From long familiarity, we know what honor is.
It is what enables the individual to do right
in the face of complacency and cowardice.
It is what enables the soldier to die alone,
the political prisoner to resist,
the singer to sing her song, hardly appreciated, on a side street.
Mark Helprin
Wonderful World of Obama
- "If you've got a business—you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen." - Obama Campaign Speech, Roanoke, VA, 7/13/12
North County High School freshman Jack Andraka became the winner of the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair for developing a dipstick sensor that tests blood or urine and detects not only pancreatic cancer, but also lung and ovarian cancer as well. His sensor is 90 percent accurate and is 28 times faster, as well as cheaper. The sensor is also 100 times more sensitive than current tests for the disease. Andraka said he was turned down by 200 researchers before Johns Hopkins University’s Dr. Anirban Maitra took a chance on him and allowed Andraka to develop the sensor in his lab.
Now that Obama, on behalf of the US government, has claimed credit for Andraka's invention...
Note that by the time Andraka gets his government-approved patent, goes through government-mandated trials under the scrutiny of the FDA, and gets his test into the market, Andraka may well be in his mid-twenties, finishing up graduate school. Mr. Obama, how many people, like Jack's inspiration for the discovery, his uncle whom died of the disease, will go without early diagnosis over the coming decade because of glacially slow government approval processes?
I wonder if Obama would have ever become President if he had been passed over 200 straight times by party bosses and/or primaries...
- "The mistake of my first term—couple of years," the president allowed in a Sunday interview with CBS' Charlie Rose, "was thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right." At times, Obama confessed, he'd forgotten that "the nature of this office is also to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism, especially during tough times." He needed to do "more explaining, but also inspiring." - Gene Healy / Reason, "Obama Descends into Self-Parody"
According to CBS's Mark Knoller, in his first two years in office, the president clocked 902 speeches and statements and gave 265 interviews. Anybody who talks that much runs the risk of saying too much.Less is more. Obama has cheapened the prestige of the Office he holds by appearing on numerous television programs. It's not just that his rhetoric has been repetitive and inconsequential, but he has been divisive, attacking his predecessors, the Supreme Court, and his political adversaries. He apologizes to America's enemies, and he constantly makes excuses.
The fact is that 3 years into the Obama recovery, the unemployment rate and the number of employed are worse than the day he took office (along with the highest structurally long-term unemployed in decades)--and tepid economic and job growth is probably a third of the rates over past recoveries since the Depression. He has added over $5T to the national debt, more than doubling our publicly-held debt. Our entitlement liabilities have deteriorated, and our ongoing debt is unsustainable, but Obama offers no solutions beyond even more spending and class warfare tax hikes.
And let's throw on his widening scope of undeclared combat in the dysfunctional Middle East/Gulf region. Here's an inconvenient fact regarding Obama's obsession in backing the corrupt Afghanistan government:
On July 7, 2011, U.S. troop deaths from the war in Afghanistan since President Obama took office reached 1,000. That means that nearly two-thirds of the U.S. fatalities in the war in Afghanistan have occurred during the Obama administration, which has managed the war for a mere quarter of its duration.And, after all this evidence, Obama THINKS that he has a MESSAGING PROBLEM. Obama's version of a "listening tour" is for a captive audience to listen to what he has to say. What hubris, lousy analysis, pathetic self-appraisal, and departure from reality.
We want and deserve more than talk: we want leadership, action and results. Leadership is NOT 8 years of nonstop campaigning, partisan sniping and political hype. It's not enough to describe the symptoms of a problem and pass the real problem on to another President next year or 4 years from now; we need a doctor whom directly faces the problem, diagnoses the disease and cures it, even if the medicine is bitter. It may be nice for a President to have a good bedside manner, but the patient really wants to get out of the hospital.
SCOTUS Mayo v. Prometheus Labs: Thumbs UP!
First of all, let point out the case was decided this past March. The reason I brought it up in this post is that in the lead segment, I described Jack Andraka, a teenager whom has developed a novel cancer diagnostic test and is applying for a patent. From what I understand, Andraka's patent application should not be affected by this case, but it provided a natural bridge to the discussion of this issue.
