Late Friday Samantha Blogging

Samantha shares Stella's colorful kitty holiday blanket...

Until moments before I took this pic, Samantha was comfortably snoozing away under the blanket, Stella equally comfortably sitting beside her. Once in a while, the household scene is just perfect.

'Give Me What I Want, Or I Will Kill Your Baby'

That's what Big PHrMA has said, in effect, to Obama: don't cut the period of patent protection of biologics from 12 to 10 years, or we will withdraw our support from your healthcare bill.

But remember, kids, medications are your friends...

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Afterthought: Consider me as an example. There are five prescription medications I take every day, month in, month out, for my chronic conditions. All are carefully chosen to be available in generics, and in particular, to be available at $4 for a month's supply or $10 for a three months' supply. There is at least one exception for which a month's supply, even for the generic, is $24; don't ask me for an explanation. All these meds are years, in most cases, decades, out of the development phase. Profits have been made and paid, high-priced parties thrown, and laughs laughed about the expense to the poor schmoes who pay for it all. In a society truly interested in motivating the invention and development of more effective medicines, that ought to be enough.

But suppose the price of each med was $24/month. Hell, suppose it was $89 or $129/month; I've been quoted those figures for some non-generics. Suppose... this is not just a supposition; I've had it happen... suppose the prices were $500, $600, $700 a month. Guess who doesn't get his or her medication? Hint: it isn't Barack Obama, and it isn't any executive in the employ of Big PHrMA. You can read the handwriting as clearly as I can.

China Hacks Google And Others, Pursuing... What?

UPDATE Thurs. afternoon: WSJ says the attack exploited a heretofore unknown security gap in Internet Explorer. (Which versions? not mentioned.)  Reuters says Microsoft has yet to patch the flaw. The Guardian says Verisign's iDefense Labs has stated that IP addresses indicate that the Chinese government "or its proxies" are responsible for the attack. Fun times a'comin', friends; fun times a'comin' ...

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I'm not a security specialist. I have the basic knowledge a competent tapper of code has to have to avoid the most common hacks... you can't work in the industry without that basic knowledge... but I'm no specialist, and beyond the level of coding to protect a running app from a malicious user, I don't know very much.

Even so, China's hack of Google (and apparently a couple of dozen other U.S.-based companies) bugs the crap out of me. For one thing, it is not clear from public statements just how much was obtained, or what malevolent uses are being made of it. Hacks of TSP data seem particularly pernicious to me, though again, I don't know the details; it's all a gut feeling for me. Read the linked article by bmaz on Emptwheel/FDL; it's one of the more thought-provoking. And be sure to read the comments; some of the commenters appear actually to be experts in the field.

What does it all mean? It means that China's exports of tainted food are not isolated incidents of shoddy products to the larger world: they are part of a systematic effort to subvert our nation's integrity. If a country deliberately sends us dangerous foods, all the while spying on private government documents (never mind whether those documents ought to be private; National Security Letters are an issue unto themselves), what are we to take away from that country's actions?

The reaction on the part of most of the businesses involved seems to be "but there's soooo much money to be made in China!" Yes, there is... and if you're going to sell your grandchildren's future for that money, I certainly hope you got a price sufficient to ease your conscience.

Is China's behavior worse than the U.S.'s so-called counterterrorism measures? Does one nation ever deserve more contempt than another for its behavior on the international stage? I don't know. China looks pretty bad to me these days; so does America. But if we don't take adequate steps to defend ourselves... something more than collecting copies of everyone's phone calls and emails, torturing alleged terrorist suspects, etc. ... I think we may look forward to a very unpleasant future.

What Am I To Say...

You say "tomato," I say "tomahto" ...

H/T TPM, above an article on Tea Party Nation's loss of sponsorship. Apparently this is/was one of those sponsors; see TPM for details. I'll wager he's as bright as, say, Sarah Palin...

Update a few minutes later: as I reread the article at TPM, it is not at all clear to me whether this individual is the sponsor discussed in the nearby text, or merely a protester with a sign guaranteed to make you spew your coffee.

