Month: May 2017

Not Enough Bullets

No Comments

The headline says it all:

Hedge Fund-Backed Pharma Company That Fed Opioid Crisis Now Seeks to Profit from Treating It:

If you get caught selling cannabis at college, you can lose your scholarship and access to financial aid. But if your company is caught bribing doctors to sell the deadly opioid fentanyl, you can get a building named after you.

Insys Therapeutics, a pharmaceutical company backed by the hedge funds Orbimed Advisors and Scopia Capital, has had its CEO and five other executives charged with conspiring to bribe doctors to prescribe the opioid fentanyl. Insys is now seeking to profit from treating the opioid epidemic that it helped to exacerbate by selling drugs to treat addiction and reverse overdoses.

In December 2016, six executives at Insys Therapeutics, including former CEO Michael Babich, were arrested and charged with paying off doctors to prescribe Subsys, an oral spray form of fentanyl, a powerful opioid that is many times more potent than morphine or heroin. The arrests came amid investigations by several states and the federal government as well as inquiries from Congress and a shareholder lawsuit.

Investigations began in 2014 after doctors who were paid tens of thousands of dollars in speaking fees by Insys were arrested for improperly prescribing Subsys. The New York Times reported that, though Subsys was only approved for breakthrough cancer pain, only around one percent of prescriptions for Subsys were made by oncologists. Half of the prescriptions for Subsys were written by pain specialists, with the rest coming from “general practice physicians, neurologists and even dentists and podiatrists.”

One of the things that most of the coverage of the opioid crisis (actually, the crisis has been around for a while, it just did not get ink until white folks started dying) is that it has been driven by aggressive and unethical marketing of pharmaceutical firms.

These folks need to spend the rest of their lives in jail.

Well, They Would Say That, Wouldn’t They?*

No Comments

Boeing is suggesting that the US Navy would be better served by evolving the existing F/A-18 rather than spending two decades to develop another hyper-expensive stealth fighter. (paid subscription required)

Boeing is making a statement in own interest. It sells the F-18.

Boeing also happens to be right in this case: Development programs that are egregiously expensive and span decades do not produce weapons that work properly.

Either they perform poorly, or they are too expensive to deploy in the numbers in which they would be needed:

Boeing has cautioned the U.S. Navy against getting locked into another 20-year aircraft development program as it reaches for the F/A-XX, the service’s next carrier warplane.


The company says continuing to evolve the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet through Block 3 beginning in fiscal 2019 and a potential Block 4 follow-on modernization program as a complement to the Lockheed Martin F-35C Lightning II is the most prudent path forward to satisfy an immediate need for greater numbers of strike fighters with advanced capabilities.


Boeing says low-radar-cross-section airframes are useful for the first day of war and flying into denied areas guarded by X-band radars. But the integrated air defense radars of potential adversaries such as Russia and China have moved into different bands of the electromagnetic spectrum, such as C-band and S-band. Buying into a next-generation stealth aircraft development program under F/A-XX might not be the best answer to meet current and future threats, Boeing believes.


………


“For the Navy, and I think for a lot of countries, don’t lock yourself into a 20-year development cycle and a platform you’re stuck with for X amount of years,” says Larry Burt, a former naval aviator and now Boeing’s director of global sales and marketing for global strike programs. “Don’t make a big revolutionary step. Keep evolving what you’ve got. You could keep evolving the mission systems, sensors and capability of the Super Hornet and maybe eventually put a new wrapper on it.”

With the 2nd most protracted and dysfunctional weapons development program in the world (India’s is worse), they are right.

US defense procurement is a racket, with the contractors spreading sub-contractors to the districts of powerful Congressmen, and providing lucrative sinecures to the generals involved in their retirement.

*Yes, this is a reference to Mandy Rice-Davies.

Remember How It Was Stated That Only the Syrians Could Launch a Chemical Attack?

No Comments

Not So Much:

US intelligence believes ISIS is bringing together all of its experts on chemical weapons from Iraq and Syria into a new “chemical weapons cell,” according to a US official.

