politics

The Mid-East

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According to Webster’s Dictionary:

Main Entry: Sem·ite
Pronunciation: ‘se-“mIt, especially British ‘sE-“mIt
Function: noun
Etymology: French sémite, from Semitic Shem, from Late Latin, from Greek SEm, from Hebrew ShEm
1 a : a member of any of a number of peoples of ancient southwestern Asia including the Akkadians, Phoenicians, Hebrews, and Arabs b : a descendant of these peoples
2 : a member of a modern people speaking a Semitic language

Based on my father originally being from Jordan, I am a semite and not anti-semitic. I have now and in the past have had friends who are Jewish. I am not prejudiced against anyone. However, having said that it doesn’t mean that I can’t be opposed to the policies of various governments (including the United States, Great Britain, Israel, Syria and Iran as well as many others) regarding the situation in the Middle East. All of these governments have behaved in a consistently stupid way for the last six decades. One look at the misery and suffering of the people on all sides in the Middle East should be all the evidence that someone needs that politics and religion should not ever be mixed. I have not written much recently about the current war in Lebanon because every time I think about it, I find myself getting sad and angry and feeling helpless.

I am still trying to organize my thoughts and figure out how to articulate my feelings. I will be writing more on this in the coming days. But for now I am afraid that the Bush administration will be providing no positive leadership on this conflict. In fact they are providing negative reinforcement by encouraging the Israelis to continue. Bush and his Christian extremist supporters believe that this is all part of the “inevitable” end-times and they want this to happen. Until someone moves into the White House who actually believes in the Constitution this will not change. Unfortunately the Syrians and Hezbollah and Hamas are not doing anything to help the situation either. As long as there have been governments that see themselves as defenders of a faith, whether it be Christianity, Judaism, Islam or any other, they have also been oppressors of the “other”. Governments MUST be secular, in order to for people to be treated fairly, freely and with justice.

The downward spiral continues

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First we have complete debacle that is the “Operation Enduring Freedom” or whatever the hell they are calling it this week. That is the ongoing war in Iraq, now 3 1/2 years in. Today at least 59 people were killed in a bombing in Kufa, Iraq. That is in addition to the 40+ killed yesterday in Baghdad along with dozens more killed in the day before and the day before that. George Bush and his crew have taken what was a relatively stable autocratic state and turned it into a completely anarchic killing field. In addition we Israel attacking Gaza to the south and bombing Lebanon to the north. They have been bombing the Beirut Airport, blockading the ports and bombing civilian targets. They are also apparently using white phosphorus incendiary bombs. All this over 2 abducted soldiers.

As if all of this wasn’t already bad enough, the one sort of success that they used to be able to claim with the removal of the Taliban regime, in Afghanistan, has been unraveling and returning back to the state it was in 2001. The administration made a big deal of smoking out the Taliban and giving freedom to the women of Afghanistan. Now girls schools are increasingly being torched by the Taliban and women are being forced to put there burkhas back on, particularly outside of Kabul. Now the AP reports that the Taliban have retaken two towns in southern Afghanistan. Even the US installed president Hamid Karzai has now approved the re-establishment of the dreaded Department for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. These were the guys who walked the streets of Afghan cities and towns during the Taliban period, with clubs and regularly beat and arrested anyone they accused of breaking the rules like not having a long enough beard, or not praying enough. I wonder how long it will be before the Taliban are back in control of the country, and Karzai is either under arrest or back in the US in exile.

The real costs of the broken IP system

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The other day I wrote about the Supreme Court dismissing an important patent infringement case without ruling on the merits of the case. This whole case got me thinking. I have been speaking to people for several years about the problems with the intellectual property system. To most people this seems to be an arcane subject that has no real bearing on their lives. After all they’re not inventors getting patents, or writers or film-makers or artists worried about copyright. But as technology advances, and more and more people write blogs, post there photos and videos on the web, and record podcasts these become real issues. My son Max recently started doing a music podcast called MewzikCast. I had to explain to him why he couldn’t play some of his favorite songs on his show. Big record companies pay millions of dollars a year to companies like Clear channel to get songs played on their radio stations. But if someone doing an independent podcast wants to play the same songs, there is no way to do it. And if you do, they will come after you. And the reality is that podcasts are helping to sell music.

However, another very real cost of this system is one that we all (at least in the United States, less so in more enlightened countries) have to pay every day. The vast majority of Americans are familiar with the skyrocketing cost of health insurance. After a brief respite in the the latter part of the 1990’s when HMOs started to catch on, the rate of inflation of health care coverage has been on a very steady climb for last 5-6 years. Probably the single biggest driver of this inflation is the cost of prescription drugs. One of the reasons for these costs is the patent system. When the pharmaceutical companies develop a drug, they patent it. This gives them a monopoly for a limited period of time for that drug. When you have a monopoly on a product you can charge whatever price you want. The premise of patents and copyrights as defined in the constitution is to promote progress by giving inventors and artists a period of limited monopoly in exchange for disclosing their discoveries and works publicly. In this way the creators get make some money from their works while ultimately the works pass into the public domain so that others can build on it. This premise is one of the contributors to the incredible technological and cultural advancement of the last two centuries. However, as these monopolies have helped to create fortunes, the fortunes have led some to do whatever they can to preserve the cash flow, without necessarily creating anything new or useful.

