On drug resistant bacteria and the invisible hand

/ deadly efficiency /

From the New Yorker, Superbugs:

In the past, large pharmaceutical companies were the primary sources of antibiotic research. But many of these companies have abandoned the field. “Eli Lilly and Company developed the first cephalosporins,” Moellering told me, referring to familiar drugs like Keflex. “They developed a huge number of important anti-microbial agents. They had incredible chemistry and incredible research facilities, and, unfortunately, they have completely pulled out of it now. After Squibb merged with Bristol-Myers, they closed their antibacterial program,” he said, as did Abbott, which developed key agents in the past treatment of gram-negative bacteria. A recent assessment of progress in the field, from U.C.L.A., concluded, “FDA approval of new antibacterial agents decreased by 56 per cent over the past 20 years (1998-2002 vs. 1983-1987),” noting that, in the researchers’ projection of future development only six of the five hundred and six drugs currently being developed were new antibacterial agents. Drug companies are looking for blockbuster therapies that must be taken daily for decades, drugs like Lipitor, for high cholesterol, or Zyprexa, for psychiatric disorders, used by millions of people and generating many billions of dollars each year. Antibiotics are used to treat infections, and are therefore prescribed only for days or weeks. (The exception is the use of antibiotics in livestock, which is both a profit-driver and a potential cause of antibiotic resistance.)

Beyond this, the article is rather unsettling; we're overusing antibiotics to ineffectiveness it seems, and there doesn't seem to be an easy way out, maggot saliva notwithstanding. Vaccines might help in the not so near future, or then again maybe not that much. Their lethal impact is however terrifying.

Going privately postal

/ letters to nowhere /
The EU commission warns over "ploys" to protect public postal services, meaning attempts to minimize public cost. These ploys include apparently wildly unreasonable demands:

...Finland has in theory opened its market to full competition but insists on a fee from new entrants if they won't offer their service across all the territory, the official said.

"That, for us, is a freedom of establishment issue," the official added, referring to a plank of EU law that can be mobilised to stop a country hindering competition.

Brussels is also concerned about "protectionist thoughts" in Belgium where a plan is mooted to make all new entrants offer a service across the entire country, a costly undertaking...

Any attempts to "impose" universal service, are thus deemed unacceptable by the folks in the EU commission (the sensitivity of whom to public sentiment and common sense in the EU will virtually guarantee that any EU related issue put to referendum will fail). As the Apostate Windbag has explained some while ago:

So if the directive supposedly guarantees universal service provision, how exactly will the market provide?

The answer is it won’t, as, again, the Commission admits. In order to ensure universal service provision member states ‘may choose’ from a range of different options: state aid (subsidizing private businesses), public procurement, compensation funds or cost-sharing. In other words, recognizing that private providers will be extremely reluctant to provide loss-making services, the Commission has concluded that to continue to ensure universal service provision, governments will still have to pay for it.

Essentially, we are selling the goose that lays the golden egg. While still having to fund universal provision of service, governments will no longer have the subsidy for this service that business-originated and parcel post previously provided.

But what's the empirical evidence regarding the mythical beast called "benefits to the consumer" the appearance of which precedes but rarely follows privatisations the world over? In the British case, a recent report is rather unequivocal, and I'll let the impeccably unsocialist Telegraph, summarize it as "'No benefit' to opening up mail market":

Opening up the postal market to competition has undermined the future of the Royal Mail and provided “no significant benefit” to consumers or small businesses, a report has said.

It found that since liberalisation individual customers had no more choice in who delivered their letter, but were now faced with a complicated sizing and pricing system.

The review, by a Government-appointed panel, also warned that ending the Royal Mail’s monopoly posed a “substantial threat” to the financial stability of the company and the universal postal service in general.

The Telegraph puts it even more explicitly in a related article eloquently titled "Royal Mail privatisation 'hurts customers'":

Posting a letter has become more expensive and more difficult since the market was opened to competition, a government-backed report said yesterday.

Individual Royal Mail customers now have to contend with higher stamp prices and a complicated sizing system as a result of liberalisation, which has provided them with "no significant benefit".