 The cell is comprised of chemical weapons specialists from Iraq and Syria who have not previously worked together, the official added. The new unit is being set up in an ISIS-controlled area in Syria within the Euphrates River Valley, between Mayadin, Syria and the town of al Qaim, just across the Iraqi border.

 That location has sparked a good deal of interest on the part of US military intelligence. One US defense official told CNN that “thousands” of ISIS operatives and sympathizers may be in the area and that ISIS leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi could also be in hiding somewhere nearby. The area is now considered the “de facto” capital of ISIS, with Raqqa under such military pressure from the coalition and local forces, the official said.

Coalition officials still stress that given its size and status, the capture of Raqqa is still considered to be an important military objective.

It is assessed that ISIS is consolidating its chemical weapons capabilities in order to boost its ability to defend its remaining strongholds.

How does this compare to earlier US claims that ISIS could not have any chemical stockpiles, and that Syria was the only player in the civil war who had the capability to deploy chemical weapons?

We need to stop doing the bidding of the various Persian Gulf potentiates.

All it does is create mayhem, disorder, and suffering.

I’ll Take Four Shares of the Clinton Dynasty, Please………

No Comments

Marc Mezvinsky, better known has Chelsea Clinton’s husband, has failed upward once again

After an undistinguished career at the Vampire Squid, and then founding a hedge fund that crashed and burned, he has now been hired by Social Capital as its vice chairman:

Social Capital, the Silicon Valley investment firm founded by Chamath Palihapitiya, has hired Marc Mezvinsky as its vice chairman. The hiring of the investment banker and hedge fund founder is part of a wider effort by Social Capital to morph itself well beyond its venture roots.

Currently, Social Capital has been making venture and seed investments, as well as some public ones, and also has a unit devoted to incubating startups. It has also been developing a software-based product-market fit platform called 8-ball, to do the quantitative part of due diligence for possible investments.

But, as part of a longer-term master plan, it has been exploring a wide range of other financial products to support its companies across their life cycle, said Palihapitiya in an interview with Mezvinsky earlier this week.

………

Mezvinsky will work out of a new office in New York, but will be in Silicon Valley regularly, where there are about 40 employees in Palo Alto. There are also plans to open a unit in London.

So, he’s getting a job as “Vice Chairman” and he’ll be working from home ……… or something, because of his non-existent business acumen?

Someone is making an investment in political dynasty futures.

You Are F%$#ing Kidding Me!

No Comments

It appears that Donald Trump has canceled a planned trip to Masada because they won’t let his helicopter on the site:

US President Donald Trump reportedly canceled a visit and speech at the historic Masada desert fortress after the Israel Air Force informed him he would not be allowed to land his helicopter at the UNESCO-listed archaeological site.

Trump subsequently removed Masada from his itinerary altogether, rather than taking the cable car to the top of the iconic mountain as had been suggested to him, Channel 2 reported.

He is set to deliver the major address of his Israel trip at Jerusalem’s Israel Museum instead.

He’s a f%$#ing orange stained infant.

Reality is Weird

No Comments

Have you heard of the The U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit?

Here is their description of themselves:

The U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit (US-CCU) is an independent, non-profit (501c3) research institute. It provides assessments of the strategic and economic consequences of possible cyber-attacks and cyber-assisted physical attacks. It also investigates the likelihood of such attacks and examines the cost-effectiveness of possible counter-measures.

Although the US-CCU aims to provide credible estimates of the costs of ordinary hacker mischief and white collar crime, its primary concern is the sort of larger scale attacks that could be mounted by criminal organizations, terrorist groups, rogue corporations, and nation states.

The mission of the US-CCU is to provide America and its allies with the concepts and information necessary for making sound security decisions in a world where our physical well-being increasingly depends on cyber-security. The reports and briefings the US-CCU produces are supplied without charge to the government, to entire critical infrastructure industries, and to the public.

Do you know what the name of their director is?

It’s Scott Borg.

