Patrons at the Met

Another round-up. I know I have some thoughts of my own, but I'll be darned if I can sus-out where I keep them. The media, ding an sich, isn't any help. Finding something that isn't cut and paste (usually from an advertiser) is a job that doesn't seem worth the effort when the weather is nice and summer days are long. One suspects that Lanier's criticism of the wired had its genesis on a day like today. The first two links are about science and the inside baseball aspects of attribution.

• Higgs is the hot topic at ICHEP: Everyone’s catching Higgs fever, even French President Nicolas Sarkozy. The elusive particle – and the race between the experiments at Fermilab’s Tevatron and those at the Large Hadron Collider to discover it – have made headlines for years, but the frenzy reached new heights in the run-up to the International Conference on High Energy Physics.
• The $2 billion error: It’s a sordid but rather entertaining story (would make a decent screen-play), and I stumbled on to it whilst Merrill Goozner’s history of the modern pharmaceutical industry “The $800 Million Pill: The Truth behind the Cost of New Drugs”. Not only did the sequencing error set back Genetics Institute in the race to patent the synthetic manufacture of EPO, but Genetics Institute had actually stolen the sequence from Amgen in the first place.

The next three links question the accepted view by taking the cover off the memory hole and peering inside.A lot of us are old enough to remember some of these things for ourselves, but ...

• Think Again: These days, virtually every time someone on the American right bashes President Barack Obama for kowtowing to dictators or failing to shout that we're at war, they light a votive candle to Ronald Reagan. Former presidential candidate John McCain has called his own foreign-policy views "a 21st-century policy interpretation of the Reagan Doctrine."
• The American Establishment: This article addresses what should be a puzzling question: Why did Barack Obama nominate Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court? Not only has Kagan never been a judge, but, far more problematically, she has over the course of a 25-year legal and political career taken almost no public positions on any significant legal or political questions.
• You must be Joking: Seriously, I hear from time to time that our nation's opinion leaders are sincere. That they aren't being deceptive, disingenuous, dishonest, but are merely stating valid opinions that, if you took a step back and thought about them, are a perfectly reasonably approach to an important problem or issue.

The next two are about Israel and the politicians who use it as chum around campaign donation season.

• An Alliance In Search Of A Reason To Exist: There is almost nothing in Frum’s argument that comes from the last twenty years, and much that has happened in the last twenty years weighs against continuing the alliance in its current form. First, as Millman says, the Cold War is long over, and whatever strategic advantage Israel provided back then disappeared along with the Soviet Union.
• Locus Sanctus: Whatever else one wants to say about the proposed Islamic center or the Cordoba Initiative, one thing that ought to be obvious right away is that this is a matter to be decided by New Yorkers, especially by the people who live in the immediate vicinity. The local community board supported this project almost unanimously, which should make the protestations of a politician parachuting in from the other side of the continent as irrelevant as they are ridiculous.

Here is one that almost everyone suspects. Them that got, get.

• No to Oligarchy: This upper-crust of extremely wealthy families are hell-bent on destroying the democratic vision of a strong middle-class which has made the United States the envy of the world. In its place they are determined to create an oligarchy in which a small number of families control the economic and political life of our country.

The last two are about Korea and by extension China. As the fight to keep the tax breaks for the rich intersect the campaign season, I'll bet the war debt owed China doesn't get much play. Instead we can look forward to tough talk, preserving our freeedoms, and the necessary expansion of our security apparatus (temporary, only temporary) needed to grow our way out. After all, magical thinking has always worked in the past.

• South Korea reels as US backpedals: As United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates this week met in Seoul with their Republic of Korea (ROK) counterparts Yu Myung-hwan and Kim Tae-young in an historic "2+2" summit, the Cheonan sinking in March, the defining crisis that was supposed to highlight the relevance and effectiveness of their relationship, instead cast an ugly shadow over the event.
• Reassessing China's Role in North Korea: Once again, North Korea is playing brinksmanship and escalating tensions by raising questions about its willingness to instigate armed conflict with South Korea. And once again, the United States is trying to persuade China to take a stronger stance toward the North.

I suppose the short of it is to keep your own backyard clean, and your house in order cuz the rest of the world will go on its merry way, with or without you.