I wonder what the pharmaceutical companies think of Shkreli

There’s a standard response when people feel the sticker shock at seeing the prices on brand new drugs: that cost is necessary to subsidize the expense of drug development. And that’s true! Bringing a new drug to market takes a lot of time and money and multiple levels of testing and clinical trials. It hurts to pay it, but you’re paying all the costs of development (would that companies that tear up the environment had to obey the same principle).

But now Martin Shkreli comes along, and ruins the whole defense. Shkreli bought the rights to a drug, Daraprim, and immediately jacked up the cost from $13.50/pill to $750/pill, all for a drug that cost him $1/pill to manufacture.

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Anthropology is so entertaining!

John Hawks makes a very good case that Homo naledi is a distinct species from H. erectus. He persuaded me, anyway, and it’s well worth reading.

Also entertaining. There is some savage snark in there aimed at Jeffrey Schwartz (oh, man, I’ve long known Schwartz as a hack, not for his anthropology, but for his atrocious abuse of genetics) and Tim White. Data, evidence, and inside baseball!

My brain just exploded

queenlizard

Join me in a journey to the gibbering throat of conspiratorial madness: a Breitbart article on Ahmed Mohamed and Irving, Texas.

This story isn’t just the usual whine that the “clock” (it’s now always in quotes — because although it was actually a clock in a pencil box cannibalized from an old Radio Shack clock, that is only its outward seeming, and in truth, it was a portent heralding the rising of an ancient evil) was not really an “invention”, therefore Mohamed was a liar. No, that was a circuit board of destruction!!!

It appears, the “clock” Mohamed brought to school this week was not the first of his circuit boards to look ominously like an improvised explosive device trigger. In fact, a photograph of one circulated by the Dallas Morning News was virtually indistinguishable from a circuit board used in a commercially available device used to train law enforcement and military personnel regarding how to identify IEDs.

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Humanity is ridiculous

cameronpig

Once upon a time, I watched a bit of a British television show called Black Mirror — it was, I was told, a series of scary stories about a dystopian near-future. The one episode I watched in full was about a politician forced by a terrorist to have sex with a pig, and most of it was reaction shots of this guy as he was contemplating the horror of this act. I started to watch a second episode, and it was something about another contrived scenario of public humiliation, and I lost interest. I came to the conclusion that where an American scary story might involve getting chased by zombies or giant spiders or something equally life-threatening, a British scary story was about finding oneself in an embarrassing situation that hurt one’s dignity.

Little did we all know, my assessment was accurate, and the show was written by a psychic. The latest news that seems to be consuming the British public is that…well, here’s the calmest description I’ve seen.

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Hoax? Fraud? Fooled?

I cannot do a facepalm big enough.

godzillafacepalm

After that last post (and now that I’m home from Winnipeg), I discover that Richard Dawkins has joined in the chorus of right-wing loons, like Sarah Palin, accusing Ahmed Mohamed of some kind of nefarious scheme. Dawkins claims that the kid was lying and committing fraud and exaggerating his accomplishment…when last I heard, Mohamed had only said he put together some circuit boards in 20 minutes before school. What did Dawkins imagine, that he’d built his transistors from scratch, etched the circuit boards, and invented The Clock?

That this was some wild Wile E. Coyote scheme, where he’d ordered parts from Acme in a brilliantly convoluted plan to get invited to the White House?

This is nuts.

People are noticing that self-proclaimed leaders of atheism are targeting a 14 year old boy — for being enthusiastic about electronics?

I’m fast learning why “movement” is a synonym for “shit”.

If Trump is going down, why not Ben Carson?

A few people have been arguing that Trump’s tolerance of anti-Muslim bigotry will kill his campaign at last; I doubt it. If so, though, shouldn’t Ben Carson be washed up?

Responding to a question on “Meet the Press,” the retired neurosurgeon said, I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation. I absolutely would not agree with that.

He also said that Islam, as a religion, is incompatible with the Constitution.

Carson, who is near the top of several early presidential polls, said a president’s faith should matter depending on what that faith is. If it’s inconsistent with the values and principles of America, then of course it should matter, he clarified.

The first amendment to the US Constitution:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

It’s also in article VI of the body of the Constitution:

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the members of the several state legislatures, and all executive and judicial officers, both of the United States and of the several states, shall be bound by oath or affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.

I guess Carson hasn’t read it, if he thinks he can claim that someone holding a particular religion can be prohibited from holding office.

Although it is an interesting idea — I think Christianity, as a religion, is incompatible with the Constitution. Can we tell all the presidential candidates to go home now?

The evolution of the Ahmed Mohamed story

The shifting rationales in the story of the Texas kid who brought a jury-rigged digital clock have been amazing. There’s been a steady progression of new excuses brought up to excuse throwing him in jail.

Early on, it was that it was simply precaution — they had standard procedures for dealing with potential threats. That’s patent nonsense. A standard response to a potential bomb would not involve throwing the “bomb” into the police car with the “bomb maker”. The school and the police knew it wasn’t a bomb from the beginning.