Linkage

No Comments

The Muppets perform Bohemian Rhapsody:

World Class Trolling, Vlad

No Comments

Love him or hate him, you have to appreciate the Russian President’s mastery of the art of the troll:

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday he would be willing to provide the U.S. Congress a record of President Trump’s meeting with top Russian envoys, bringing scoffs on Capitol Hill that the Kremlin could help shed light on the disclosures of reportedly highly classified intelligence.

The provocative offer for the Kremlin to share evidence with U.S. oversight committees about the Oval Office meeting came with the caveat that the request for the transcript would have to come from the Trump administration.

Presenting a transcript is the Kremlin’s latest gambit in denying that Trump shared classified secrets last week with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russia’s ambassador to the United States during an Oval Office meeting.

But the tactic may have more to do with attempts to sow further chaos in Washington than assuage suspicions about the talks.

I have come across my share of trolls, but the elegance of this troll is truly a thing of beauty.

Pass the Popcorn

No Comments

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein just appointed Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate alleged coordination between Russia and the 2016 Trump Campaign.

There is basically no difference difference between a special counsel and special prosecutor. The former term came into use largely through the notoriety of the latter term during Watergate.

Both are appointed by, and can be removed by, the Attorney General or his designee, who also gives the special counsel/prosecutor his remit.

An independent counsel (IC) is a completely different kettle of fish: They are appointed by a 3 judge panel, cannot be removed by the Attorney General, and their remit is pretty much unlimited.

The law that enabled the appointment of an IC expired in 1999, following the excesses of Kenneth Starr in his pursuit of Bill Clinton’s penis.  (Starr went on to become President of Baylor, where he covered up a rape culture among its athletes.)

This should be interesting.

Seriously? ……… Joe F%$#ing Lieberman? ……… Seriously?

No Comments

Guess who is on the short list for being the next FBI director?

I cannot for the life of me see why Donald Trump would be interested in appointing Lieberman to anything.  Joe is such a self-serving, smarmy,  and sociopathic narcissist ……… Wait ……… Now I get it:

President Trump, hoping to nominate a new F.B.I. director before leaving on a long foreign trip on Friday, interviewed four potential candidates on Wednesday, including Joseph I. Lieberman, the former senator from Connecticut.

 ………

 Several administration officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal White House deliberations, described a rushed and fluid process in which the president and Attorney General Jeff Sessions had swung nearly hour by hour on which candidate they preferred.

 Mr. Lieberman’s name surfaced publicly for the first time on Wednesday after Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, added him to the list of candidates Mr. Trump and Mr. Sessions were scheduled to interview before the president departs for a nine-day trip to the Middle East and Europe. Mr. Spicer said the other three candidates were the acting F.B.I. director, Andrew G. McCabe; former Gov. Frank Keating of Oklahoma, a Republican; and Richard A. McFeely, a former top official at the F.B.I.

Dear lord, make it stop.

Did Not Expect This

No Comments

It looks like Senate Republicans could not muster the votes to repeal an Obama administration rule on methane emissions:

Some Republican lawmakers balked at fully embracing the Trump administration’s climate skepticism Wednesday, as the Senate failed to kill an Obama-era plan for containing methane emissions that had deep support among environmental activists and many landowners in the West.

 Three Republican senators joined Democrats in blocking the effort to kill the methane restrictions that the GOP congressional leadership had been confident it could scuttle. The push to scrap the methane rules faltered amid an uprising of protest in Western states, where tens of thousands of residents near drilling operations risk exposure to the toxic compounds that leak in tandem with the methane.

 At issue is 41 billion cubic feet of a greenhouse gas leaking from many of the nearly 100,000 oil and gas wells on federally owned land. Methane is among the most potent accelerators of global warming, 25 times more harmful than carbon dioxide.

A House vote in March to eliminate an Obama-era Bureau of Land Management rule requiring energy firms to trap the escaping gas and convert it to electricity was followed by a swift public backlash. Several Republican senators wavered on the measure in recent weeks.

I don’t think that this vote was about pissed off land owners in the west, as none of the Senators who flipped, Collins (R-ME), Graham (R-SC), and McCain (R-AZ) are from states where potential landowner objections to leaky gas wells are not a huge factor.

