Monday February 28
Long Time Coming
The story is a little old, but rings very true now after last week's contested vote by a Food & Drug Administration panel (replete with conflicts-of-interest and other scandals) to keep painkillers Vioxx and Celebrex on the market. FDA to Institute Drug Safety Board [L.A. Times.com]. Isn't this what they were supposed to have been doing all along, namely overseeing drug safety?
Posted by glenn at Snow Days
Once upon a time -- in a world far, far away -- a "snow day" meant there was too much snow on the ground to make kids trudge through a blizzard. Now, it apparently means that there's snow predicted for later, because this morning all schools in the Washington, DC-area were canceled even though there's no snow on the ground and none falling from the sky. As my son celebrated at 6:00 a.m. today, it's a "prospective snow day." That's the reason some folks call this place "Washington, The Nation's Weather Wimp."
Update: It's now 2:00 p.m., snow showers are falling but because the temp. is 34F, nothing is sticking to the ground. Once again, much ado about nothing.
Friday February 25
Sucker Born Every Minute
Yeah, I too received one of these spoofed emails from "fbi@fbi.gov" purportedly warning that my IP address had been recorded visiting "40 illegal Web sites." Virus Arrives in E-mail Allegedly Sent by FBI [ZDNet.com]. It's just hard to understand that anyone could be so gullible as to believe that the FBI would do such a thing or that, even if it did, the agency would notify a target via email. Even harder to comprehend is why anyone would open an attachment forwarded with such an email, which arrived with a .pif extension that all but cried out "virus." But it happens every day. Folks fall for the silliest phishing ruses to disclose their confidential financial information, answer those ridiculous emails from ex-wives of deposed Nigerian dictators promising millions of dollars, and the like. Take the latest scam, a mythical French company that allegedly promised cases of free champagne for forwarding a chain lettter to 10 friends. C'est fantastique!
Thursday February 24
The Anti-Social iPod?
Andrew Sullivan (from the Daily Dish) has an op-ed in the Sunday Times of London, titled Society is Dead, We Have Retreated Into the iWorld. It's a rant against what he views as the anti-socializing effects of the iPod MP3 music player. Sullivan thinks that iPod owners "walk around the world like hermit crabs with our isolation surgically attached."
That's hardly the case. I would wager that more spontaneous conversations, and flirtations, have begun about iPods and what their owners are listening to than about anything since blotter acid in Haight-Ashbury in the 1960s. More to the point, the world is a great place when it has a soundtrack. It makes people smile, and smiles make for pleasant social interactions. If you ask me -- and Andrew hasn't, but I will tell him anyway -- it's the folks who are tethered to their wireless headsets and talk on cell phones while walking down the street who are really anti-social. A decade ago that behavior (mumbling to one's self in public) would have been regarded as delusional or schizophrenic. Maybe it still should be!
Dark Matter
Readers of this blog (whoever and how few you are) may recall that I am a big fan of theoretical physics. Now one of the biggest problems with the Big Bang theory -- which has been proven by remnants of microwave radiation and a red shift in receding galaxies -- is that the amount of known matter in the universe is just a small fraction of what the equations predict. (Perhaps a bigger problem is what was "before" the Big Bang, but that's a metaphysical question, as time was created by the Big Bang so there was no "before.") Physicists theorized that there was a lot of "dark matter" in the universe, perhaps in black holes, that had as yet been undetected.
Well now it has been found. Astronomers Detect First Invisible Galaxy [MSNBC.com]. An entire galaxy that is invisible, 500 times the mass of its visible "twin." As Carl Sagan would have said, "billions and billions" of dark stars is a lot of dark matter. Once again, the theoretical mathematics of Einstein and his heirs has been proven correct, decades later, by experimentation and observation.
It's a weird and wonderous thing, the scientific method. But it works.
Putin's Revenge
Our intrepid President is treking all over eastern Europe, former Soviet satellites, singing the song of democracy. That's wonderful, because the U.S. was nowhere in 1968, when Russian tanks rolled across Checkoslovakia, in 1980, when Lech Walesa was leading democratic revolutionaries in Warsaw, or in 1989, when students holding Statues of Liberty confronted Chinese government tanks in Tiananmen Square.
Of course, George W. has little bad to say about his "soul-mate" Valdimir Putin of Russia, even though the latter is doing everything he can to turn back the clock on democratic reform in that beleaguered nation. Even today's headlines on their joint press conference in Bratislava, Slovakia -- where Bush again referred to Putin as "my friend" -- reveal that Dubya has morphed the "criticize in private, praise in public" principle from corporate management, where it works well, to foreign relations, where it flatly contradicts his professed objectives. On the other hand, honest Russians (there's an oxymoron for you) admit that there's no American backing of Putin's autocratic putsch.