This has been manifested in several ways. In the entertainment industry, copyright holders (and not that these copy right holders are not necessarily the creative people but the holders of the copyright), there has been continued drives to extend the period of copyright, and greater restrictions on what can be done with copyrighted material. In the area of patents, patent holders have tried to tweak their patented products to get new or extended patent protection. They have also tried to get broader less specific patents. An example this would be a drug company developing a new treatment for some medical problem. After getting a patent and getting the drug on the market for some number of years, they develop a new variant with the same drug in a new form. For example, the drug may initially come in a tablet form. Then it is developed in a capsule form. Now having a drug in a capsule form may be an innovation in itself and patentable. However once this has been done, putting other drugs into this form is no longer innovative. Similarly developing extended release versions might also be patented, even though it really shouldn’t be. In this way pharmaceutical companies have manipulated the patent system in order keep drugs under their control. By keeping a patent in force on brand name drugs, they keep generic versions off the market.

If you have ever compared the prices of generic and brand name medications you know how huge this gap is. For example, I take loratadine which is sold under the brand name Claratin for my allergies. The brand name stuff sells in a box of 40 tablets for about $16 I bought a bottle of 120 at Target for $17 for the generic version. It is the exact same drug for 1/3 of the price. This example is available over the counter now, but similar comparisons apply to must prescription drugs. The pharmaceutical companies do everything they can to preserve their patent protection as long as they can. Other examples of abuse of the system are of the type by Metabolite to patent a basic chemical relationship. They get patents on overly broad or general ideas. Health care systems are then forced to pay exorbitant fees to conduct tests, or pay for medicine. This affects each and every one of us. If we can afford health insurance we end up paying much more. More people than ever cannot even afford insurance. For the rest of us we end up paying for all the un-insured either through the taxes we pay to support Medicaid or through the higher fees charged by hospital to cover the costs of the emergency care they have to provide to un-insured patients.

The patent system need to be fundamentally changed with the onus put on the applicants to demonstrate the true innovation of their “invention”. There should also be an open comment period after an application is published so that people can shoot holes in it and demonstrate prior art before a patent is granted. It needs to be easier to show that an idea is not valid for patenting before granting a patent. I will be discussing this last thought more in another post I am working on and will publish shortly.

Questions for the forth of July

This entry was posted in constitution politics on by

The Forth of July is coming up in couple of days. Many of you will be going to parades, parties and other events, where you may well encounter a candidate who is running for congress this year. If you do, do your best to corner them and ask the following questions and make them give you a straight answer:

1. Which is more important, the US Flag or The Bill of Rights?
2. Which is more important, preventing two men (or two women) from committing to each other or that your personal financial data is kept private?
3. Which is more important, that the president gets to do and say whatever he feels like with impunity or that he stand up for what the constitution say in its entirety?
4. Should the Unites States be allowed to abduct, torture, and kill people or should we uphold the treaties to which we are signatories and the United States Constitution?
5. Is the United States a Christian Fascist theocracy or a representative democracy?

If they answer the former to any of these questions, tell them to go back and read the constitution and the bill of rights, the one they swear an oath to uphold and defend.

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.

Then tell them to do their job, and vote to impeach George Bush and Richard Cheney because they are both domestic enemies of the US Constitution.

Also note that although the constitution is the fundamental law of the United States to which all others are subordinate, the constitution makes no reference to the flag. Even though the flag pre-dates the constitution the writers did not see fit to protect it. Like all The flag ultimately means and guarantees nothing. That is the job of the constitution. Defend the Constitution and the laws of this land, for that is ultimately the only thing that makes it special.

Supreme court rejects Bush Kanagaroo courts

This entry was posted in constitution politics war on by (updated 6704 days ago)

The US Supreme Court today declared illegal the military commissions being run by the Bush administration at the Guantanamo Bay Prison. The white house wanted to hold military trials of some of the prisoners held there on war crimes charges. In a 5-3 decision the court ruled this illegal. Demonstrating his continued ignorance Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a strongly worded dissent in which he said

to second-guess the determination of the political branches that these conspirators must be brought to justice is both unprecedented and dangerous

Actually it is precisely the job of the supreme court to second guess the determination of the political branches and not to be a rubber stamp. Secondly, there was no determination of “the political branches” to hold these mock trials. This was a dictate from the white house and congress never approved it. In fact congress declined to approve the trials. Maybe Thomas should read Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion where he wrote

Concentration of power (in the executive branch) puts personal liberty in peril of arbitrary action by officials, an incursion the Constitution’s three-part system is designed to avoid.

Kennedy is exactly right on this point and it is well past time for both court and congress to stand up to this would be dictator and do their job.