Campaign Finance Law In Danger

If Zachary Roth of TPM is correct about a coming Supreme Court ruling, we could find ourselves in a sort of corporate heaven in which corp's could contribute unlimited amounts of campaign money to candidates:

The Supreme Court could rule this morning on a case that may radically reshape our campaign-finance laws, opening the door for unrestricted amounts of corporate money to flow into American politics.

In a nutshell: The FEC ruled that the conservative group Citizens United (CU) was prohibited by the McCain-Feingold camapign-finance law from airing a negative movie about Hillary Clinton. CU received corporate donations and the movie advocated the defeat of a political candidate within 60 days of an election. CU is arguing that the FEC ruling violated its freedom of speech, and that the relevant provision of McCain-Feingold is unconstitutional.

I have long since given up attempting to predict how this Court will rule on constitutional issues, because their rulings have shown so little relationship to precedent or even to typical conservative/liberal splits in the votes. And the whole notion of "corporate personhood" still boggles my mind. But one fact is indisputable: if the Court rules to allow greater or unlimited corporate contributions to candidates on a First Amendment basis, both the First Amendment and participation in politics by natural persons are dead, and we may as well all hang up our keyboards.

Summary of HCR Status

Jon Walker of FDL offers us a sort of editorial summary of the status of various proposed (and ignored) healthcare reform legislation, ranked from "The Perfect" to "The Bad." If you participate in the debate as infrequently as I do these days, it's worth reading as a rough framework for evaluating what comes next.

Bryan Faces Network Difficulties

Bryan of Why Now? reports in  an email a comment on his Internet provider troubles:

OT:Steve, I'm not stuck on an ice floe in the middle of the bayou, but the iguanas with H1bs who power my DSL are all pining for the fjords or something. I have been without a connection since Thursday afternoon, and it looks like Monday night before it might be back on.

Over 100 hours of down time is not exactly professional level service.

I borrowed a Mac on a cable modem, that's how bad it is.

This highfalutin' hi-tech world we supposedly inhabit still apparently contains quite a few people barely able to put on their socks when they find them. I've had an ISP like that in the past; I know just how Bryan feels. Try visiting his place tomorrow.

'Harass Sarah'

Hey, don't look at me... it's a (ahem) Palin-drome.

(H/T ellroon.)

Will Work For Health Insurance, Um, I Mean, Health Care

Please read Marcy Wheeler's article at Firedoglake about the deficiencies of some self-proclaimed healthcare reform advocates' notions of "affordability." Face it: a plan that leaves out any substantial fraction of Americans, no matter how it makes the cut, causes the whole reform effort to be more expensive for everyone, including those who are in fact covered. Most of the economies of scale can be obtained only by universal coverage, but some supporters of "a plan by SOTU-time at any cost" seem to have omitted a few basic facts from their analyses. Wheeler's article relates to an article on "affordability" (a word one can apparently define to one's taste and economic class) as analyzed by authors from Gruber (MIT) and Seif (Harvard). See, in particular, what Wheeler notes that those authors omit: simple facts such as the very similar Massachusetts state plan, under which something like 21 percent of participants find themselves forced to forgo necessary medical care for financial reasons. Does this sound like reform to you?

Down, Down, Down

It feels strange to sit in the den window looking out on the patio, from morning into afternoon, as the temperature drops from 32°F at the moment to its predicted low of 20°F tonight.

And I tend to believe it will get that low. Why? Samantha loves to sit on a big green ottoman Stella placed in that window for her enjoyment, staring out at everything going on behind the house... stirring creatures (probably including mice), rustling dead leaves, clanging wind chimes and flapping cloth kitty banners, all driven by wind, wind and more wind, almost every day since we've moved here... but not today. Today, Samantha abandoned her post as too cold to be worth the trouble, moving to a fleece blanket on a bed against an interior wall. That's what kind of night... what kind of weekend... we have in store.

Bill Bates At 90

My father would have turned 90 years old today (Thursday). No one in our family on either side ever lived that long, but still we celebrate Dad's birthdays, even if he actually experienced only 75 of those anniversaries. As you can see in this picture, Dad was editor of his college newspaper, The College Star at Southwest Texas State Teachers' College (since renamed twice, now Texas State University), just before W.W. II.