Seumas Milne notes in the Guardian that:

"...The farce of [Labour's] claims [about the effectiveness of its policies] couldn't have been more clearly demonstrated than in the liberalisation and creeping privatisation of Britain's postal service. Far from "working" or delivering the goods, the corporate-skewed opening up of the market is progressively destroying a publicly owned network at the heart of Britain's social and business life. When New Labour came to power, the Post Office was an effective public monopoly handing over more than £100m profit a year to the public purse. Public and political support saw off successive attempts by the Tories and, more tentatively, Tony Blair to privatise what had become Royal Mail.

But eight years after New Labour began exposing the network to private competition and two years after Royal Mail's 350-year-old monopoly was finally abandoned, the postal service is in crisis and the universal service which guarantees delivery of mail anywhere in the country at a single price is in peril..."

Failures however can always be explained by arguing that reforms haven't been deep enough, or that any shortcomings are temporary etc - while governments are advised to leave the services up for privatisation to rot for a while, so that a demand for reform will make privatisation seem sensible. Local developments of course couldn't be allowed to trail behind.

George Carlin, comedic genius, dead at 71

/ fuck /

"...But we have flamethrowers. And what this indicates to me, it means that at some point, some person said to himself, "Gee, I sure would like to set those people on fire over there. But I'm way to far away to get the job done. If only I had something that would throw flame on them..."

A few days ago in a rather absurd debate in the Greek blogosphere, I posted in an aggregator forum a link to George Carlin's "euphemism" sketch, the first time I've posted anything about my favorite stand-up comedian (comedic philosopher, really). It didn't help [around 9:05]. He died anyway. Apparently the simple act of my quoting him didn't relieve his heart problems as I learn today, to my utter grief. So in memoriam, Euphemisms:

Did the United States Create Democracy in Germany?: The Independent Review

/ the raw story from an idealized past /

This Independent Institute review by James L. Payne, casts doubt on claims, current around the time of the invasion of Iraq all over the mainstream media and published by both scholars and think tanks (see this [pdf] on the subject; the whole report was critiqued by Le Monde Diplomatique at the time) in the aftermath of Iraq, that the US had successfully exported democracy to Germany in WWII:

Both advocates and opponents of nation building say that the United States played a key role in helping post-war Germany become a democracy. In fact, a close look reveals that, from the standpoint of democratic nation building, the U.S. occupation of Germany is actually a lesson in what not to do.

The full report can be found here, in PDF format: Did the United States Create Democracy in Germany?. Note that the report is written from a libertarian perspective and it shows in certain criticisms regarding the handling of the German economy and its view of the Marshall plan. However a lot of the facts mentioned are surprising and quite interesting and it seems like a valid case is being made. Quite interesting reading.

via monochrom

The eXile shutting down?

/ in fact I was amazed they got away with all that for so long /
According to the Moscow Times the english language Moscow entertainment (in the broadest possible sense) daily, the eXile, is being "inspected" "to check whether the newspaper had violated media laws or its license". The newspaper's editor Mark Ames, has said that "I get the general sense that they have decided it's time to shut us down, that they're not going to tolerate us anymore". I'm not sure if it has any bearing on the situation, but the last Feature Story - a review of the newspaper's misdeeds over the past 11 years - is currently missing from the newspaper's site (google cached here). [Correction June 11: It's up and working now]

I "discovered" the paper's site in 1999, while in the US, as the Kosovo war was starting. I remained a loyal reader (and in fact a buyer of Taibbi's and Ames' books) ever since. They seemed to offer one of the few sane descriptions of the feeding frenzy of the Yeltsin years - in fact the only western source people I met from or residing in Russia could recognize as having any relation with the reality of the times. Beyond that a mega-dose of cynicism and political incorrectness that was definitely missing from the media on everything in the world. I've been reading more or less regularly, stuff ranging from the infuriating to the sublime from the eXile for nearly a decade now (always expecting its demise - in fact the aforementioned Moscow resident told me that they must be CIA agents or something, because it's amazing they're not dead, much less still in press).

Hopefully they'll weather this one out too.

Update: And you can help them too! Apparently they need money to relocate and they're asking for donations.

