Category Archives: Technology and Society

Business, Health, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Antibiotics

5 Comments

In light of the news earlier this week of the discovery of a resistant strain of E. coli, this looks like good news from Harvard:

Erythromycin, which was discovered in a soil sample from the Philippines in 1949, has been on the market as a drug by 1953. “For 60 years chemists have been very, very creative, finding clever ways to ‘decorate’ this molecule, making changes around its periphery to produce antibiotics that are safer, more effective, and overcome the resistance bacteria have developed,” says Dr. Myers, Amory Houghton Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology in Harvard’s Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology. “That process is semisynthesis, modifying the naturally occurring substance.”

In contrast, the process described in the Nature study involves using “eight industrial chemicals, or substances derived from them,” according to Dr. Myers, and manipulating them in various combinations and then testing the products against panels of disease causing bacteria. This allows us to make new “new compounds in fewer steps than was previously possible.”

For a host of reasons, from the difficulty of developing antibiotics to the relatively low return on investment they offer, by 2013 the number of international pharmaceutical companies developing antibiotics had dwindled to four. And in each 5-year period from 1983 through 2007, the number of new antibiotics approved for use in the U.S. decreased, from 16 at the beginning of that period to only five by its end.

One thing that has complicated antibiotic development is a perceived reluctance by federal agencies to fund the research. In fact, Dr. Myers says, his new antibiotic development system would have been impossible without support from a Harvard alum and his wife who are interested in science and Harvard’s Blavatnik Accelerator Fund, which provided support for the initial creation of Myers’s company Macrolide Pharmaceuticals.

“I was making a presentation to a group of visiting alumns interested in science and one, Alastair Mactaggart, asked me about funding. I told him I had no funding because at that time we didn’t, and he followed me back to my office and said, ‘this is ridiculous: we have to do something about this’.”

Gee, it’s almost as though the government is completely incompetent at its core functions while busying itself with things that are none of its business.

Business, Economics, Space, Technology and Society

XCOR

14 Comments

It looks to me like Lynx is dead. It will be interesting to see who, if anyone, from the company shows up at the suborbital researchers conference in Colorado next week. Fortunately for those laid off, I think that a number of commercial space companies are hiring, including in Texas.

[Update a while later]

I would note that apparently Midland has joined the ranks of spaceports with no spaceships.

Business, Space, Technology and Society

BEAM And SpaceX

17 Comments

They’re going to depressurize and repressurize the BEAM tomorrow morning. They seem to think that the material was just stiff from storage.

Meanwhile, less than a half an hour until today’s launch and landing attempt. The ship is on station, despite the growing tropical depression in the area. They don’t really have anything to lose from the attempt, unless the ship itself is at risk from the weather, but it’s not even a storm yet. The live feed is up, unlike yesterday.

[Update a while later]

OK, another perfect mission and landing. We’re rapidly approaching the point at which we’ll be surprised if they don’t recover the stage.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary, Technology and Society, War Commentary

Katie Couric

8 Comments

…decried “edited Planned Parenthood video,” then doctors an interview with a gun owner.

How perky of her.

[Update a while later]

Who cares about Hillary’s emails? Not we in the media.

[Update a while later]

The networks refuse to cover her perfidy against journalism. Yes, I’m shocked, too.

[Update a few minutes later]

Related: The media snoozed when Obama was tyrannically expanding the power of the executive branch, but they’ll pay more attention when Trump does it.

it’s nice to see the prospect of a Trump administration reminding folks on the left of this, particularly as the journalist and pundit classes are dominated by lefties. It’s terrible, we’re told, that Trump is issuing veiled threats to journalists — though Obama joked about auditing his enemies, seized journalist phone records and threatened a journalist who refused to reveal sources with imprisonment. Trump would be a warmonger, we’re told, although in fact Barack Obama has been at war longer than any other U.S. president, if without any particular success. Trump would arrogantly ride roughshod over any opposition, though Barack Obama famously used “I won” as an excuse to ignore opponents and bragged that he had a “pen (and) a phone” to bypass congressional disagreement. (And he’s used them a lot.)

Many of the journalists and pundits who see Trump as the next imperial president were silent over these Obama actions. Like Ron Silver with his fighter jets, they saw Obama’s envelope-pushing as fine because it was by their own president.

Yes, this is (sadly) why we have to have a white Republican in the White House. When it’s a Democrat, the media are lapdogs, not watchdogs.

[Update a while later]

Crickets from documentary film makers on Couric’s doctoring of the video. Because it’s not about the truth, it’s about the narrative.

