The Mother’s Milk of Politics

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This will have to be a short post because I have a lot of checks to write in support of worthy charities who work to save drowning kittens and shade-bound petunias.

These are 501(c)(4) groups, otherwise known as “social welfare” organizations, who have solemnly assured the IRS that they wouldn’t dream of subverting my eleemosynary intentions by using the money to support crooked Republican politicians or to smear honest Democrats – or, vice-versa, theoretically, but we all know where the floodtide of dark money rises.

And, no, it’s not from “big labor,” which now consists of the last 16 guys who carry both a union card and a nail-driver.

My first check will go to American Crossroads, Karl Rove’s slush fund, which I assume uses the money to plant crown vetch and ornamental grasses around the off-ramps and leave Gideon bibles at toll booths. I’m fairly sure they’re clean because last November all of Karl Rove’s favored candidates lost.

Next comes the Mother Teresa Puppy Pampering Patriots Fund, then the Seraphic Redemption Coalition, which is devoted to rehabilitating sleazy crooks by getting them good-paying jobs as clowns or congressmen. Otherwise, they’d all be in jail, and it would cost us a fortune to feed them.

So many are in desperate need:

Quid Pro Quo (must be a Catholic charity), Mother’s Milk for Maggots (Who knew they were even endangered?), Eye of Newt, Unplanned Parenthood, Saturday Night Special Olympics, Greased Palm Sunday, Healthy Food and Uzis for Cub Scouts, Far-Righteous Oligarchs for Christ.

A few others look a little fringy, and you can’t really be sure they actually deserve their special tax status. Thanks to a few bad apples who hold a majority in the House and a few bumblers and bunglers in the IRS, the 501(c)(4) groups don’t have to disclose whether their donors are schoolteachers, gospel singers, animal shelters, bailed-out bankers, polluting industrialists, foreign intelligence agencies, drug lords, gun dealers, or terrorists.

And thanks to conservatives on the Supreme Court, there’s no legal limit as to how big the bribe.

I wish I could be sure I’ve picked the right “social welfare” groups, but they’re all cloaked in secrecy. I wonder why.

Just to be on the safe side, I’ll limit my contributions to $2 apiece.

High Court Lowdown

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UPDATE: Barb’s lawsuit reaches Supreme Court.

Should a private company be permitted to patent human genes?

The high court will soon decide. The best known case is that of Myriad Genetics, which holds patents on two DNA sequences and charges fees to doctors who need to reference these genes for diagnoses and genome research.

Barb’s case is less well known, but she’s counter-suing a company called Barb’s Fingernail Genetics, which claims to hold a patent on DNA in the fingernail of her right index finger. The company got a district court order requiring Barb to pay licensing fees if she wants to use that finger in typing U, J, and M, or in buttoning buttons or feeding her cat Andy.

Her suit points out that even if she were willing to pay the licensing fee, Barb would be unable to write a check to Barb’s Fingernail Genetics without having first paid a licensing fee to use the finger to write the check, which is an infinite regression and therefore unconstitutional.

LATEST DEVELOPMENT: Barb’s attorneys have demanded that Justice Scalia recuse himself from the case due to obvious conflicts of interest, given his unlicensed public use of fingers.

The Justice also owns stock in a company called Bushy Eyebrow Genomics.

Ethical Drugs?

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It used to be – still is, at least in the dictionary – that ethical drugs were those that required a doctor’s prescription.

Today? The term “ethical drugs” is devolving into an oxymoron.

Three years ago, the Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis paid $443 million to settle charges it bribed doctors with entertainment, travel, consultancies, and speaking engagements to get them to prescribe its drugs. Novartis promised never to do it again.

Last week, the company was sued by New York state for doing all that and worse – like giving kickbacks to pharmacies — to promote an immune suppressant called Myfortic and a few other drugs.

And last year, as the New York Times reported in an editorial, GlaxoSmith-Klein paid a $3 billion fine for health fraud, and two other companies paid $1.5 billion or more.

The Times thinks stronger remedies are needed – like excluding certain drugs or their makers from selling to Medicare or Medicaid after a criminal settlement.

The rest of us are left to wonder – where is all this money coming from?

You get a prescription and buy a drug (or you don’t – it hardly matters because you’re going to pay for it anyway). What, exactly, are you financing?

First, you’re paying for the actual drug – including the costs of developing and marketing it.

That includes the millions spent on TV ads and on glorious packaging.

And the illegal bribes and other goodies for a few judas-goat prescribing doctors.

And kickbacks for a few conniving pharmacies.

And the armies of lobbyists they pay to get these crimes declared legal.

