Month: November 2011

What Bill Gates thinks about the drug industry:

[V]accines, Gates argues, “actually have more impact on health than all the new drugs.” And the pharmaceutical businesses didn’t do as well as expected [when they invested in new drugs rather than vaccines]. For Pfizer, for instance, a big bet on a Lipitor follow-up went down in flames when the drug turned out to increase, not decrease, the death rate. But now Pfizer is betting big on a vaccine, called Prevnar, against the pneumococcus bacteria. After Lipitor loses patent protection, Prevnar may well be the company’s top seller.

Indian school children dressed up as India's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru wave the Indian national flag during celebrations for Children's Day at a school in Amritsar, India's northwestern state of Punjab, on November 14, 2011. The celebration of Children's Day falls on November 14, coinciding with Nehru's birthday. Despite a ban on children's labour imposed under the 1986 Child Labour Prohibition and Regulation Act, which took effect 10 October, millions of Indian children still have to work for a living to support their families, missing out on primary education. By Narinder Nanu/AFP/Getty Images.

James Poulos tries to understand Newt's appeal: 

The Gingrich Proposition, as he likes to put it, is that you have to “go up a couple of levels” in your categories of thought. And when you do, you come to the substance of The Gingrich Proposition — his very own master category of thought, which he has maintained at least since 1992, when he wrote it down in a note-to-self now making the rounds on TV and the Web: advocate of civilization, defender of civilization, teacher of the rules of civilization, arouser of those who form civilization, organizer of the pro-civilization activists, and leader “possibly” of the civilizing forces. …

Most people are unaccustomed to fellow human beings thinking — much less speaking — of themselves in this way. But The Gingrich Proposition holds that this species of small-mindedness characteristically misses the point.

Shorter Poulos: Gingrich is definitionally what conservatism, properly speaking, opposes. Conservatism was born in the eighteenth century against the grand pronouncements of the French philosophes; it roots itself in practice not theory; it distrusts massive, profound reorganization of anything. In all of this, Gingrich is, in fact, conservatism's nemesis: an autodidact megalomaniac, contemptuous of existing institutions, and bent on dragging an entire culture, country and, yes, civilization into a fantastic pocket of his own small mind.

Maybe this is how American conservatism truly ends: in the fantastic utopian nightmare of Newtism.

(Photo: Republican presidential candidate and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich speaks in the Strong America Now tent outside the Hilton Coliseum, where Iowans will vote in the Iowa Straw Poll at Iowa State University August 13, 2011 in Ames, Iowa. Nine GOP presidential candidates are competing for votes in the straw poll, an important step for gaining momentum in a crowded field of hopefuls.B y Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.)

Deadspin's blog on Penn State's child rape cover-up is well worth a read. First we learn that:

When Jerry Sandusky was initially arraigned, as previously reported by Sara Ganim, prosecutors requested $500,000.00 bail and that Sandusky be required to wear a leg monitor. District Judge Leslie Dutchcot, however, ordered that Sandusky be freed on $100,000 unsecured bail. She ordered that Sandusky be freed and pay nothing unless he failed to show up for a court hearing…

Judge Dutchcot is a volunteer for Sandusky's group, The Second Mile. Sandusky turned himself in the morning of Nov. 5, a Saturday, at Judge Dutchot's Centre County office. He was released, under the aforementioned terms, shortly thereafter.

Then today a Deadspin reader sent in this email:

I just read your post on DJ Dutchcot granting Sandusky unsecured bail. I practice criminal law in Central PA, which I really can't imagine is much different than Centre County/State College. I have represented multiple people charged with the same or similar counts that are against Sandusky. I have never had a client who was charged with those counts released on unsecured bail.

Surely, judicial recusal in a case like this is a no-brainer. But we're seeing how sick a cult persisted in that small world; and how it let so many children be raped as a result.

Andrew Cohen holds Obama responsible for Saturday night's insanity: 

When President Obama let all those Bush-era officials off the hook, when he didn't push for indictments or even Congressional hearings on the topic, he famously said that he wanted to look forward, not back, on the debate over torture. Even though some civil libertarians warned that such magnanimity would backfire on the president, Obama was generally heralded at the time for not putting the nation through the agony of serious self-reflection. Legal and political accountability took a back seat to convenience; we all took the easy way out.

Jonathan Bernstein pushes back:

[Y]es, blame Obama for not addressing an issue he should have addressed, but do remember that controlling what the opposition says and believes is far beyond the powers of the presidency.

I understand Obama's reluctance to open up what would have been a titanic political struggle upon coming into office. But the truth is: war criminals are still walking around with impunity, in violation of the United States' adherence to the Geneva Conventions. And the attorney general has decided not to enforce the rule of law on the elites, while enforcing it on the underlings. Glenn Greenwald has a point.

A reader writes:

Is this the first time you've used this construction? "…Successful and wealthy"? I'm a pretty regular reader, and it's usually just "successful." In any event, I'm glad to see it. Progress, I think, for those of us who love you more when you resist the pull of abstractions. Those are two different words and concepts. Good for you for acknowledging it. If we could get to "commercially successful and wealthy" or "financially successful and wealthy," I'd never grumble again.

If I didn't learn from my readers I wouldn't continue doing this job. Yes, you showed me I was being too crudely provocative. Without changing the meaning, I can make the same point.

Apparently, the "CIA being run by the ACLU" means solely that the Agency can't torture people. Seriously.

In an inspired choice, Esquire chooses Mark Kelly, the calm astronaut whose wife, congresswoman Gabby Giffords, was brutally shot in the face doing her job. Money quote:

In space, Kelly had received further instruction in catastrophe. On his third trip into orbit, he had delivered a part to the International Space Station, where the residents needed badly to fix their broken toilet. His previous flight had been only the second after the Columbia disaster. Astronauts understand: Something always goes wrong. On the day his wife was shot, during the torturous flight that Kelly, his mother, and his daughters from a previous marriage made from Houston to Tucson, there were twenty minutes when he thought he had lost his wife for good. He was flying on a friend's private plane, and he had turned on the TV to watch reports of the shooting. "It was a terrible mistake," he said later. In the chaos, someone said that his wife was dead. His mother practically screamed, he remembered after; his daughters cried. Kelly retreated to the bathroom. "I just, you know, walked into the bathroom and, you know, broke down," he said. Eventually, he managed to get through to someone at the hospital, and he found out then that Giffords was, in fact, alive. "As bad as it was that she had died," Kelly said, "it's equally exciting that she hadn't."

(Photo: In this handout image provided by U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' office on January 11, 2011, Mark Kelly, husband of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), holds his wife's hand in the congresswoman's hospital room at University Medical Center January 9, 2011 in Tucson, Arizona. Six people were killed and at least 13 others wounded, including Giffords, when a gunman opened fire at a public event held at Tucson Safeway supermarket. By U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' office via Getty Images.)

Christopher Jobson is wowed:

A new rotoscopic animation by Seoul-based Studio Shelter (previously) in which every single frame is a different character in a different style, frequently switching mediums between pencils, pens, markers, and even paint. What a perfect and wonderful way to capture the frustrations and rewards of drawing through the medium itself. I watched the whole clip twice and was amazed, but it wasn’t until the third time when I started hitting pause repeatedly that I realized how many hundreds of hidden treasures flash before your eyes.