman Catholic who likes Pope Francis
• Actually went on a mission trip to Honduras where…
• He learned to speak fluent Spanish

I could go on but you get the point.

But don’t be deceived. Behind that smiling face is the mind of a shrewd politician. He delivers his killing blows with neatly spread claws and gentle demeanor. I have no doubt that he’s companionable, competent and experienced, just what a VP should be. He can take over without any rookie mistakes. And he got to this place because he plays the game very well.

Can I just say that it’s about time we got people with experience running the executive branch? You know, people who don’t have to do on the job training, or will start the bargaining from a position of weakness, and who know how the web is structured so they know what threads to pull to get the whole thing moving in their direction? Politics is for politicians and this country has had plenty of really good politicians. They’re not all bad.

By all accounts he is a decent, hard working, god fearing, civil rights championing ex-governor with a heart. And he looks deadly for Trump and Pence.

Well done, Hillary. I have no doubt that she was rational and strategic and made this decision all by herself. There was no indication of second thoughts or buyer’s remorse. She also claims to be “afflicted with the responsibility gene“. As an eldest child, I know exactly where she’s coming from.

This was her first big decision and it was brilliant.

The two of them were like a crisp, bracing, joyful wind blowing away all the sturm und drang of Trump’s RNC convention speech translated from the original German.

All you lefty guys out there can relax now. (You know who you are, Joe Trippi and others too numerous to mention) This is what we saw in Hillary all along. She’ll take it from here.

 

Lighter Notes

Jaysus this week has been depressing. Let’s lighten things up around here.

For those of you who are Serial fans, Adnan Syed may be getting a new trial. Based on the evidence that was presented in a hearing a few months ago, his conviction was vacated. I think that’s a fancy way of saying, “technically, you’re innocent but we’re not done with you yet”. It’s hard to believe he could have been convicted in the first place based on such flimsy evidence -and that’s probably why I have never been selected as a juror. I’m just a f&*(ing pain in the ass with questions and not going along with the crowd. Anyway, hope he’s home soon.

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It’s hard to believe that anything about Hillary’s email can be considered light hearted but it always amuses me when I listen to Poltical Gabfest where David Plotz, John Dickerson and Emily Bazelon twist themselves into knots over them. You can hear the frustration in their voices over the 8 years of a very secret presidency where the press that elected Obama has been fed nothing but eensy-weensy nuggets of nothing. It’s a bit ironic that the only person who we have any tinge of scandal about is Hillary and that only because the Republicans have been relentless over Benghazi. I’m sure everyone who is anyone in Washington has a private email account where they squirrel things away and it probably comes with a lot of encryption and poison pills these days.

Bazelon was uncharacteristically flummoxed over the legal reasoning why James Comey did not pursue Hillary for “gross negligence”. But I think we can all logic this out.

1.) There was no criminal intent and no evidence of any legal wrongdoing.

2.) Comey, knowing he was on the hook to deliver the goods, gives an unprecedented press conference to discuss his findings and why he isn’t going to indict. It’s the best he can do for Gowdy’s committee. There’s nothing to charge her with but he can smear her for carelessness and make her behavior look negligent and inexcusable.

3.) The problem is it wasn’t even gross negligence, which is why he was trying so hard to signal this to Gowdy et al during the hearing. He was telling them that the attack ad he gave in the press conference was as far as he could legally go. As I understand it, the State Department’s probe is going to pick up where it left off before it was so rudely interrupted and the truth about the emails is going to come out. Comey’s pronouncements were purely subjective statements that indicated the borders of his abilities to prosecute. He can’t get her for doing anything illegally with criminal intent AND he can’t get her for “gross negligence” because it doesn’t even make that threshhold either.

There’s nothing there.

Emily Bazelon, legal scholar, is smart enough to figure this out so I don’t know why she sounds so mystified about it. It’s staring her right in the face but she doesn’t want to admit it. The Comey press conference was a political hit job. It was a PERSONAL email server with nothing important on it and while the State department might have rules and guidelines, no laws were broken and no one even knew it existed until Benghazi went looking for gotcha emails.