And the New York law firms the drug company hires if it gets caught.

And the huge fines they have to pay – that’s your money they’re using.

And the inflated healthcare insurance premiums the HMOs have to charge because drugs are getting so expensive.

And rising Medicare premiums – same reason.

And the higher taxes we’ll all pay to keep Medicare solvent.

That’s ten times you’ve paid for a drug you aren’t even using.

But if you get really lucky and contract the very disease this drug was designed to cure – why, just think! Naah. By that time, you won’t have any money left to pay for it.

Belated Rave Review

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Thirteen years ago, Tim Weiner, then a reporter for the New York Times, wrote about the street names in Mexico City. I saved the article, e-mailed it to a few friends, and recently came across it once again – an excerpt is reprinted below.

(Weiner has since left the Times and has won a Pulitzer and a National Book Award for his writings on national security issues.)

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Mexico City: This is not a place where people live on 88th and Third, as in Manhattan, or 35th and P, as in Washington. This is a place where people live on Heart and on Soul. They live on Forest of Light, Mirror of Water, Forest of Miracles, Garden of Memories, Tree of Fire, Forest of Secrets, Sea of Dreams.

Surreal street names can reflect hard realities:

Work is long. Love and Happiness are short. Good Luck crosses Hope, then hits a dead end.

Intersections become works of imagination: the Volga River flows into the Nile, Beethoven meets Bach, the Himalayas cross the Alps.

And Comprehension ends in Silence.

(Ed Note: That’s none other than Juan Sebastian Bach. The Times showed the street sign. There’s further background in the first comment.)

NOTES & QUOTES

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The Envelope, Please

This is a new category for us – and probably should be a category for the Oscars:

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Best (Worst) Subtitles from Foreign Language Films

I once arrived late for a black and white Eisenstein epic (I think it was Alexander Nevsky) in an avant garde film series – and promptly encountered a subtitle for the ages.

The scene is a wintry dusk. A fierce battle is in progress between heroic Russian defenders and invading Teutonic Knights – the ones wearing black coal scuttles on their heads – but all of that is somewhere in the background. Two men riding furiously on horseback crest a ridge, plunging toward the camera, and one of the horses slips and falls sideways, taking his rider with him into the snow.

A loud, unintelligible yell echoes through the frigid air, and a subtitle pops onto the screen:

“The Horse keeps falling down!”

I’ve long wondered if that fall was planned. Film stock was expensive, and a retake might have been out of the question anyway, due to injuries. Either way, the life of a subtitle writer is terrible hard.

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Best News Lead
… this by Vivian Yee on the front page of last Saturday’s New York Times:

It started with the accusations of sex behind the back pond. Of late-night parties that begot stitches and adultery. Favoritism. Misspending. Bullying.

Since then, the police have been called, e-mail access has been revoked and Robert’s Rules of Order repeatedly cited. Expletives have been tossed around. Herb lovers have nearly come to blows.

A tool shed burned to the ground; the word arson was uttered.
So goes life these days at the Roosevelt Island Garden Club…

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Best Intro to an Autobiography

It never had occurred to me to write a book … it’s an autobiography and it’s unauthorized and I’m suing myself.

…from Dick Van Dyke’s My Lucky Life

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Worst Human Resources Robots

From a story in The Economist on software that companies are using to screen candidates for possible employment:

Algorithms and big data are powerful tools. Wisely used, they can help match the right people with the right jobs … (but in one case) the software rejected every one of many good applicants because the firm in question had specified that they must have held a particular job title – one that existed at no other company.

And from the same article:

There is no point asking jobseekers if they are honest. But surveys can measure honesty indirectly, by asking questions like “How good at computers are you?” and later, “What does control-V do on a word processing program?” A study of 20,000 workers showed that more honest people tend to perform better and stay at the job longer. For some reason, however, they make less effective salespeople.

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Best Liked Belly-Putter

Masters winner Adam Scott is known for the kind of genial personality that makes him everybody’s favorite practice round partner, reports the Times.

At Scott’s postround news conference, journalists from all over the world greeted him with a round of applause even more enthusiastic than what followed the announcement in the press room that alcoholic beverages were available in the dining area

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Bronze Medal for Security Chief Memorandum

We’ve retired the Gold Medal in this category. The author’s name is lost in the mists of history, but the memo emeritus reads:

“The beatings will be discontinued once morale improves.”

And we assume a permanent silver medalist belongs with some announcement heard over an airport PA system somewhere – we just haven’t heard it yet.