I've thought a bit today about the differences in political usages from his day to mine. Both of us lived in (in his case, through) a depression. In Dad's case, the Great Depression rendered him a Democrat, since there were really only two choices... no Yellow Dogs, Blue Dogs, New Dogs, etc., just Democrats and Republicans. He was an FDR admirer; I grew up hearing Dad's tales of what FDR did to alleviate the worst of the depression. Unsurprisingly, most of the tales turned out to be true.

These days, his son has been vehemently wrested from his former status as a Yellow Dog Democrat... the Yellow Doggerel Democrat, in fact, though I coined the phrase after Dad's passing... into some undetermined flavor of independent... I don't have a name for the flavor, but it resembles that of Sen. Bernie Sanders a great deal more than Sen. Joe LIEberman. Dad encountered very little of Sen. LIEberman, but I am certain he would have detested him... not for his conservative politics; Dad was amazingly tolerant of political differences, but for his pervasive, ongoing dishonesty. Mom always taught me, "be honest"; Dad taught me, "be more than honest; your sincerity and veracity must be beyond question when you deal with politics." Dad would shake his head in dismay at today's political realities.

Nor would he have been interested in a third party, or in someone such as Sanders, who seems anything but reluctant to be known as a Socialist. This is where the generational difference in usage appears: to him, probably thanks to the efforts of J. Edgar Hoover, "Socialist" was too close to "Communist." To me, it's just another descriptor, one that may apply legitimately to me (though without the capital S) now that I am no longer officially a Democrat.

As you can tell, I miss Dad a lot; we had some great political discussions. But he is beyond politics now; his own and Mom's physical remains are in urns in my living room. Thus pass the glories of the world. Happy Birthday, Dad, if you still exist in some form, time and place to receive the greeting.

AFL-CIO's President Trumka Arrested During Hotel Boycott

Michael Whitney of Firedoglake has details; no need for me to repeat them here. Count me as one who believes... strongly... that the nation's long-term survival as a productive economy and a viable community for workers to live in must have an active, aggressive union movement. In pursuit of some very traditional labor issues, e.g., who gets what benefits, unions must engage in dramatic public action; I'm sorry, but polite negotiation at the table simply hasn't done the job. Kudos to Richard Trumka for refusing to back down... it's damned well time unions and their leaders started drawing lines.

Full disclosure: I am a member in good standing of AFM Local 65-699, the local of the musicians' union. I can physically no longer perform, but the nominal fee to belong is both my statement of support and my thanks for the years in which they actually confronted employers on my behalf and that of many other musicians. If anyone tells you unions don't do anything anymore, or we don't need them anymore, point them to the episode in San Francisco. Or have them talk to me.

Don't You Feel Safer?

The TSA shows evidence that some of its agents have gone full-blown fucking nuts. Fox:

TSA Confiscates Boy's Play-Doh at New Orleans Airport
Tuesday, January 05, 2010  Associated Press

ST. LOUIS, Mo. —  Extra security at the airport in New Orleans has cost one small boy a Christmas gift from his grandma.


On a post-Christmas flight out of New Orleans last week, the TSA confiscated young Josh Pitney’s Play-Doh.
...

Play-Doh. Somebody please explain to me how Play-Doh is indistinguishable from, say, C4. Play-Doh is NOT on the TSA list of prohibited items and substances; the parents checked before they departed. TSA asserts that this places the matter at the discretion of the TSA agents on the line. It seems that rules are meaningless, and there is nothing you can reliably take with you when you fly. Is this what you expected in the United States of America in 2010? Welcome to our brave new world.

Not A Good Day So Far

This was inevitable at some point: I woke up this morning (insert blues riff here) to find that I have the same $%^&* cold that Stella had for about three weeks. The air outside is actually better than it was yesterday... lots of "green" panels in the Houston area page for TCEQ numbers... but I feel a lot worse, throat and sinus alike.