Why do we need to see what’s in her personal email anyway, Emily? I mean, if there’s nothing classified in them of any interest, not even for the Chinese, why do we need to be snooping? I don’t think Emily has a good reason for this except that Hillary made it harder for them to do it and avoided FOIA requests. But then, the whole administration has been avoiding FOIA requests and has zipped it good and have left the media kicking the curb. They didn’t get any juicy scandal to report about for 8 long years. Later on in the podcast, they discuss a White House released description of Obama’s evening routines and note that there’s not even mention of Michelle and the girls in it. There are, however, details of exactly how many salted almonds Obama eats each evening. It’s exactly 7. It’s hillarious how the White House jerks the media’s chains especially after they were so extremely helpful getting him elected in the first place.

We tried to warn them but did they listen?

At one point, Bazelon likens Hillary’s behavior to that of Chelsea Manning’s. This shows just how disconnected the media has become over Clinton’s email. There’s no comparison between Manning and Clinton. Manning, regardless of how you feel about her motives, intentionally broke the law and leaked undeniably classified information of national importance. It’s not like apples and oranges, it’s like apples and platypuses. They’re not even in the same kingdoms.

Give it up, guys. If you pursue this, it’s going to depress your ratings. I guarantee that the only people who want this to come up in a debate between Trump and Clinton are the diehard Trump supporters and a small group of Bernie supporters experiencing a temporary psychogenic fugue state. The rest of us won’t watch the debates or will switch them off the minute the emails come up. There’s a resistant conspiracy culture growing around this issue that’s unhealthy and counterproductive going into the general election. The media has great power but it hasn’t been very responsible lately.

Yes, Emily, John and David, I’m talking about YOU and your colleagues. Grow up already.

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Joy Womack, principal dancer for the Kremlin Ballet, is going to the International Ballet Competition in Varna, Bulgaria. Ballet fans know that Joy was one of the first American students to graduate from the Bolshoi ballet academy and then joined the Bolshoi itself as a soloist. But she never really got an opportunity to dance at the Bolshoi. She was in the company in the year when the director was splashed in the face with acid, an attack that was arranged by another dancer over the treatment of his girlfriend, an up and coming dancer. Joy herself was told that if she ever wanted to dance on stage, she would have to pay for the privilege. So, she left, and the Kremlin Ballet picked her up. In the last few years, she’s been working hard on classical repertoire, which bores me to tears, but whatever. She’s good at it. She’s gone through a lot of ups and downs, like alcoholic partners and unpleasant co-workers who take their anti-Americanism out on her. Plus, the pay sucks. She supports herself on her little company that makes Prima Bars.

Varna may change that. If she does well, it could give her more opportunities to dance as a guest artist for companies. I think that’s what she’s shooting for here.

Here’s one of her rehearsals for Varna with one of her more reliable and complementary partners, principal dancer Misha Martynuk and her ballet teacher, Zhanna. She’s the seated woman shouting corrections in Russian. They’re rehearsing the pas de deux for Le Corsaire first, followed by Diane and Acteon. Keep an eye out for the lift at about the 5:30 mark.  I’ve watched a lot of youtube videos of this pas and have never seen it done so effortlessly. Not even Vishneva and Acosta are this breathtaking.

Thoughts but not prayers on Dallas

To whoever did it in Dallas,

Diamond Reynolds was unnaturally calm when she made a video of a police officer pointing a gun in her car after shooting Philando Castile while her 4 year old daughter was sitting in the backseat.

Then the phone kept recording when they forced her out of her car and onto the ground while her daughter screamed from the backseat and Philando Castile expired in the front seat soaked in blood.

Then Diamond kept the phone running while she was put in the backseat of a police car handcuffed while her daughter tried to console her and Diamond unleashed her anguish over the death of Philando Castile.

You would have to be inhuman to not feel how horrible and devastating it is to be black and driving a car with a broken tail light. Diamond showed us what it is really like.