"Give me more oil or I'll hold my breath", a new school of American foreign policy is growing

/ how to generate Onionnesque headlines - for real /
On the heels of US presidential candidate Clinton's pledges to smash OPEC in a confident if utterly vague and unspecified way, reaching the "hollow threat" concept to unprecedented heights, the US congress has one-upped her, passing a bill to sue OPEC over oil prices, under US law, a move that even the hypertrophic jurisdiction cheerleaders in the current White House think is a bad idea. Ignore that in the current price range most oil producers are producing at near capacity. Notice however that the implementation of their proposals can only be established militarily and would certainly destroy supply along with demand (demand destruction in the form of mountains dead people, I mean to imply), to reach an uncertain final balance.

Meanwhile, back in reality, the International Energy Agency (hardly an alarmist institution, one is obliged to notice), flinches, as it is...:

...preparing a sharp downward revision of its oil-supply forecast, a shift that reflects deepening pessimism over whether oil companies can keep abreast of booming demand.

The Paris-based International Energy Agency is in the middle of its first attempt to comprehensively assess the condition of the world's top 400 oil fields. Its findings won't be released until November, but the bottom line is already clear: Future crude supplies could be far tighter than previously thought...

We're heading to a broad acknowledgment of the reality of Peak Oil, it seems, albeit obliquely, and a wide range of experts are predicting rough but promising to scary times, the last link being about the latest predictions of the man who wrote the Hirsch Report. Our world is about to be not very subtly transformed it seems.

This post came about through the utilization of this Eurotrib Diary, a website where peak-oilers (and other commie pinkos such as myself) abound. For a more dedicated peak-oil hub, check out The Oil Drum.

The Milgram dissident

/ who disobeys? /
If you haven't heard of the Milgram experiment on obedience, see the relevant Wikipedia article first. Then, if you want, watch Milgram's fascinating short (44') film on the subject, Obedience:


I stumbled upon (via Metafilter) a first person account from one of the people who actually refused to continue the experiment (one of the 15 out of 40 only to do so in Milgram's first experiment), titled Resisting Authority: A Personal Account of the Milgram Obedience Experiments. It is a fascinating story that reveals - aside from the fact that this guy sort of figured that the whole thing might be staged that the man in question was a member of the Communist Party of the USA. This I think is highly relevant and I quote the man in full on his political opinions and their relevance to his behavior in the experiment:

In retrospect, I believe that my upbringing in a socialist-oriented family steeped in a class struggle view of society taught me that authorities would often have a different view of right and wrong than mine. That attitude stayed with me during my three and one half years of service in the army, in Europe, during World War II. Like all soldiers, I was taught to obey orders, but whenever we heard lectures on army regulations, what stayed with me was that we were also told that soldiers had a right to refuse illegal orders (though what constituted illegal was left vague).
In addition, in my position during the late 1940s as a staff member of the Communist Party, in which I held positions as chairman in New Haven and Hartford, I had become accustomed to exercising authority and having people from a variety of backgrounds and professions carry out assignments I gave them. As a result, I had an unorthodox understanding of authority and was not likely to be impressed by a white lab coat.
In the early 1950s, I was harassed and tailed by the FBI, and in 1954, along with other leaders of the Communist Party in Connecticut, I was arrested and tried under the Smith Act on charges of "conspiracy to teach and advocate the overthrow of the government by force and violence." We were convicted, as expected, and I was about to go to jail when the conviction was overturned on appeal. I believe these experiences also enabled me to stand up to an authoritative "professor."
This is not to say that membership in the Communist Party made me or anyone else totally independent. Many of us, in fact, had become accustomed to carrying out assignments from people with higher positions in the Party, even when we had doubts. Would I have refused to follow orders had the experimental authority figure been a "Party leader" instead of a "professor"? I like to think so, as I was never a stereotypical "true believer" in Party doctrine. This was one of the reasons, among others, that I left the Party in the late 1950s. In any event, I believe that my political experience was an important factor in determining my skeptical behavior in the Milgram experiment.

Update June 20 2008: A recent trial of the Milgram experiment concludes that: "Among other things, we found that today people obey the experimenter in this situation at about the same rate they did 45 years ago"...