[Saturday-morning update]

From Ace: Why I hate the media. One gets the sense that he is annoyed.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society, War Commentary

Hillary’s Emails

13 Comments

The coming summer of scandal:

A long-awaited State Department inspector general report on the impact of personal email use on recordkeeping at State is expected to be made public any day. And as many Americans prepare for the traditional Memorial Day kickoff to the summer season, longtime Clinton aide Cheryl Mills is scheduled to sit for a sworn deposition Friday in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the conservative group Judicial Watch.

Mills’ testimony would be the first known time a member of Clinton’s inner circle has been questioned under oath in the email controversy. Another top Clinton aide, Huma Abedin, is set to testify next month. And Clinton herself is awaiting a judge’s ruling on whether she should be required to give a deposition.

No matter how that comes out, Clinton also faces an ongoing FBI investigation into the email set up. Some of her aides have already been questioned. She’s expressed a willingness to sit down with investigators — something they’re expected to take her up on in the next few weeks. Unless it takes place in complete secrecy, such a session would be the highest-profile legal spectacle the former first lady has faced since she testified 20 years ago before a federal grand jury investigating the disappearance and reappearance of Whitewater billing records.

“I think the [Office of Inspector General] report is going to be of interest and the testimony is going to be out there,” said Judicial Watch’s Tom Fitton. “I think the courts will take action this summer….I don’t see any of this going away.”

Nope, no matter how much the media and the corrupt Democrat Party want it to.

[Update a while later]

The media is desperate to resurrect Hillary’s campaign.

For those too young to know what Whitewater was, here’s some inoculation to forthcoming media spin about it. No, she wasn’t “exonerated.”

[Update on Thursday morning]

Hillary’s problem isn’t her emails; it’s her dishonesty:

In this case, her dishonesty evolves from lying to potentially criminal activity.

Hence the FBI investigation, with the possible crimes including serious, fundamental breaches of the laws implemented to protect national security secrets. Hillary Clinton decided to retain personal control of her government-related communications, and the OIG report speaks to this seeming crime. Hiding her government-related communications from legally-required scrutiny served Ms. Clinton’s own personal political interests—more important, to her, than obeying the law. Even worse, her actions prove more important than protecting the American people.

The Federal Records Act has penalties for government employees who do not comply—of course, the Department of Justice has to enforce them.

Apparently, Ms. Clinton never requested permission to operate her own private server system. She certainly refused OIG requests for an interview. Great quote (footnote 152, document page 38): “Secretary Clinton declined OIG’s request for an interview. The former Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations has not responded to OIG’s request for an interview.” Yes, more than one key Clinton aide refused to grant interviews to OIG investigators. (See footnote 7 on document page 2.)

A close reader of the document will note that current Secretary of State John Kerry agreed to an OIG interview. So did former Secretaries Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell and Madeleine Albright.

But, but, but…THEY ALL DO IT! TU QUQUE!!!

If the FBI concludes it has evidence of crimes, the DOJ must proceed. If it doesn’t, Congress must seek a special prosecutor.

Yes. Or there is no rule of law.

[Update a while later]

Obama snaps at a reporter who asks about Hillary’s emails.

[Update a while later]

Game over, it’s not a right-wing conspiracy, and the FBI will get to the bottom of the mess:

The State IG report, weighing in at over 80 pages, is crammed full of bureaucratese yet paints an indelible and detailed portrait of things going very wrong at Foggy Bottom—especially under Hillary Clinton. It can charitably be termed scathing, and it leaves no doubt that Team Clinton has lied flagrantly to the public about EmailGate for more than a year.

That the State Department’s IT systems were a mess for years was hardly a secret, and the IG report makes painfully clear that State has had a difficult time transitioning into the electronic age. Several recent secretaries of state used email in a manner that would be judged inadequate, and perhaps improper, by today’s standards, including Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, who served under President George W. Bush.

That said, only Hillary Clinton simply refused to use government email for government work—she repeatedly denied requests from State security and IT to use state.gov email—and she systematically dodged federal regulations on electronic communications and records preservation by setting up her private email server of bathroom infamy. Damningly, while several former secretaries of state cooperated with the IG in this important investigation, Ms. Clinton refused to.

…Hints are now emerging that Ms. Clinton’s neglect of basic security may have damaged more than her political reputation. A new report suggests several U.S. counterterrorism operations went awry thanks to Hillary’s slipshod communications security. This serious accusation is unsubstantiated yet plausible, given how easy it would have been for foreign spies to access Ms. Clinton’s email — as well as how much classified information she and her staff routinely put in “unclassified” emails. Counterintelligence officers will be investigating EmailGate for years, searching for clues about clandestine operations that went wrong, possibly due to Hillary’s IT misdeeds at Foggy Bottom.

We may never know just how much damage she did to national security, and how many operations failed and operatives lives were lost.

[Update a while later]

With the IG report, will Bernie finally muster up the gumption to take Hillary down?