I think that more prosaic political considerations are taking place here:  McCain and Graham clearly detest Trump, and Collins needs to pretend to be liberal every now and then in order to secure her political popularity in Maine.

Still, it’s a win for the good guys.

OK, This is a Big F%$#ing Deal

No Comments

It appears that following his meeting with Donald Trump, James Comey wrote a memo describing the meeting, and in this memo he makes it clear that Donald Trump applied pressure to get him to drop the investigation on Russian coordination* with the Trump campaign.

Assuming that an actual copy of the memo is made available, and the recipients are willing to testify as to the timing of the memo, then this is more than sufficient justification to open up an investigation against Donald Trump for obstruction of justice:

President Trump asked the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, to shut down the federal investigation into Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, in an Oval Office meeting in February, according to a memo Mr. Comey wrote shortly after the meeting.

“I hope you can let this go,” the president told Mr. Comey, according to the memo.

The documentation of Mr. Trump’s request is the clearest evidence that the president has tried to directly influence the Justice Department and F.B.I. investigation into links between Mr. Trump’s associates and Russia. Late Tuesday, Representative Jason Chaffetz, the Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee, demanded that the F.B.I. turn over all “memoranda, notes, summaries and recordings” of discussions between Mr. Trump and Mr. Comey.

Such documents, Mr. Chaffetz wrote, would “raise questions as to whether the president attempted to influence or impede” the F.B.I.

Mr. Comey wrote the memo detailing his conversation with the president immediately after the meeting, which took place the day after Mr. Flynn resigned, according to two people who read the memo. It was part of a paper trail Mr. Comey created documenting what he perceived as the president’s improper efforts to influence a continuing investigation. An F.B.I. agent’s contemporaneous notes are widely held up in court as credible evidence of conversations.

Mr. Comey shared the existence of the memo with senior F.B.I. officials and close associates. The New York Times has not viewed a copy of the memo, which is unclassified, but one of Mr. Comey’s associates read parts of it to a Times reporter.

………

In a statement, the White House denied the version of events in the memo.

“While the president has repeatedly expressed his view that General Flynn is a decent man who served and protected our country, the president has never asked Mr. Comey or anyone else to end any investigation, including any investigation involving General Flynn,” the statement said. “The president has the utmost respect for our law enforcement agencies, and all investigations. This is not a truthful or accurate portrayal of the conversation between the president and Mr. Comey.”

………

Mr. Comey created similar memos — including some that are classified — about every phone call and meeting he had with the president, the two people said. It is unclear whether Mr. Comey told the Justice Department about the conversation or his memos.

There is a part of me that is hoping that this meeting was actually taped.

There is another part of me who fearss that Mike Pence is way worse than the Donald.

That being said, Congressional Republicans value Donald Trump as the proverbial useful idiot, so I do not see any meaningful moves toward impeachment absent a complete electoral debacle in 2018.

*Note that Comey has been very meticulious about using the term, “coordination,” and not, “collusion,” the former is a violation of campaign finance laws, while the latter is just sleazy, and so only the former constitutes an underlying crime to which things like conspiracy or obstruction of justice charges can be laid.†
†But I am an engineer, not a campaign finance lawyer, dammit.‡
‡I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!

This is the One Case Where the “Tricky Dick Defense” Actually Works

4 Comments

Everyone is having conniptions because Donald Trump had a discussions with Russian officials describing credible reports that he had received regarding of ISIS plans to use a laptop bomb to take down a plane.

This may be stupid, but it’s not illegal, because POTUS is the ultimate classification authority in the United States, which means that he can tell whoever he wants whatever secrets he wants, and it’s legal, “Because the President is doing it.”

This does not apply to the multitude of crimes that Richard Milhous Nixon actually committed, but it does apply here.

His decision to go into detail about this with the Russians is a matter of politics and policy, but there is no violation of the law here, though there would be if any other individual in the US did so without authorization.

The President can authorize any release of classified data that is not constrained by other laws (For example, if there were a release of medical data, he might be in violation of the HIPAA statute).*

That is the beginning and the end of the law here.