Nothing to Celebrate [MSNBC.com]. Perhaps true, but we don't do the image of the United States any favors by sharply criticizing Iran -- indeed, implying invasion plans -- while turning a blind eye to a leader who has basically abolished the legislature, continued a civil war and tried to disrupt free elections in another sovereign country. Yes, Moscow and Putin have suffered from terrorism, too. But that doesn't mean we should remain close allies.
Wednesday February 23
It Never Rains in California
Unlike the 1972 pop song by Albert Hammond, it's not true that "it never rains in Southern California." The media is all over the story of the recent storms in Los Angeles and Orange County, what with mudslides, houses falling off cliffs and other spectacular images. Deadly S. California Storm Rages Into its 5th Day [USAToday.com]. But the truth is that February is always rainy in California -- north and south -- something Easterners simply don't understand. They see pictures of the San Gabriel mountains, snow-capped around greater L.A., and think that's what the basin looks like year-round.
In reality, February is the time to bring umbrellas, ponchos and very bright headlights. Once, when I lived in Del Mar in North San Diego County, it was so foggy in the early evening (the "marine layer" never burns off in the winter) that I could not even find an exit off the freeway.
Now it's true that these rains are much more substantial than in the past 15 years. But it always rains in the desert in the winter. Things are just backwards in California. Winters are green, summers are brown, and Republicans are moderate. Welcome to California -- do not back up, severe tire damage.
Tuesday February 22
You've Come a Long Way
The story was about a significant constitutional case concerning private property rights and eminent domain before the U.S. Supreme Court. But buried in the text was the observation that with the absence of Chief Justice Rehnquist due to illness and another Justice (Stevens) missing due to a travel snafu, that "created an opportunity for Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the most senior remaining justice, to become the first woman to preside over an oral argument at the court."
The significance of this moment was its relative insignificance. Meaning that 20 some years after she became the first woman on the Supreme Court, O'Connor's assumption of the presiding role at the Court was not treated as anything extraordinary. That illustrates the extraordinary social changes wrought by the women's rights movement, which began with Betty Friedan and blossomed in the late 1970s. When I was in law school (1978-81), it was the first time that women made up nearly 50% of the student body. I remember celebrating Myra Bradwell Day, named after the first woman who was admitted to the bar as an American lawyer (after unsuccessfully appealing her initial denial to the U.S. Supreme Court) in 1870. Now it's no big deal to have female lawyers, women judges and even women presiding at the Supreme Court. The same Supreme Court, mind you, that wrote about Bradwell, "The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many occupations of civil life....The paramount destiny and mission of women are to fulfill the noble and benign office of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator."
Holy revolution, Batman! John Riggins, of Washgington Redskins fame, once drunkenly quipped to O'Connor "Loosen up, Sandy baby." I think it's more appropriate, now, to say -- like the old cigarette ad (or the newer Fatboy Slim CD) -- "Sandy, you've come a long way, baby."
He's Really Sick
Michael Jackson "Really Was Sick" Judge Says [Reuters.com]. It's a good thing juries decide these cases, because Jacko's "flu-like symptoms" hardly justify a week-long delay in jury selection in his child abuse trial. It's also probably a really stupid defense tactic, as it allowed the jury pool to watch ABC's "Michael Jackson's Secret World" last Thursday night, with all its pedophelia overtones and weird behaviors, filmed and otherwise, about the pop music legend. And remember, the child by his side at that 2002 interview -- where Jackson unabashedly spoke about sharing his bed with young boys -- is the same boy who is now the centerpiece of this criminal trial.
Maybe the judge got the tense wrong. It's not that Jackson was really sick last week, it's that he is really sick.
Monday February 21
Gonzo is Dead
Last night Hunter Thompson, author of Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas ("A savage journey to the heart of the American dream"), preeeminent practitioner of self-styled "gonzo" journalism and the inspiration for this blog, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at his ranch in Woody Creek (Aspen), Colorado. Hunter S. Thompson Takes His Last Trip, Echoing Hemingway [MercuryNews.com]. Amid all the obituaries, many ask how a man who lived so hard could commit suicide, without even leaving a note.
That's not a quandry; it's perfectly in character. Given his exccessive consumption of drugs and alcohol for 30+ years, it's a wonder the man made it to 65 at all. And it seems that Thompson planned it himself, spending an intimate weekend with his kids and shooting himself in the kitchen while his wife was working out at her health club. Once the fun was over, Thompson often made clear, he wasn't going to stick around and watch the janitors sweep up.
Suicide is painless. It only hurts those left behind. Yet as Albert Camus wrote in The Myth of Sisyphus in 1942, "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide." Indeed, it may be the only rational way to exit this insane world of ours.