Update: From Americablog I saw this link to the ScotusBlog. The actual decision is really huge. In the decision the court stated that the Geneva Conventions of prisoners of war do apply to these prisoners! This essentially means that most of the tactics being used by the Bush administration are illegal and in fact are War Crimes! Time to bring on the articles of impeachment!

Government protecting us from losers!

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You know those seven “Home-Grown Terrorists” that Alberto Gonzales made such a big deal about busting in Miami last week? The seven guys who apparently wanted to attack the Sears Tower in Chicago? Well it turns out these guys were at worst some small time criminals. They had never actually had any contact with any other known terrorist groups. They had no weapons of any kind. They were trying to get some “soldier boots”, but there were no guns and bombs. Oh and one more thing

None was known to be an adherent of a militant Islamic faction, nor even of the Muslim faith. Relatives described some as religious, but drawn together to study the Bible, not the Koran.

Why would anyone actually pay any attention to anything coming from any member of the Bush administration? They have zero credibility. This is just another one of those scams like all the Orange alerts before the 2004 election. They were just trying to distract attention from the debate, about pulling the troops out of Iraq and the fact that the feds are also scouring our bank records. They are breaking laws and violating the 4th amendment all over the place and every time they get called on it they pull out some bogus sting operation or some other false crisis to distract us.

Bush may allow wiretapping review: Specter

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So Arlen Specter says that the White House may allow a federal court to look at it’s secret surveillance program? Excuse me, but since when does the executive branch get to dictate what the judicial and legislative branches do? it shouldn’t matter if the Bush likes it or not, both the congress and the judiciary have every right to determine if he is breaking the law and deal with that appropriately. There is no need for the other branches of government to bow to his highness ever!. It doesn’t matter if we are in wartime (and that is a dubious assertion at best), no president is ever allowed to break the law just be feels like it. The oath of office requires him to uphold the constitution and that means letting the other two branches of government to do their duties as well.

Mr. Specter, please either grow some balls and do your job or get out of the way so someone else can. And the same goes for the other 434 members of congress. You all ready to remove an actual properly elected president from office for lying about a blow-job why aren’t willing to do the same to one who has consistently lied to the American public about the reasons for sending 2500 Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis to their deaths.

Supreme Court Blows a Chance

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Last year the US Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal on a patent infringement case. This was a prime opportunity for the court to take a stand on rule on the limits of the fundamentally broken US patent system. For at least the last decade the USPTO (US patent and trademark office) has been granting patents on all kinds of obvious concepts seemingly without even reading the applications in most cases. They have issued such legendary patents as the sideways swinging patent and the Amazon One-click patent. This term the Supreme Court agreed to hear a patent infringement case involving Metabolite Laboratories Inc patent on the relationship between homocysteine levels in the blood and vitamin B12 levels. Metabolite had sued Laboratory Corporation of America (where do they come up with these brilliant names anyway?) for infringement. LabCorp had claimed that the patent was too broad and and did not actually cover any invention. Metabolite had determined that there was a correlation between B12 levels (which are difficult to measure directly) and homocysteine levels which are relatively easy to measure. They were essentially granted a patent for determining that A is proportional to B and if A goes up or down so does B. For some ridiculous reason two lower courts had sided with Metabolite and agreed that LabCorp was infringing but evidently didn’t look at the actual validity of the patent.

The court agreed to hear the case last fall just after John Roberts joined. Apparently the Bush Administration didn’t want this case heard however, because they filed a brief asking that the case be rejected. As usual the court bowed to King George’s crew. Yesterday they issued a dismissal of the case stating only that they erred in taking the case without any further explanation. Roberts had recused himself apparently because his old law firm had been involved in the case. Justice Stephen Bryer along with John Paul Stevens and David Souter wrote a strong dissent stating that the patent should have been invalidated.

Writing for the three dissenters, Justice Stephen Breyer said the patent amounted to “no more than an instruction to read some numbers in light of medical knowledge.”

Failing to decide on the merits of the case “threatens to leave the medical profession subject to the restrictions imposed by this individual patent and others of its kind,” Breyer wrote. He was joined by Justices John Paul Stevens and David Souter.

The court had a prime opportunity reign in the out of control patent system. They blew it big time. Just like the Pledge of allegiance case they dismissed it on a technicality. These are not trivial cases. The patent system can have a major impact on our economy. It affects how much people have to pay for things because a grants limited monopoly power to patent holders. Abuse of the patent system is one of the big reasons why prescription drug costs are so insanely high. Pharmaceutical companies keep making minor tweaks to their drug formulations without actually coming up with anything fundamentally new, just so they can extend their patent protection. This is one of the major drivers of skyrocketing health care costs in this country. Those health care costs in turn are one of the biggest pain points for American manufacturing companies, especially the automakers. This is one of the things that is driving all manufacturing to other countries and leaving us with low paying, low benefit jobs at places like Wal-Mart. Lets hope another patent case comes before the court soon and they actually address it next time.