And now, Diamond’s bravery and calm and final grief is going to be quickly forgotten because you had to take matters into your own hands.

Those of you who survived your terrorist activities will receive better due process than Philando Castile or Alton Sterling ever did. But who is going to remember that?

Who’s going to tolerate another march for black lives who are being slaughtered for minor traffic violations when they can see how you mowed down 11 police officers, 5 of whom are now dead?

It’s Dallas, where assassinations are not unheard of. It’s in Texas. And everyone and their brother has a gun. This nation is armed to the teeth and we have an orange colored loose cannon running for president. But it’s not him I’m worried about. It’s his crazy ass followers. It’s going to start to look like the Wild West. That’s not the country I want to live in.

Retribution is bound to follow and Diamond Reynolds will be replaced on the front page by pictures of you and the heartbroken family members of the people you killed.

What a stupid waste.

 

The Republicans “Oh S^&*!” Moment

I suspect it came on Tuesday when they realized they would have to run with The Donald they had.

They bet the whole enchilada on Hillary getting indicted. This apparent truth absolutely floors me but they seem to have talked themselves into it. How could they lose? After all, Jim Comey is one of their guys: lifelong, conservative, hard-ass Republican. Remember how he and John Ashcroft were buddies?BUT, as we have seen before, Comey has a conscience. Not much of one. It struggles under the weight of so much indoctrination from his party. Nevertheless, it surfaced at his press conference on Tuesday, buried underneath all that robotic recitation from Newt Gingrich’s “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control”, the primer that juvenile Republicans cut their teeth on.

Comey is … an apostate.

Duh-duh-duhhhhhhhh!

They just could not believe that he wasn’t going to step forward and save them from the spectacle of Hillary Clinton talking about policy and issues with Donald Trump during debates this fall. She’s not supposed to be there. Bernie is, or someone else that hasn’t been sufficiently vetted by the Democrats.

Here they were, having blown off their own primaries, confident that Comey was going to disqualify Hillary from running for president. Then they’d be home free, baby! It wouldn’t matter who their nominee was. The Democrats would be a broken party with a power vacuum at the top, babbling incoherently on CNN about climate change or something. Gowdy had to conclude the Benghazi fiasco last week, having found nothing but a series of unfortunate events. But the emails were going to finally nail Hillary FOR-EVER. Bwahahahahahhhhhhhh!

And it didn’t happen. Did they hear Comey right? Did he say no charges? No reasonable prosecutor would indict?

What about an UNreasonable prosecutor? Can we get one of those?

Turns out this is not possible.

You know, this batch of Republicans aren’t too bright. They’re not like the 90’s era Republicans who made House of Cards look like hopscotch. They haven’t got the media savvy of the Bushies who manipulated the American public into endless war and came up with such jolly and memorable slogans as “Cut and Run” and “Freedom Fries”.

OMG, this fall is going to be so ugly. They are going to get slaughtered at the polls.

 

Putting “Extremely Careless” into perspective

According to James Comey, head of the FBI who happens to be a Republican, after sifting through 50,000+ emails at a cost of millions of dollars to the taxpayer, he was able to dig up 113 emails that contained classified material. Some of this classified material was classified after the mail was sent, some was buried in email threads, which, as anyone who gets email threads at work can verify can sometimes be mind bogglingly long and hard to follow. The recipient can’t control what other people send to her.

Let’s do the math:

113 classified emails/50000 emails total = .23%. (I rounded up)

I can only assume that James Comey went through all of Condoleeza Rice’s emails and Colin Powell’s emails and Madeline Albright’s emails for comparison and that none of our three most recent Secretary of State’s emails contained anywhere close to that number of unintentional violations.

That would be about 2 tenths of 1% of emails.

What would be considered “extremely careful”? Shouldn’t Comey provide a scale so we know what would be considered rigorously careful? Presumably, 50000 emails would contain 0 classified emails unintentionally passed between communicants.

In the absence of any data from other Secretaries of State, we have no way to know just how egregiously bad Clinton’s numbers are.