Goodbye, Hunter. You died like you lived. Gonzo is dead; long live gonzo.
Update: Like Markos of The Daily Kos, there's only two authors for whom I have gone out of my way to read everything they've written -- Hunter S. Thompson and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (Actually, there are five for me, since I've also read everything by Michael Chrichton, Tom Clancy and Robert Ludlum.) Oh well, serendipity is all we've got folks. Enjoy life while it lasts.
Saturday February 19
The Great Flip-Flopper
In a Newsweek opinion essay titled Hail to the Flip-Flopper, Fareed Zakaria writes that George W. Bush should be commended for not "staying the course" in Iraq.
Well Zakaria's right, of course. But it would be very helpful -- and certainly honest -- for the President to admit that the original Iraq war plan was a failure and that he's been forced to change his tune to accomodate reality on the ground. That's a sure sign of leadership. Pretending nothing's changed, when everything has, is just flip-flopping. Bush does it as good as any other cynical politician; his vaunted religious pieties and cowboy determination are all just for show.
Thursday February 17
Bloggers Don't Do It Daily
Well it's 500 posts for me at Fear & Loathing since this blog was launched in March 2003. That's an average of 1.378 days between entries, or just a little under one a day (689 days since inception). Not bad for a part-time gig slotted into the busy life of a practicing lawyer, but also not the "do it daily" ideal -- for whatever that's worth -- of the blogosphere.
Wednesday February 16
Brain Dead and Starving
Last month the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal by Florida Gov. Jeb Bush of a decision overturning his efforts to force the husband of a comatose woman -- who has been in a vegitative state for 15 years -- to continue intravenous feeding. The Christian right has taken up the case of Terry Schiavo as a cause celeb, arguing that medical miracles cannot be discounted and that removing the feeding tube would be euthanasia -- murder.
What a stupid and tragic case in which to decide the rights of individuals to die. There's no dispute that this woman expressed a clear desire not to be a vegetable. There is also no question that is what she is today, unable to move any limbs, speak, respond, acknowledge vistors, register emotions, etc. Her husband, for God's sake, is the one who after 15 years wants to end her suffering, but her evangelist parents -- backed by the state -- want to take that decision away from him.
You know, the United States has prosecuted Christian Scientists for felonies when they refused medical care, on religious grounds, for children who needed emergency treatment. That's a classic instance of the right to life and the right to freedom of religion clashing. But it's been settled for decades that the right to life includes the right to end one's life -- at least by refusing "extraordinary measures" and imposing a "do not resusicate" requirement on doctors -- if done knowingly. That's what living wills ("advance medical directives") are all about.
Too bad that Terry Schiavo was not up-to-speed on that concept on Feb. 25, 1990, when a chemical imbalance possibly triggered by an eating disorder caused her heart to stop beating and cut off oxygen to her brain. She's been brain-dead ever since and is now a pawn of religious zealots trying to impose their own view of miracles on a (rightly) reluctant husband and court system.
Monday February 14
Long Time Coming
When one works in an industry, it's somewhat amazing how wrong the press -- including those frequently praised as erudite -- can be about the issues of the day. Take the current wave of mergers in the telecommunications industry, like SBC-AT&T and Verizon-MCI. Verizon to Acquire MCI for $6.75 Billion [Forbes.com].
The usually thoughtful Forbes opined that the MCI deal "is the latest example of how regulatory changes in Washington are continuing to transform the telephone industry." That's hardly the case. Despite the Telecommunications Act of 1996, there have been very FEW regulatory changes in Washington (i.e., the Federal Communications Commission) because the local telephone monopolists -- who years ago were granted permission to merge the "Baby Bells" down from seven to four -- used the courts to overturn almost every regulatory change commanded by the FCC. (Indeed, the basic telecom regulatory and policy issues are the same now as they were two decades ago.) Meanwhile, fundamental technological changes continued to make dramatic cuts in the cost of long-distance, which in turn meant that the source of AT&T's and MCI's earnings was being vaporized by low margins, cell phones and the like. Combine that with huge overcapacity in long-haul fiber optic networks, available post-bankruptcy for pennies on the dollar, and one has all the makings of a classic market glut followed by shakeout.
These deals are not happening because of regulatory changes, rather despite (or maybe even because of) the lack of regulatory change in Washington.
Sunday February 13
Ah, THAT Leftist Europe
If folks in the EU are so rabidly anti-American as conservatives like to claim, what's this all about? Germany Rejects Call for Rumsfeld War Crimes Probe [Yahoo!News.com]. Seems like solidarity rather than confrontation and support rather than criticism. Even now-Attorney General Gonzales was worried in 2002 about potential war crimes charges against the Administration. That was never politically possible even in "leftist" Europe, as Germany's actions demonstrate quite clearly.
