KLEM FM

Overheard at Lem's: "buttinsky"

Heh. I thought ron invented that word on Twitter back in '09: link

link in case the video don't load

Hippies Punching Upwards

[Posted as a retort to Glenn Reynolds' disparaging post on hippies, posted here]

Hunter S. Thompson writing about hippies in 1968, well before he got really weird:

The British historian Arnold Toynbee, at the age of 78, toured San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district and wrote his impressions for the London Observer. 'The leaders of the Establishment,' he said, 'will be making the mistake of their lives if they discount and ignore the revolt of the hippies and many of the hippies' non hippie contemporaries on the grounds that these are either disgraceful wastrels or traitors, or else just silly kids who are sowing their wild oats.'

Toynbee never really endorsed the hippies; he explained his affinity in the longer focus of history. If the human race is to survive, he said, the ethical, moral, and social habits of the world must change: The emphasis must switch from nationalism to mankind. And Toynbee saw in the hippies a hopeful resurgence of the basic humanitarian values that were beginning to seem to him and other long-range thinkers like a tragically lost cause in the war-poisoned atmosphere of the 1960's. He was not quite sure what the hippies really stood for, but since they were against the same things he was against (war, violence, and dehumanized profiteering), he was naturally on their side, and vice versa.

--Hunter S. Thompson, The Hippies (1968)

More of Thompson's thoughts on the optimal timing of being a hippy from the same essay are here.

KLEM FM

The meaning of Morrison's "five to one" ratio followed him to his grave. Snopes explodes some of the myths here. The one about penile manipulation was a new one to me.

Let's add the ratio of Jihadis to Americans in prisoner exchanges to the numerology.

False Dichotomy

The main problem with the modern conservative movement is the attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable values of Christianity and Ayn Randian Social Darwinism. It can't be done and the attempt leads to intellectual confusion on the party of millions of social conservatives. 

A reasonable argument could be made that these conflicting values can actually lead to a form of mental illness - embracing a "let the poor sink or swim" mentality while calling yourself a "Christian" is a recipe for a sick society. 

~A comment by "Soulstranger" at a story lined at Drudge: Liberal, Foulmouthed Preacher Speaks To Fed-up Believers*

False dichotomy.  And for their part, liberals reject a very simple truth time and time again: it is the painful truth that when you subsidize something, you get more of it. Liberals rightly believe that subsidizing healthcare will lead to more of it. But they ignore the dependence they will necessaily create. Democrats learned this the hard way with welfare reform under Clinton.
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*Lem has a scheduled post on the "foulmouthed preacher" so please save comments on her for that post

Too Many Chefs And Not Enough Indians

India's patent policies have long irked multinational drug companies. Only in 1995 2005 did India even recognize patents on new drugs. This meant that generic companies could set up shop there and churn out knock-off copies of successful drugs -- drugs which cost millions for someone else to invent -- with impunity. India is not a leader in the discovery of new drugs, however, they are fast becoming a leader in the manufacture of them, along with other BRIC nations. So far so good?

Novartis, India Clash Over Patent Laws

Some express outright hostility towards patent protection in general, arguing that it is essentially rent-seeking. They point out that billions of poor people deserve the fruits of the wealthy, and the human cost is too high to ignore. The problem with that stance (as I see it it) is its lack of a better model for drug discovery; everything being unequal, what is to prevent widespread piracy? Another problem aside from lack of access by the poor is the re-importation of cheaper drugs back into countries which can afford them but which increasingly refuse to pay for them. The problem will become worse before it becomes better.

Got Wood?

Trees use a rigid natural polymer called lignin* to stand upright against gravity. It's the arboreal analog of cellulose in plants -- the very molecular scaffold on which a plant hangs its inner workings. But lignin interferes with the extraction of sugars from trees for biofuels. A work around solution is to genetically modify certain trees to have less lignin and thus to be less rigid, according to a recent article in Science.