So, James Comey, Republican, can say whatever he likes about the standard of care that was applied here. There is no way of knowing whether this is higher or lower than any other secretary of state who used private emails.

Ok, then.

Happy Fourth of July and other stuff

There are no bad views in Pittsburgh on the Fourth of July. Some are better than others but you really can’t miss a good fireworks display. Best Spots are probably the Dravosburg and West Mifflin area,  Grandview, and a couple streets down from me. And there’s always Kennywood.

Happy Fourth!

Other stuff:

I’ve read in different places that Barack Obama may decide to become a venture capitalist after he leaves the White House, feeding on the corpses of geeks who ran out of early discovery money before they could develop their drugs into blockbusters.

Check out my post from 2011 on Their Plans for Us to get a better sense of what I’m talking about. And yes, the ACS representative really did say that those of us who were unemployed should borrow from “friends, family and fools” in order to work our asses off in our own start up for years before some venture capitalist came along to bail us out.

I’m reminded of the altruism, fairness study of monkeys who don’t think the game is fair if they get less than 30% of the fruit. But it’s OK if vulture capitalists cash in big on the backs of hard working researchers who should be grateful they get 1% back on their blockbuster patents they are forced to sell.

Well, he’ll be trying to fund cancer and orphan disease biological treatments and who can argue with that? If you have cancer or some metabolic disease, this is pretty sweet. But as I have said before, this kind of research has two major characteristics: 1.) It’s a business model that really does feed on the weak. A person with a life threatening disease will not complain about side effects, isn’t likely to sue you if you extend their lives and will pay whatever it takes to get better. Biologicals don’t have the same patent hurdles as many small molecule drugs and for cancer and life threatening orphan diseases they are “fast tracked”. In other words, the FDA will look the other way on many safety profiles. The potential profits are enormous. 2.) Other diseases will be deprioritized. Got heart disease, schizophrenia, or a life threatening bacterial infection? Too f&*(ing bad. Those small molecule therapies don’t get fast tracked, are subject to a lot of patients suing over side effects, are too difficult and expensive to research because of the blood-brain barrier or aren’t taken for long enough periods of time for the dough to roll in.

That’s the harsh reality. Vulture capitalism in new biological therapies is all about maximizing shareholder value while minimizing research at the cost of innovation in other areas. It puts researchers at risk because unless they are early geniuses or incredibly lucky, they will be job hopping from one shaky startup to another and it deprives harder science of the long term funding it needs to make progress.

But don’t take my word for it, listen to Chris Viehbacher, former CEO of a large pharmaceutical who is now into venture capitalism:

In Viehbacher’s view, Big Pharma is still trying to act in the way the old movie studios once operated in Hollywood, with everyone from the stars to writers and stunt men all roped into one big group. Today, he says, movie studios move from project to project, and virtually everyone is a freelancer. In biopharma, he adds, value is found in specializing, and “fixed costs are your enemy.”

Fixed costs are other words for “people who have spent most of their adult lives in a lab getting PhDs in very hard subjects”. These people require life sustaining things like food, water, shelter and money to pay off their student loans. Those things are baaaaad. They’re your enemy.Well, we’ll have none of that. But thanks to Chris Viehbacher, we have the entire working person’s grievance summed up in one paragraph.

By the way, Chris, specializing is important but even specialists have to work in project teams to do real discovery research. A star specialist is only effective if he or she can work in a team of people who put away their egos to focus on their goals. Pharma research has very, very few Mark Zuckerbergs (thank God). In fact, Mark Zuckerberg types who study molecular biology are just as likely to go work on Wall Street as a start up lab because they know where the money is when they have to make a living, didja ever think about that, Chris? But I digress.

and Chris also said…

“It is cheaper. But research and development is either a huge waste of money or too, too valuable. It’s not really anything in between. You don’t really do things because it’s cheaper. The reality is the best people who have great ideas in science don’t want to work for a big company. They want to create their own company. So, in other words, if you want to work with the best people, you’re going to have go outside your own company and work with those people … And, you want to work with them, why do they want to work with you? The reality over the last 10 years is, (a small biotech) wouldn’t get caught dead working with one of these big cumbersome pharma companies. Once you have a funding gap, suddenly there’s a much greater willingness of earlier-stage companies to work with Big Pharma. We’re looking earlier and people who are early need help.