I'd just go back to bed, but we hired our lawn guy (a very bright, capable fellow) to weatherize our house this morning, so I have to stay up awaiting him. Stella has prepared a task list for him, the poor fellow. :-) Most of the essentials are done; the cars have antifreeze, the plants are to be moved into the garage, there's food in the pantry for a few days, and (perhaps most important) the heating system seems to be working fine (crosses fingers). Stella is in "project mode"; she's, ah, quick to respond to anything I say. This, too, shall pass. This morning, the temp is only 31°F  (-1&degC); it could be a lot worse... and Thursday night it's supposed to get a lot worse, with sleet and conditions one would just as soon not go out in.

As I glance around, it looks as if many of you in the South are in similar circumstances. Please feel free to report in in the comments; I'd be glad to hear from you.

Oooohhhhh...

That was the first word I groaned when I awoke this morning. People are supposed to breathe air, but I don't think they're equipped to breathe this stuff.This morning it's foggy and smoggy and guaranteed to interact unhealthily with the lining of your lungs. The temp isn't supposed to drop until tonight, and this first of at least two freezes this week is supposed to be relatively mild (29°F), but the crap in the air pretty well guarantees that I will be sick from now until then. This is not the post-holiday I had in mind. How's your encounter with "winter"?

Aside to Minnesotans who think we're wimps down here: I'll trade you a day, one of your early winter days for one of our 100°F/100% days. Enjoy drinking your T-shirt!

Please Give Up The @#$%^ Corporate Boycotts!

A couple of months ago, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey wrote a wildly über-libertarian op-ed in the WSJ mocking people who wanted genuine healthcare reform and suggesting that each of us has the opportunity to improve our health by simply... you guessed it... shopping at his stores. Don't expect the feral gummint to solve everything for you, the ruggedly good-looking, probably disgustingly healthy and well-insured Austin resident told us.

That did it for a lot of us. People announced they would not shop at Whole Paycheck Foods for a period of time varying with the individual. I said I would boycott until Congress passed healthcare legislation, for good or ill. They passed it for ill, and Obama will doubtless sign a truly oppressive version of it this year, but I was looking forward to a few flavors I can get only through Whole Paycheck, and had made a list for a trip there tomorrow.

Then Blue Texan of Firedoglake informed us all today that Mackey is a global warming denier. Writing in a post on Firedoglake, Blue Texan strongly implies we should continue the boycott.

BT, did I mention that Whole Paycheck is geographically the single closest grocery store to my home?

BT, I probably also forgot to mention that I am mobility-impaired. Driving six blocks is difficult for me. Driving six miles... well, I can expect to be laid up for a few days if I have to do that.

BT observes, correctly IMHO, that John Mackey hasn't yet realized that he gains no advantage as a grocer by preaching to his customer base. When will you, BT, realize the same thing about your preaching to your "customer base," your fellow activists?

In the era of globalization and corporate consolidation, boycotts seldom work. Let's see. For possibly 10 years now, I've boycotted Wal-Mart, a store whose bad corporate behavior exceeds all normal humanitarian bounds. The result of my boycott and everyone else's? The bad corporate behavior continues, and Mall-Wart, not five years ago, built a new store about a mile from me.

I boycotted Target stores a few years back over their alleged bad relations with charities that had connections with Planned Parenthood. I obtained my info from a usually reliable source. She was wrong, just completely wrong. The result of all the Target boycotts (I wasn't the only one who did so)? A new SuperTarget opened about 15 blocks from me approximately four years ago.

Gosh, those boycotts really were effective, weren't they? Oh, yeah. They were effective at making a low-income person have to stretch his low income even further, effective at making it even more difficult for a vegetarian in the city to obtain the food he needs, effecting at hammering on a cripple. Oh, yes, that was effective.

Given that organized boycotts are, on the whole, ineffective at obtaining the desired result... can't we citizens, especially activists, just shit-can the damned things, and spend our money and efforts on something that works, like buying a couple of members of Congress? [/snark]

The Cheney Of Command

Jeff Danziger names his terrifying cartoon exactly that... set down your coffee or beer.

Show Your 'Nads For Security

Via WaPo, we learn that former DHS secretary Michael Chertoff really wants airport security guards to see all air passengers in graphic detail:

Ex-Homeland Security chief head said to abuse public trust by touting body scanners

By Kimberly Kindy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 1, 2010


Since the attempted bombing of a U.S. airliner on Christmas Day, former Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff has given dozens of media interviews touting the need for the federal government to buy more full-body scanners for airports.