This does not mean that his discussion wasn’t f%$#ing stupid, it appears that the intel came from another nation,† and his behavior would make other nations more reticent about intelligence sharing, but it is not illegal.

This is a tempest in a teapot over what is what I would call masturbatory intelligence outrage:

President Trump revealed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in a White House meeting last week, according to current and former U.S. officials, who said Trump’s disclosures jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State.

 The information the president relayed had been provided by a U.S. partner through an intelligence-sharing arrangement considered so sensitive that details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the U.S. government, officials said.

 The partner had not given the United States permission to share the material with Russia, and officials said Trump’s decision to do so endangers cooperation from an ally that has access to the inner workings of the Islamic State. After Trump’s meeting, senior White House officials took steps to contain the damage, placing calls to the CIA and the National Security Agency.

 “This is code-word information,” said a U.S. official familiar with the matter, using terminology that refers to one of the highest classification levels used by American spy agencies. Trump “revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies.”

………

Trump went on to discuss aspects of the threat that the United States learned only through the espionage capabilities of a key partner. He did not reveal the specific intelligence-gathering method, but he described how the Islamic State was pursuing elements of a specific plot and how much harm such an attack could cause under varying circumstances. Most alarmingly, officials said, Trump revealed the city in the Islamic State’s territory where the U.S. intelligence partner detected the threat.

The Post is withholding most plot details, including the name of the city, at the urging of officials who warned that revealing them would jeopardize important intelligence capabilities.

“Everyone knows this stream is very sensitive, and the idea of sharing it at this level of granularity with the Russians is troubling,” said a former senior U.S. counterterrorism official who also worked closely with members of the Trump national security team. He and others spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the subject.

That “Former senior U.S. counterterrorism official who also worked closely with members of the Trump national security team?”

That would be former SecDef Bob Gates, the unofficial mascot of what Ben Rhodes calls “The Blob”, the interventionist foreign policy conventional wisdom, which is itching for some sort of war with Russia.

With all the damage that Trump and his Evil Minions™ are doing to our economy, our environment, and our civil rights, the hysteria of America’s always wrong foreign policy establishment should not be a primary concern.

*I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!
†My guess is that the source is Israel, simply because it sounds like the sort of thing that the Mossad would catch, but this is a completely uninformed guess.

Linkage

No Comments

A British Marine makes merciless fun of officers:

This is an Epic Resignation Letter

No Comments

Paul Carr, who has been covering Silicon Valley misdeeds for many years, has resigned the beat, which he calls the “Silicon Valley Swamp.”

He’s not quitting writing, and he will remain at Pando, but he has found that his continuing exposure to the, “Endless perp walk of sociopaths, psychopaths and criminals with names like (Pando investor) Peter Thiel, Travis Kalanick, Emil Michael, Palmer Luckey, and Gurbaksh Chahal – not to mention their enablers and co-conspirators like Paul Graham and Sam Altman, Rachel Whetstone and Steve Hilton, Joe Lonsdale, Arianna Huffington, Shervin Pishevar, and a thousand more like them,” was soul destroying.

Here is the most profound bit of his opus, and it IS an opus:

But no. The fact that spotting tech toxicity has become my “thing” is exactly the problem. Another lesson I learned a long time ago: When something toxic comes to define you, it’s time to stop.

This should be on the wall of everyone’s cubicle.

We……… Got ……… Lucky

No Comments

Here is a very good account of how a techie more or less accidentally found the off switch for this weeks ransomware attack.

It’s not really an accident, though the techie, one “MalwareTech”, describes it as such.

Basically, he has a procedure, and a check list of sorts for evaluating this sort of thing.

Because he followed this procedure, he found that the software phoned home to an unregistered domain, and he registered that domain, and its existence functioned as a kill switch.

As I’ve said before, this is not an accident: this is a byproduct of proper procedures.

Much like a pilot’s preflight checklist, success is a byproduct of a deliberate process, and not some random stroke of luck.

As Baseballer Branch Ricky pithily noted, “Luck is a residue of Design.”