It would take many posts to unpack what Chris is really saying in this paragraph. Let’s just say that to those of us who used to do this kind of research, this is transparent BS pitched to future investors and says more about the only thing that Chris and his droogs feel is a measure of success and value in life. This is from a man who likely never stepped foot in the labs he ran. Discovery sometimes takes a long time, patience and continuity. That’s how we do science. Everything else is either a get-rich-quick scheme or low hanging fruit built on the backs of others- who worked in those big corporate labs for years and years doing the heavy lifting in research.

But it’s the image of Viehbacher and his investors waiting around for early stage companies to have a funding gap, where presumably they can’t pay their top stars anymore, that really fuels my contempt for these predators. “Nice lead compound you got there. Be a shame if something *happened* to it.” This is venturing into Martin Shkreli territory.

And Barack Obama wants to be one of them?

Some presidents build libraries, some presidents build multinational charitable foundations, some presidents look for FDA loopholes, researchers on the edge of bankruptcy and desperately sick people to make a killing in the market.

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Antecdotal evidence of *something*:

I walked to the bus stop the other day on the way home from work. The buses must have been piled up in traffic upstream because the sidewalk was crowded with about 100 people. That’s an estimate, probably a good one. I didn’t want to block the sidewalk so I stood where I could. It turns out it was in a line that was quickly forming in front of another line of people backed up against the side of a building. All of the sudden, there was a voice behind me, “Is there a good reason you stood in front of me??”. I turned around to see a tall African American man behind me. He looked casually dressed, like he just came from a Pirates game. I looked like I just came from my air conditioned office floor in a tech company with my company lanyard hanging from my neck. I just said “No” and turned away just as the bus pulled up.

It’s just the buses held up in traffic and crowded bus stops with no place to stand. Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar, not a socio-political statement. Anyway, there was no way I could stand behind him because there was a f^*&ing building there and then, people standing in front of me. So, you know, we’re all in this whole bus thing together.

Then I got on the bus and stumbled on the foot of a white woman who was taking up way too much space (she wasn’t obese) on the side bench seating including sticking her legs out into the aisle. “Excuse me”, I muttered as I quickly took my seat down the aisle and across from her. She too was a casually dressed, graying blonde who looked her age. She gave me the stink eye for several blocks before she got off in mid town.

WTF?? I suddenly felt like the target for Trump supporters AND anti-Bernie people who wanted to pick a fight.

This is going to be an ugly summer.

I ran into a bunch of POC tweeters yesterday who just assumed I was a Bernie supporter because I didn’t think the turn to the left in the Democratic platform was a slap to Obama. The internet is a rough place and I’m used to it, but the level of anger and assumptions, including that I had deliberately used a “sepia toned” photo of myself for some nefarious purpose was hillariously over the top.

Look, POC, calm your g&* damned tits for crying out loud. It was eight years ago that Donna Brazile and Paul Begala fought it out on national TV over the Democratic party ditching its “old coalition” for “eggheads and African Americans”. (They both missed the point, IMHO) This year, thanks to an angry electorate and a definite shift in voter sentiment against getting the shitty end of the economic stick in the past eight years with no bankers going to jail and years of absolutely the worst job market since the Great Depression, the Democratic party seems to slowly be turning back to its roots and in the direction of the left.

Those of you who *think* this turn is a slap to Obama should seriously ask yourselves why the party struggling to embrace its identity with working people and more liberal values looks like it is disrespecting Obama.

I’m not saying your perception is wrong. I’m saying the reason is not what you think it is.

I’ll leave it at that. You’re smart enough to figure it out. It’s got nothing to do with racism.