But the bronze medal goes to the security chief at a software company named Ingres, where Barb used to work. The gentleman had just ascended to this lofty perch when the company held its annual fire drill, and he decided to strike a positive note to earn the future respect and compliance of notoriously undisciplined information scientists, mathematicians, and software developers. Immediately after the fire drill, all hands got a message signed by the Director of Building Security:

“Thank you for your calm building egress mannerism tactics.”

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Posthumous Citation for Patriotism.

Attributed to the late Bill Veeck, owner of the Chicago White Sox:

Look, we play the Star Spangled Banner before each game. You want us to pay income taxes, too?

Handy-Talkie Time Traveler

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It was an exciting discovery – a time traveler caught on camera.

About a year ago, a black and white film from 1938 surfaced on the internet, showing some cheerful people emerging from a building – possibly part of a factory – and one young brunette in the group is apparently chatting on a cellphone.

The Twittersphere and a flood of YouTube commenters quickly pegged her as someone from the future.

As a time traveler myself, I was riveted. (That’s how we build people in the future. I was also galvanized.) I hadn’t had a date in 32,000 years. I looked for the picture to check out the brunette and to see if Dr. Who’s time-traveling phone booth was somewhere in the background.

Mysteriously, the YouTube video showing all this had vanished.

Writing for Huffington Post, Meredith Bennett-Smith says the incident is far from unique. In 2010, someone came up with unreleased footage from a Charlie Chaplin film in which a woman in the background appears to be talking on her cellphone. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhA6cxtncgY)

Another one showed up in a 1973 Mexican film (I looked at it but couldn’t detect the traveler). And there was a photo of a 19th century man who is a dead ringer for Nicolas Cage. A long-dead ringer.

Cage insists he is neither a time traveler nor a vampire.

We live in a narcissistic culture. Uncounted texts, tweets, and Facebook posts chronicle every visit to the post office or the dentist. Not surprisingly, we think we’re so interesting that people from the future would move scientific mountains to visit us. The trouble is that the visitors noted in 1938 and 1929 videos are not from our future. They’re supposed to be people from right now, using our present version of the cellphone; but our present versions of time machines, star gates, or wormhole portals to send them back there don’t seem to be available.

Nor do we know how to send back a network of transmitting towers so that the cellphones would be workable.

During the Korean War, our soldiers were talking to each other over the ANPRC-6 Walkie Talkie. Before that, there was the Handy-Talkie used by soldiers in WWII. And leading up to that – certainly by 1938 – there were various prototypes of these portable two-way radios being developed and tested, for example around factories. They didn’t need WiFi – just radio waves.

True, they were a good deal bulkier than an iPhone, but those were the two-way versions. A portable radiophone designed to receive but not send could have been much smaller, even then — long before transistors and Moore’s Law pointed the way to miniaturization.

A YouTube commenter using the name Planetcheck recently announced that the 1938 time traveler was actually his grandmother. He says grandma was 17 years old and working for DuPont at a factory where they were testing equipment for a proposed in-plant communications system.

That can’t be true. It’s too boring. I think Planetcheck is a time traveler engaged in a massive cover-up.

High on Helium

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Mark is concerned — and he doesn’t scare easily — about a potential helium shortage.

It isn’t the critical uses of helium in semiconductors, MRI scanners, and particle accelerators that worries him – it’s the birthday parties that would fall flat and leave little children disappointed because no one is speaking in funny, high-pitched voices.

The basic problem hinges on the fate of the U.S. Helium Reserve, which was last seen somewhere over Texas and may still be, depending on prevailing winds.

A government spokeschipmunk, squeaking off the record in a Betty Boopy voice, noted that prices for refined Grade A helium have quadrupled over the past 12 years. The gentleman acknowledged that the blame for price inflation lies with the government itself, which is the world’s major supplier of refined helium and, as governments tend to do, overcharges for that as for much else.

Other refiners just rub their hands in glee (the technical term for crude helium) and match the government’s prices.

Even worse, the U.S. Helium Reserve may have to shut down, if they can find it. Its founding legislation required that all revenues from selling its helium be used to pay down the debt incurred in building the facility in 1960. But prices are so high, the debt is all but gone. What a tragedy.

Mark’s recommendation: Send in the clowns. Dozens of gasbags in Congress could think of ways to use the money and would happily change the law to get hold of it.

Barbara Boxer is expected to insist on comparable funding for Shelium.

Senate rules require that speeches supporting helium legislation – and all filibusters opposing it — be delivered in falsetto after sniffing large quantities of this noble gas.