What he has made little mention of is that the Chertoff Group, his security consulting agency, includes a client that manufactures the machines. The relationship drew attention after Chertoff disclosed it on a CNN program Wednesday, in response to a question.

An airport passengers' rights group on Thursday criticized Chertoff, who left office less than a year ago, for using his former government credentials to advocate for a product that benefits his clients.

...

 Ooooh, yeah. The responses practically write themselves, don't they?

• A clever male passenger might use plastic creativity to display an immense member in the full body scan (that is, if he were willing to risk jail, and I think it might almost be worth it);
  
• A woman might superpose a dollar sign in three strategic places (again with the caveat about jail time);
• A particularly clever hacker might manage to load some replacement of the displayed image, say, an effectively naked image of Michael Chertoff;

Add your own ideas... this is fun and not difficult, if you wave away technological and legal difficulties.

If a passenger decided to traverse the security frame naked, a lot of narrow-minded right wingnuts would object vociferously that exposing oneself is against the law. One wonders if they distinguish the difference between someone standing facing the open outer front door of his home, wearing what he was born with, and someone else staring in through a window of the same house at that same man naked in the shower. Is that such a difficult distinction?

"Those that would trade a little privacy for a few TSA employees' getting their jollies in a day's work and a security consulting corp raking in millions in taxpayers' bucks shall lose both their privacy and their tax dollars, and deserve neither." Isn't that what the venerable Benjamin Franklin said?

HaloScan Soon Gone. HaloScan Soon Gone.

Is there an Echo in here? NO!

This is the day JS-Kit.com says they'll turn HaloScan off on my old site. Having encountered first JS-Kit's intermediate mess and later JS-Kit's Chaos, um, I mean, Echo on a few friends' blogs, I thought I'd do us all a favor and tell them to go ahead and pull the trigger on that gun they held to my head. I don't appreciate extortion.

I modified the old site so that comment links, at least on the current home page, launch a popup with instructions on how to request a comment from an old post. You're requesting it of a human... me... so be polite. There are a few references to HaloScan still embedded in the code over there; please forgive any oddities you find. I'm not being especially diligent about it; blogs are supposed to have a certain forward motion in time, and I believe my time is better spent on this new one. As I find stuff I can reasonably fix or port, I'll do it, but it's low on the priority list.

With luck, this will be the last ref on this blog to... that commenting system, what was its name?

... In With The New

New Year's Day has turned into one of those crystal-perfect days, sunshine with no precipitation of any sort, just chilly enough to make one reach for a jacket, lots of light coming from all the windows in the house instead of all the electric lights... the sort of day one lives for, the sort of day one hopes for on a holiday. Call me seasonally affected if you want; I'm happy when it's sunny.

We spent a good deal of the morning working our way through Stella's rather sizable collection of recordings of klezmer music. It makes me feel like dancing (no, I don't), or playing tuba (no way), or dragging my childhood clarinet out of its case to attempt some of the instrumental leads in those klezmer dances (but I've already confronted my diminishing ability to do that, in the previous post). So I sit and tap my foot like any idiot enthusiast who never picked up an instrument in his life. But that's OK; I had a good two decades working with Isabelle Ganz in one of her numerous groups covering various aspects of the Jewish literature, in that case, Sephardic music, the music of the diaspora. I had a good ride performing that literature, and I can scarcely complain now if a few formerly working parts don't work as well. Fortunately, we live in an era when a CD or an .mp3 file can bring me Andy Statman and crew, so the music is neither gone nor forgotten.

And in a way, that's the point, for an aging musician who performs music in some specific historical tradition: the continuity, the preservation, the ongoing spinning of the creative threads that originated in a bygone time, transcend the details of when or why I decided to hang up my axe. There are plenty of younger, healthier folk with axes they clearly know how to use at least as well as I ever did. No performer ever carried a tradition by himself or herself; no tradition ever carried itself without a critical mass of involved performers. Someone will do this. That's very important to me. And if my hearing holds up, I can continue enjoying the music without expending the effort... how's that for a lazy man's attitude?

May 2010 be your best year yet, and the first of many good years.