Guantanamo:..."rats are treated with more humanity"

/ sami al-hajj is free /
Sami Al-Hajj the AL Jazeera cameraman arrested and detained without cause in the Guantanamo prison camp, is now free, realeased on May 1st. A campaign for the release of Al Hajj has been active these past six years, a cause which was well known in the Arab world, but not as much reported in the West (see this recent NYT article though). His case was picked up by Amnesty International and there was a campaign for his release. Recently sketches/cartoon of his from Guantanamo were forbidden release by the gulag's authorities, but were re created from their descriptions by Lewis Peake, a political cartoonist:


This is Sami Al Hajj's interview after he was released:



I quote from the moving interview as reported in the World Socialist Web Site the following shocking (well, for those whose view of the world is informed by the Mainstream Media, anyway) statement:

Although US officials have given multiple rationales for his detention, al-Hajj told reporters that a primary purpose was “to abort free media reporting” in the Middle East. He said that in the hundreds of interrogations to which he was subjected, his captors repeatedly tried to get him to say there was a link between Al Jazeera and Al Qaeda.

Thus Al Hajj was used as a hostage and abused as a mafia abductee in the war against Al Jazeera. The War against Al Jazeera I emphasize not Al Qaeda. But hey what's he gonna do? Sue? Yeah right...

Warzone business opportunities or Why Kill 'Em If you can't Use 'Em

/ balkan mortuary /


Tales of organ trafficking by the KLA during the Kosovo campaign surfaced recently:

BELGRADE, Serbia: Serbia's war crimes prosecutor is looking into reports that dozens of Serbs captured by rebels during the war in Kosovo were killed so their organs could be trafficked, the prosecutor's office said Friday.

The Serbian prosecutor's office said it received "informal statements" from investigators at the U.N. tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, that dozens of Serbs imprisoned by Kosovo Albanian rebels were taken to neighboring Albania in 1999 and killed so their organs could be harvested and sold to international traffickers.

Bruno Vekaric, the Serbian prosecutor's spokesman, said later on B92 radio that Serbian war crimes investigators have also received their own information about alleged organ trafficking, but not enough for a court case. Vekaric said Serb investigators also received reports suggesting there might be mass graves in Albania containing the bodies of the Serb victims.

Serbian media reported that the issue was brought into the open in a book written by former U.N. war crimes prosecutor Carla Del Ponte that is to be published in Italy on April 3.

According to Serbia's Beta news agency, which carried parts of the book in Serbian, Del Ponte said her investigators had been informed that some 300 Serbs were killed for organ trafficking.

The Beta report quoted Del Ponte as saying in the book that her investigators were told the imprisoned Serbs were first taken to prison camps in northern Albania where the younger ones were picked out, and their organs were later sold abroad.

Here's the more detailed story from Belgrade's B92 and here is the story in Jurist.

To this Doug Muir responded over at A Fistful of Euros claiming that the story is unlikely on a number of grounds. While it is a matter of speculation and no one can positively determine that the crimes described did indeed happen, all of Doug's points seem moot to me:

- DM claims that 300 Serbs is over a half of all missing Serbs; this is debatable. The Serb side is claiming that over 3000 Kosovar Serbs are missing, but even if we are talking about a total of 400 missing, it doesn't stretch imagination much to picture an organized operation in which prisoners were directed to such camps - anyway the IHT article quoted above speaks of "dozens" of Serb prisoners. Other sources state that the number seems to be "at least 100" or "two trucks full of people". Thus, even if 300 is an inflated number (which it might well be) this does not disallow the possibility of the gist of the story being true.

- DM suggests that the great difficulty of disposing 300 bodies and of keeping silent about it afterwards makes the story unlikely. He compares the situation with the fact that the Serbian state didn't manage to keep secret neither the executions or the mass graves of abducted Albanian Kosovars. He thus seems to mistake state efficiency in Serbia and Albania with Mob efficiency (in either of these countries actually). Since the organ snatchers, if indeed they existed, would have to be connected with the mob, this isn't much of a problem. I'm sure that neither disposing 300 people a year or, much more, convincing people to remain silent about it, is something that is way beyond the capabilities of any self-respecting Mafia (see John Stanfa on corpse-disposal technique).