Then the complaint was that he didn’t properly explain what the device was. Simply not true: he said over and over precisely what it was, and all it was: it was a clock. Demanding that he say that it was something more when it wasn’t is absurd.

Then the yahoos all came out of the closet and said it sure doesn’t look like no clock to me. Yep. It was a collection of components strung together with wires, it was ugly and not too practical, but functionally, all it was was a clock. Sorry you don’t know much about electronics.

Then there were the detailed deconstructions of the clock, from the few pictures we have of it. This bit came from here, that bit came from there, here’s a dangling wire that has no purpose, there’s a cable that could be used to tap into the signal output from the clock. A terrorist could use this to set off a bomb! Sure. But they could also buy a $5 travel alarm from Wal-Mart even more easily to do the same thing. Can we arrest Wal-Mart now?

Then there were the nay-sayers: the kid was lying. He didn’t invent anything. This is true: a lot of us tinkered with old electronic components when we were his age, and assembled basic gadgets. I built a crystal radio, and made electric motors (looping those thin copper wires around and around was tedious). There was nothing revolutionary and lot that was clumsy in the clock. He disassembled and reassembled a Radio Shack digital gadget, nothing more. But so what? He’s 14! It’s excellent that he’s curious and is experimenting with technology, and is also enthused about it. That’s how scientists and engineers get started.

And now, at last, that lunatic Sarah Palin weighs in:

Friends, consider the kids disciplined and/or kicked out of school for bringing squirt guns to school or taking bites out of a pop tart until it resembled (to some politically correct yahoo) a gun, Palin rambled. Or the student out deer hunting with his dad early one morning who forgot he had a box of ammo in his truck when he parked in the school’s lot later that day. Kids humiliated and intimidated for innocent actions like those real examples are often marked the rest of their lives and made to feel really rotten. Whereas Ahmed Muhammad, an evidently obstinate-answering student bringing in a homemade “clock” that obviously could be seen by conscientious teachers as a dangerous wired-up bomb-looking contraption (teachers who are told “if you see something, say something!”) gets invited to the White House.

I thought we’d reached Peak Paranoia with Palin, until I read the comments on her post.

Guys, can’t you see between the lines? This was nothing less then a dry run, to test school security, had no one noticed it, next time, it would be the real thing

This little Muzzie was practicing his bomb making skills not “inventing a clock”.

It was a dry run to see how far they could get. They use their kids to bomb all the time in their country. They don’t care if their child dies in the process.

So now the demented right wing is convinced that Ahmed was actually planning to make a suicide attack on the school.

I’d like to believe we’ve reached the limit on this evolving set of excuses, but I’m not going to shortchange the astonishing imaginations of the American people.

Maybe I’m just too cynical

Kevin Drum is being way too optimistic here.

But his latest howler at a town hall in New Hampshire—especially after his weak debate performance last night—might finally be his death knell. Note: the issue isn’t the questioner. There are lunatics in every crowd. This one declared, “We have a problem in this country: it’s called Muslims….They have training camps growing where they want to kill us.” Then he asked “When do we get rid of them?” Did he mean all the Muslims? Just the fantasy training camps? Who knows. But all Trump said was this: “We’re going to be looking at a lot of different things.” No pushback, no nothing. I’m sure he’ll be walking this back soon, but it might be unwalkable. If there’s any justice, this might finally do him in.

Among all the stupid, bigoted, ridiculous things that Trump has said, why should having him agree to someone saying We have a problem in this country: it’s called Muslims be the one that does him in? We’ve had a presidency built around the Muslim threat that killed hundreds of thousands of Muslims, and Dick Cheney is still going on bragging about it. Has there ever been any substantial downside for people who want to denigrate Muslim lives?

After all, we have one dead famous atheist who advocated bombing Iran, and responded to pragmatic arguments that that would just create more terrorists by suggesting that the solution to that was to kill them all. And we’ve got another live famous atheist who could write this:

We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it.

He still has swarms of defenders. And these are the supposed smart people.

I’m hoping the Trump balloon pops soon. I don’t have much confidence that his open pandering to bigotry will be the pin that does it.

Jesus. Bill Maher.

Bill Maher really went off on the case of Ahmed Mohamed and said maybe liberals should drop the political correctness and consider that maybe being cautious is a good thing.

Maher made it clear that of course the Texas teen deserves an apology for being arrested over a clock, but said there’s nothing wrong with being a little suspicious when there’s a young Muslim student with something that “looks exactly like a fucking bomb” and there are young Muslims “blowing shit up” all over the world.

The exact quote, in defending the Irving police “erring on the side of caution”, is this bit of blinkered bigotry:

For the last 30 years, it’s been one culture blowing shit up over and over again.

In case the reference is unclear, he’s not talking about the United States of America.

He also claimed that we put [arrested] a kid after school for a couple of hours. This is not the end of the world. No, it’s not, but way to go, minimizing injustice, Bill Maher and panel of three wealthy white guys!

I don’t expect Maher to lose his show after this long pattern of egregious bigotry, just as I don’t expect Trump to suddenly be shunned for one more incident. But it won’t even end the reverence the atheist community has for Maher.