Today in "Pop Culture Reference Other Bloggers Missed": Epistimology of Reading Edition

Spencer Ackerman and Wired's Danger Room recently broke the story of some rather jingoistic training material at the FBI, which the Agency has since claimed is no longer in active circulation. Naturally, reporting this sort of story brought out the unreconstructed id of the Internet, admonishing Spencer to "Read the Koran". Spencer posted a fantastic rejoinder, which everyone should read. he ends with this bit:

Those who tell you, in an accusatory tone, to "read the Koran," will never have read the Koran. They will perhaps have scanned words that the Koran contains. But they will never have read it. What a shame that they don't understand the difference.

Perhaps Spencer's interlocutors might understand the difference if they watched White Men Can't Jump.


(For those who haven't seen the movie, by the end, Snipes thinks that Harrelson can "hear Jimmy", perhaps through Harrelson's growth as a person).

Will Intellectual Property Protections Kill Millions?

That appears to depend on which way the Indian Supreme Court rules. Novartis has taken the Indian government to court about the generic production of a drug that has efficacy against AIDS and cancer. It appears that they tweaked an old drug so that 30% more of it would get into the bloodstream, and want their old patent evergreened. The Indian patent office ruled that the new version didn't have enough increased efficacy, and refused to evergreen the old patent. So Novartis sued.

This is a pretty tremendous issue for people with AIDS in the Third World. The generic version of the drug costs $170 per month, while Novartis' branded version costs about $2500 per month. Indian generic manufacturers are the primary source of the drugs for many poor countries.

“About 80 per cent of anti-AIDS drugs and 92 per cent of drugs to treat children with AIDS across the developing world comes from the Indian generic manufacturers,” says Leena Menghaney of Medecins Sans Frontieres (translated from French as Doctors Without Borders). “India is literally the lifeline of patients in the developing world, especially in the poorest parts of Africa…If Sec. 3(d) is overturned, it means any meaningful effort to make these vital medicines available will be put in jeopardy.”

As far as I can tell, there's no need for-profit pharmaceutical companies. A lot of what they do starts from publicly available basic research done by academics and government scientists. They then carry the ball across the goal line and get patents that allow them to make tremendous money. Instead, we could turn research and development over to academic researchers funded by government grants, and set up a Fed-like body of scientists that would pick the best projects and farm clinical trials out to contract labs. The creative work can be done by smart people seeking glory and tenure, and the grunt work can be contracted out. The resulting knowledge would be open to all, and generic manufacturers could crank out cheap pills for everyone in the world.

CBO Jobs Scoring Redux

I'm at the Merkley donor event in Portland, which has been great fun so far.

I've been emailing with some friends about Merkley's proposal to have the CBO score supercommittee proposals for jobs impact. One concern was that having the CBO regularly do such things might make it harder for big proposals like health care reform to pass, as they'd have to not only pass a deficit test but a jobs test. I don't think this is a problem. If the CBO was out there scoring it on jobs impact, health care reform would've probably been written differently in a more pro-jobs way. The money for jobs probably would've detracted from the deficit-cutting power of the proposal, but isn't that what we want to do these days?

The only people who have reason to oppose CBO jobs scoring are monomaniacal deficit reduction fans. They've enjoyed the advantage that only the thing they're interested in gets an official score that has a big role in guiding policy. Give an official score to something else as well, and people proposing things will trade off one against the other.

I Get To Meet This Senator Tomorrow!

Yglesias notes that Merkley supports getting CBO scores on jobs impact for the proposals that the supercommittee considers. It's one of those things that makes you think, "Why weren't we doing this all along?"

Anyway, I'm in Portland right now where I'm going to be attending a Merkley donor event tomorrow and Saturday. Really looking forward to it.

Joe Crowley Fail

It's hard to look at David Weprin's defeat in the NY-09 special election without getting pretty upset at local party boss Rep. Joe Crowley, who picked Weprin to run in the district. It doesn't help that Crowley's response to defeat was to make a bunch of obnoxious comments about how his candidate won by 4% in Queens.

As Dana Goldstein points out on Twitter, there were some highly qualified female candidates in the district. I didn't even know that Elizabeth Holtzman was in that district, but apparently she was interested in running. (She might've been starting her sixth term as Senator from New York right now if the 1980 Senate election hadn't been a three-party race.) If your tastes run more towards the young up-and-coming star than the old legend, City Councilwoman Melinda Katz was also a possible choice.

Would Holtzman or Katz have won? My initial guess is no, as Weprin lost by 8% and I don't know if a better candidate could've made up that big a difference. Bad economy, etc. But that doesn't get Crowley off the hook -- a fair amount has to go wrong for you to lose a longtime Democratic district by 8%, and dubious candidate selection was part of the deal.