Prometheus Labs developed a test for flagging threshold levels (i.e., too high or too low) of metabolites (chemicals in the blood) as a result of administering a class of drugs called thiopurines for autoimmune disease. Medical personnel could use these results to make necessary adjustments in drug delivery. (One should note that the issue wasn't the drug or the measurement method of metabolites but the flagging mechanism.) Prometheus was awarded a relevant patent in 2002. Mayo developed its own alerting diagnostic, and Prometheus sued in district court. The district court dismissed Prometheus' claim. Prometheus appealed, and the Court of Appeals reversed the decision. Mayo appealed to SCOTUS, and SCOTUS unanimously ruled in favor of Mayo.
Now a reader not familiar with the libertarian literature may wonder why Reason, Cato, and others submitted legal briefs in favor of Mayo: don't we believe in property in property, and isn't protection of trademarks and patents guaranteed by the US Constitution? Yes. The issue involves an expanding number of patents granted to implementations of abstract ideas or laws of nature (especially relevant to software or business processes) sustained in the lower courts since the 1990's.
Thus, for example, one could conceptualize what Prometheus and Mayo were doing as a variation on the concept of a thermostat applied to metabolites or a pregnancy test. Medical personnel already knew how to compare metabolite measurements against threshold levels; this product enhancement simply made the diagnostic results more usable. Maybe doctors needed to manually double-check threshold levels and suggested that it would be easier if the test "knew" to flag exceptional conditions. This is simply an organic extension to a diagnostic test.
For example, I've manually configured my own email alerts to flag unusual errors appearing in a database log. I could, of course, examine the database log at any time (but I typically multi-task, have to go to meetings, etc.); I could set up an automated alert to wake up every 5 minutes and check if an Oracle error message or warning had been appended to the log. Third-party applications did similar things, and Oracle eventually implemented a relevant feature in a core DBA application.
The point is, if the government starts granting patents for, say, a natural extension of a concept, it has a chilling effect on innovation, because market innovators may find themselves sued because their independently developed work products violate some unduly granted patent they didn't know about. This has been particularly notable in the field of software development or business methods, something I'm deeply worried about. Liberally granted software and relevant patents create an artificial barrier to entry for the implementation of software/business improvements, a violation of free market principles.
What's interesting is noting what companies submitted briefs to SCOTUS on this decision. Big Software, like Microsoft, and some venture capitalists supported Prometheus; in part, they seemed to be worried that SCOTUS might rein in the proliferation of dubiously awarded software and related patents (affecting market-protected revenues, e.g., licensing fees). IT companies not primarily software vendors (like Verizon and HP) sided with Mayo, essentially based on my concerns outlined above.
How Can This Happen in America?
Reason recently covered a Ninth Circuit decision involving the DEA involving its treatment of a family:
At 7 a.m. on January 20, 2007, DEA agents battered down the door to Thomas and Rosalie Avina’s mobile home in Seeley, California, in search of suspected drug trafficker Louis Alvarez. Thomas Avina met the agents in his living room and told them they were making a mistake. Shouting “Don’t you fucking move,” the agents forced Thomas Avina to the floor at gunpoint, and handcuffed him and his wife, who had been lying on a couch in the living room. As the officers made their way to the back of the house, where the Avina’s 11-year-old and 14-year-old daughters were sleeping, Rosalie Avina screamed, “Don’t hurt my babies. Don’t hurt my babies.”
The agents entered the 14-year-old girl’s room first, shouting “Get down on the fucking ground.” The girl, who was lying on her bed, rolled onto the floor, where the agents handcuffed her. Next they went to the 11-year-old’s room. The girl was sleeping. Agents woke her up by shouting “Get down on the fucking ground.” The girl’s eyes shot open, but she was, according to her own testimony, “frozen in fear.” So the agents dragged her onto the floor. While one agent handcuffed her, another held a gun to her head.During the first half hour, all four family members were handcuffed in the living room; the handcuffs for the daughters were removed after the first half hour, while DEA agents continued ransacking the home. After 2 hours, they came to the conclusion that the license plate number leading them to the address was in error.