Jellied Justices

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When the Supreme Court heard arguments last week about overturning California’s gay marriage ban, Proposition 8, the justices shuffled around, as one observer put it, as if they were looking for an off-ramp. For our money, Maureen Dowd said it best, in her Wednesday Op-Ed in the New York Times. Two excerpts:
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“Their questions reflected a unanimous craven impulse: How do we get out of this? This court is plenty bold imposing bad decisions on the country, like anointing W. president or allowing unlimited money to flow covertly into campaigns. But given a chance to make a bold decision putting them on the right, and popular, side of history, they squirm.”
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“While Justice Alito can’t see into the future, most of America can. If this court doesn’t reject bigotry, history will reject this court.”

Elephants in the Arctic

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It’s nice to be tinct. You have friends. You’re somebody. If you become endangered, you’re very special.

Once extinct, you don’t get any of that. Just peace at last – no headlines, no deadlines, no peer group, thus no peer pressure.

But now even that small consolation is under siege, as scientists scheme to give new life to extinct species like the Southern gastric brooding frog of Australia – extinct since, well, the 1980s – and it’s surely a poorer world without them. The frogs, I mean, not the scientists.

Then there’s the ibex that used to frighten skiers in the Pyrenees. The ibexes (ibices?) flourished until they were killed off to harvest their horns when Pyrex kitchenware was all the rage. Actually, that’s not what happened, but the last Pyreneean Ibex did perish in 1999.

The technology is now in hand to rekindle the extinguishment.

These recent departures are ripe for cloning because their DNA is readily available. More ambitious geneticists are hoping – just hoping – to restore Neanderthals or woolly mammoths.

As Gina Kolata points out in the New York Times, the passing of the woolly mammoth left us without elephants in the arctic. The mammoths once knocked down millions of trees, leaving snow-covered grasslands to reflect the sun’s heat back into the stratosphere. And they trampled snow, strengthening the permafrost, keeping its methane locked up instead of being released as a greenhouse gas. Were the woolly mammoths to return, we might see global warming slowed or reversed in the north, or so goes the dream.

New relevance for elephants!

As for Neanderthals, we all have some of their genes – about 3% of our own genome — but kindly spare us the intrusions necessary to catalogue and collect them. “It would be a really bad idea,” says Hank Greely, director of the Stanford Center for Law and the Biosciences.

As quoted by Ms Kolata, Greely also questions the wisdom of trying to resurrect the passenger pigeon. We used to have three to five billion of them.

“They would take days to cross a city,” Greely said. “They left cities covered with an inch of guano.”

No serious researcher expects to recover viable DNA from 65 million years ago, a la Jurassic Park. As for more recent extinctions, we can happily relinquish the phantasmagoria of zombie pigeons encrusting our cities, but woolly mammoths were late survivors, too. They were last seen around 4,000 years ago, and their frozen DNA may yet be found.

So let us go on dreaming the mammoth dream. We can’t imagine the antarctic without its penguins. How can we leave the arctic bereft of its elephants?

Notes & Quotes

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Anonymous woman, quoted by Barb:

“I don’t resemble myself as much as I used to.”

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Dolly Parton:

“I’m not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes. I know I’m not dumb … and I also know I’m not blond.”

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Neuroscientist Alison Gopnik:

“The vivid, even ecstatic awareness of the world that accompanies discovery … is the kind of consciousness that makes us grateful to be human. I think that for babies every wobbly step is skydiving, every game of hide-and-seek is Einstein in 1905, and every day is first love in Paris.”

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HEADLINES

The New York Times:
Burning Fuel Particles Do More Damage
To Climate Than Thought, Study Says

The Huffington Post:
Female Senator Makes History With New Position

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David Freedman in the Columbia Journalism Review:

“Remember that virtually every drug that gets pulled off the market when dangerous side effects emerge was proven ‘safe’ in a large randomized control trial.”

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Mark Twain (as Hal Holbrook reminded us in ‘Mark Twain Tonight’)

“I’ve been drunk before, but this was a masterpiece.”

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Eduardo Porter in the Times, on the Republican obsession with cutting taxes, ostensibly to grow the economy:

“Recent history may even suggest that the economy thrives when taxes are higher. Despite President Bush’s tax cuts, the economy during his administration grew only about 17 percent, half as much as during that of his predecessor Bill Clinton, who had raised them.”

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Steve Doocy on Fox News, ridiculing the Obama commitment to pre-school education for every child in America:

“It hasn’t even been proven that pre-school education is effective beyond third grade.”

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Albert Einstein (as I discovered by wasting enough time to do last Thursday’s NYT crossword):

“Creativity is the residue of wasted time.”