- Doug also suggests that the Albanian government would have to be complicit in such an operation. Not at all. Trafficking in people, including cases of organ snatching, already occur and have been occurring for way over a decade in much of the developing world and Eastern Europe, certainly including both Albania and Kosovo, and certainly without government complicity in most cases. In fact a few years ago a Greek-Albanian organ smuggling ring (mentioned here) was, according to investigations, active in Greek and Albanian hospitals and smuggled human organs through diplomatic pouch, having certain Albanian diplomats on the payroll as well. This was certainly neither done with the assistance or help of the Albanian government (DM brushes off a bit too lightly the connection between Berisha the Socialist Party and the KLA,but that's another story). I remind everybody that the border at the time we're talking about was quite porous with refugees coming in and out of Albania.

- The idea that this is a really difficult process, given the assistance of organizations that are superb smugglers of goods and people, have access to hospitals and doctors and very fast vehicles of all types, seems likewise an exaggeration. Again any decent-sized mafia could easily pull this over. Otherwise there would be no illegal organ trafficking trade at all. Something which is not the case.

Thus, while I agree that this is very far from proven, I'm much less confident that the whole story can be dismissed as "probably bullshit". If the story is totally bogus what in the world could make Carla Del Ponte of all people, include it in her book? And neither of Doug's two alternative scenarios regarding the "yellow house" is plausible IMHO. Firstly because no one in Albania would deny involvement in setting up a hospital for the KLA (which anyway could easily be disguised as a hospital for fleeing Kosovars) and secondly because the "torture-camp" idea, as Doug himself notes, doesn't explain why anybody would do this in Albania rather than on the field in Kosovo.

Two things to add:

1. The story itself is important in a sense that has little to do with whether it is actually true: This is an innovation, an idea that merges seamlessly with the current zeitgeist of market-driven-everything. It is a brilliant way to make a direct profit from what are usually considered to be martial waste products. The idea is so good that I'm willing to bet that if Dick Cheney has heard about it, having already dispensed with the most of the provisions of the Geneva conventions, he has his legal team turning the idea into some sort of non-biddable contract for KBR to sign, giving it full authorization for the expedient trafficking salvaging of usable organs from terrorists and other Arabs. This has the potential to be something that is praised in the OpEd columns of the WSJ, blessed by various US congregations and sold as some form of yet another triumph in the annals of ghoulishness graverobbing colonialism humanitarian-war. Similarly, smaller markets could emerge, as a vast array of mafias big and small will be rushing to war zones with medical trucks, doctors and nurses, in order to utilize the soon to be remains of those about to die. Thus, both legal and black market supply of organs will increase. The only problem will be keeping supplies of bootleg organs at low enough levels as to not effect prices by much. Everybody (that matters, anyway) wins! $$$$$$!!!! € € € € €!!!!!

2. Regardless of the plausibility and validity of the scenario, one can be certain that, had Carla Del Ponte heard of any similar reports of organ trafficking in 1999, but from the other side, i.e. were the accused body snatchers Serbs, with exactly the same evidence to back this up:

a. It would be out in the open well before CDP decided to write a book.
b. A Hollywood film about it would already have been released with a star cast and presented as fact
c. The alleged center of detention and organ snatching would be by now a byword for modern evil, casually referred to as such by pundits on both sides of the Atlantic.
d. The people claiming that the story was "possibly bullshit" would be dismissed as pro-Milosevic patsies or something like that.
e. I'd be writing a similar post complaining that were the perpetrators of the alleged crimes, anything other than Serbs and were the victims Serbs, people would dismiss the story as not very plausible and in fact it would barely make the news.

The Covert War in Palestine

/ making civil wars /
A small price (for others) to pay for building democracy no doubt:
The Gaza Bombshell:

"Vanity Fair has obtained confidential documents, since corroborated by sources in the U.S. and Palestine, which lay bare a covert initiative, approved by Bush and implemented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams, to provoke a Palestinian civil war. The plan was for forces led by Dahlan, and armed with new weapons supplied at America’s behest, to give Fatah the muscle it needed to remove the democratically elected Hamas-led government from power. (The State Department declined to comment.)

But the secret plan backfired, resulting in a further setback for American foreign policy under Bush. Instead of driving its enemies out of power, the U.S.-backed Fatah fighters inadvertently provoked Hamas to seize total control of Gaza."