Saturday February 12
Accounting Fluff
So the trial of Bernie Ebbers, former WorldCom CEO, for fraud is beginnning, and the chief witness against him is the company's former CFO. Scott Sullivan testified this week that Ebbers was told quarterly that in order to "make the numbers" demanded by Wall Street, the green eyeshade accountants had to add "fluff" to WorldCom's revenues and understate expenses. Ebbers Told of 'Accounting Fluff' [USAToday.com].
This is very damning evidence and (as in Martha Stewart) more than enough to convict the slimebag Ebbers. WorldCom went down in an $11 billion accounting scandal because someone booked expenses as assets, thus artifically inflating revenues and understating costs in order to maintain false EPS reports. Bernie either knew about it or directed it -- matters not. He's going down, and it could not happen to a more rotten guy.
Friday February 11
SCO's Follies
Most people other than the SlashDot and open source crowds haven't been following the case, but a small company called SCO Group has sued IBM, claiming that the latter violated copyright rules in developing the Unix (and hence Linux) operating systems. I have always regarded this as a simple strike suit, designed to terrorize the open source movement with threat of copyright judgments -- a legal strategy funded by Microsoft -- without much substantive merit. Well, the courts appear to agree. Judge Slams SCO's Lack of Evidence Against IBM [ZDNet.com]
That's judicial-speak for "you lying bastards, get out of my court"!!
Thursday February 10
This is Torture?
Like many Americans, I was shocked and revolted by last Spring's revelations that detainees at the US-run prison in Abu Ghraib, Iraq were subjected to attacks by dogs, naked human pyramids and other degradations. But this takes things too far, the wrong way. The Washington Post, in a front-page article titled Detainees Accuse Female Interrogators, reported yesterday that some detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba were "abused" because "women rubbed their bodies against the men, wore skimpy clothes in front of them, made sexually explicit remarks and touched them provocatively." That's not torture and it's not anything like the sort of brutality outlawed by the Geneva Convention (which the Administration refuses to apply to Iraq).
Now we all know that sexual values and mores in Muslim countries are more restrictive than in America and most Western democracies. But still, using sex to entice men to talk is the oldest game in the book of espionage. And any man, Muslim or not, who would complain that some women rubbed their bodies provocatively while wearing skimpy clothing is just out of his mind. (We can leave aside the 72 virgins that Muslim martyrs are supposed to receive in heaven -- what are they for if not sex?) I mean, this is something for which most men would LOVE to be on the receiving end. Reminds me more of the way in which the Army won the Iraq war in the first three weeks. They used bullhorns to announce loudly in contested areas that Iraqi men had small penises and could not satisfy their women. So the stupid Iraqi soildiers were so angry they stormed out of their foxholes and got machine-gunned to death instantly.
They can't have it both ways. Either Muslim men are defiantly proud of their sexual prowess, in which case provocative body rubbing by sexy girls should be no big deal, or they are sexually deficient, in which case the provocation here was as offensive as Ginger Lynn accosting a bunch of gay men. Whatever, but if this is torture, send me to Iraq!!
Wednesday February 9
Lawyer Jokes
I am a lawyer and like to tell lawyer jokes. In fact, I've been known to take off-the-record breaks during depositions to regale opponents with new ones.
Now it turns out that, despite the PC-ification of America (I mean, no more Polack jokes, right?), lawyer jokes are still protected speech. Man Arrested for Lawyer Jokes at Courthouse Gets Last Laugh [law.com]. So what do lawyers use for contraception? Answer: their personalities.
Monday February 7
Swooning Under Pressure
Yesterday's SuperBowl 39 game was a very interesting football match, with most of the emphasis on opposing coaching schemes. But I think the game came down more to determination and will than anything else. The look in Donovan McNabb's eyes in the 3rd and 4th quarters -- when New England was pulling away decisively -- was of a lost soul. Then Philadelphia did not go into a hurry-up offense down 10 points with less than five minutes left in the game, and managed to run only one offensive play from scrimmage in the last 1:06.
As Mike Wilbon writes in A Case for All Time [washingtonpost.com] this morning:
I have grudgingly gained respect for the Eagles and McNabb this season. But their performance on Sunday stuck me as simple wilting under pressure. These guys get paid millions every year to deal with that pressure, so when they don't or can't it is very disapppointing. Not because the wrong team won, but because little boys and even many grown men look to these players as heroes. Everyone has a bad day once in a while, even champions, but not even to make it to the line is just a sad excuse for professionalism. The first rule to winning is showing up. Even Donovan's mom knows that.