We’ll see if he campaigns in California on it. A loss here would be politically devastating to her.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Trump And The Economy

12 Comments

His policies would crush the winners:

Like Google and Facebook, Amazon is under attack by European antitrust regulators. If Trump were really the economic nationalist he plays on TV, he would be defending these U.S. stars. But in his picture of the economy, these companies simply don’t count, perhaps because they weren’t around during his 1980s business heyday. Trump is neither pro-market nor pro-business, the usual Republican choices. He’s just pro-Trump.

He’s oblivious to most U.S. success stories. On just about any list of excellence — the most admired companies, the most valuable brands, the world’s supply-chain leaders — U.S. enterprises dominate. Nike has even surpassed long-time champion Louis Vuitton as the world’s most valuable apparel brand, a triumph for American culture as well as a U.S. business. The chemists coming up with new products at 3M or Procter & Gamble are no more important to Trump than the FedEx and UPS drivers delivering packages, the longshoremen offloading cargo at the ports of Long Beach and Charleston, the animators creating new films for Pixar, or the buyers finding bargains for T.J. Maxx. Whether you work for a U.S. company or a foreign company with U.S. operations, if you’re a successful player in a global supply chain, you simply don’t exist to him.

This is a candidate who promised to bring big steel back to Pittsburgh without considering why it disappeared. In Trump’s version of the economy, the only threat to established industries comes from diabolical foreigners and stupid U.S. trade negotiators. (Never mind that Chinese steelmakers already face nearly 500 percent punitive tariffs for corrosion-resistant products, with more tariffs for other types of steel potentially on the way.) He can’t imagine disruption that comes from changing demand or better ideas.

He’s an economic ignoramus, or a demagogue, or both.

But one possible good outcome; could he cause “progressives” to rethink big government?

Having watched the rise of Trumpism — and, now, having seen the beginning of violence in its name — who out there is having second thoughts as to the wisdom of imbuing our central state with massive power? Have progressives joined conservatives in worrying aloud about the wholesale abuse of power?

That’s a serious, not a rhetorical, question. I would genuinely love to know how many “liberals” have begun to suspect that there are some pretty meaningful downsides to the consolidation of state authority. I’d like to know how many of my ideological opponents saying with a smirk that “it couldn’t happen here” have begun to wonder if it could. I’d like to know how many fervent critics of the Second Amendment have caught themselves wondering whether the right to keep and bear arms isn’t a welcome safety valve after all.

Furthermore, I’d like to know if the everything-is-better-in-Europe brigade is still yearning for a parliamentary system that would allow the elected leader to push through his agenda pretty much unchecked; if “gridlock” is still seen as a devastating flaw in the system; if the Senate is still such an irritant; and if the considerable power that the states retain is still resented as before. Certainly, there are many on the left who are mistrustful of government and many on the right who are happy to indulge its metastasis. But as a rule, progressives favor harsher intrusion into our civil society than do their political opposites. Are they still as sure that this is shrewd?

Unfortunately, I’m not sure they’re really capable of thinking those sorts of things through.

[Update a while later]

“Even within the private sector, Trump’s background does not extend to the sorts of decision-making situations that would confront, say, the chief executive officer of a large, well-established corporation. Instead, Trump’s career, apart from his flings at presidential campaigning, has almost exclusively been about deal-making aimed at personal enrichment and enhancing recognition of the Trump brand name. Against the backdrop of U.S. history and past U.S. presidents, Trump’s personal qualifications are breathtakingly narrow and shallow, and his endeavors inwardly oriented.”

You don’t say.

Business, Culinary, Economics, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Nutrition Labels

9 Comments

The guy who came up with the stupid idea says they don’t work:

If the nutrition label doesn’t work, how else can the government help consumers make more informed, healthier choices? For starters, the FDA should be more like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the people who created the Internet. Instead of just focusing on trying to fix the unfixable, the FDA could shift its focus toward thinking more creatively about viable solutions and give up on what isn’t working.

First, the FDA would need to honestly concede how little it knows about how different foods and food combinations actually affect individuals with distinct genetic and environmental factors, along with their personal preferences or capacity (or willingness) to exercise. The FDA would need to expand its base of knowledge and understanding within these areas and then consider how manufacturers and consumers would respond to any changes the FDA suggests as a result.

But that would involve having to do real science.

And of course, despite their failure, Michelle and the FDA commissioner continue to cheer lead for them.

[Update a while later]

Sorry, there’s nothing magical about breakfast.

I rarely eat breakfast, except on weekends, or vacation. I’ll generally go all day without eating if I’m just working at home. But when I do eat breakfast, I try to make it mostly protein and fat. Cereal is a dietary abomination, invented by a scientific whack job in Battle Creek.