The Avina family sued over their treatment, and the District Court ruled in favor of the DEA. The Ninth Circuit ruled that the rough treatment was appropriate for the parents but not the children.
Someone needs to explain to me why any rough treatment of either the parents or the daughters, none of whom posed a serious threat to any of the armed DEA agents, was necessary or acceptable. The DEA
This excerpt comes from the Ninth Circuit opinion:
Under our case law, an issue of material fact exists as to whether the actions of the agents were excessive in light of the ages of B.S.A. (age eleven) and B.F.A. (age fourteen) and the limited threat they posed. See Tekle, 511 F.3d 839 (holding that officers were not entitled to summary judgment on excessive force claim where officers pointed guns at an eleven-year-old boy’s head during the arrest of the boy’s father); Motley v. Parks, 432 F.3d 1072, 1089 (9th Cir. 2005) (en banc) (holding that officer’s act of pointing a gun at an infant during the search of a gang member’s house was objectively unreasonable); see also McDonald ex rel. McDonald v. Haskins, 966 F.2d 292, 294-95 (7th Cir. 1992) (holding that officer’s act of pointing his gun at a nine-year-old’s head during the search of home was excessive use of force). Accordingly, we reverse the district court’s grant of summary judgment in favor of the United States on B.F.A.’s and B.S.A.’s claims for assault and battery.Okay, there but for the grace of God. I don't like any law enforcement official pointing guns at children's heads or children, period. Or rough treatment and handcuffing people unless there is evidence of resistance. In this case, apparently there wasn't even evidence that the suspect was ever seen at the residence in question. I expect law enforcement officers to perform due diligence. How can this happen in America? If Bastiat talked about legal plunder, this must be legal terrorism.
I personally have never taken drugs and discourage their use (I value my mind, and as the UNCF ad goes, "a mind is a terrible thing to waste"). But I think we seriously need to think about dysfunctional public policies resulting in prisons and jails overflowing with people not harming other people.
DISCLOSE Act? Thumbs DOWN!
The Senate, on a party-line vote, failed to pass the DISCLOSE Act again (i.e., short of the 60 votes needed for cloture). This is a thinly-disguised discriminatory, unconstitutional attempt to intimidate free speech. It's discriminatory because some special-interest groups (e.g., labor unions) or media companies (which don't have to disclose since no transaction takes place) are favored over others (i.e., non-media corporations). The fact that the Democrats all voted for a law that specifically excluded their largest interest group, organized labor, is transparent. It's a thinly disguised attempt to intimidate corporate speech (i.e., for reprisals by special-interest groups, including harassment of corporate officers and attempts to boycott goods or services).
There is no need to disclose whether you support a candidate anymore than disclose whom you vote for. There are specific reasons why we are allowed to vote in private. Similarly, we are allowed to publish anonymously, under a pseudonym, etc. There are a number of reasons, including harassment if you openly express unpopular opinions.
I have never bought the idea that political commercials buy elections. Certainly they can help frame the issue or raise questions. But even in the case of the notorious Swift boat ads, the fact of the matter is that John Kerry in the early 1970's as a politically active dissident Vietnam veteran had said some provocative things about his fellow American soldiers and created political enemies in the process; they were and are entitled to express their opinions. As far as I know, the Bush campaign never ran ads of Kerry's Senate hearing statements. Democrats have had no problems with outspending McCain or Romney by 3 or more times and running negative ads. Over the past month, I've seen at least 30 Obama ads (I have a mute button...) and no Romney ads. I think that the ads, which have been smearing Romney, are pathetic and risk a backlash from voters. I don't think, regardless of what their focus groups say, that the ads are helpful. But he has a right to express his opinion.
In any event, it's irrelevant. Even the ACLU agrees on the dysfunctional effect of these unconstitutional burdens on free speech:
The electoral system is strengthened by efforts to facilitate public participation, not by chilling free speech and invading the privacy of donors to controversial causes. Indeed, our Constitution embraces public discussion of matters that are important to our nation’s future, and it respects the right of individuals to support those conversations without being exposed to unnecessary risk of harassment or embarrassment.Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
The Babys, "Midnight Rendezvous"
