Monthly Archives: November 2010

What is the greater corruption?

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Cam NewtonThis?

Or the FBI using its resources to investigate this?

The FBI shouldn’t be involved in such matters at all. But if the G-Men insist on investigating, they should be investigating why some institutions of higher education are getting away with making great wealth from their football programs while colluding to restrict the compensation paid to the predominantly black professional athletes who take enormous risk to life and limb to generate that wealth.

If Cam Newton received money to play for Auburn, I’m glad he got it and that he didn’t take the discounted payment from Mississippi State. He deserves every dime that he was paid.

Guilty Until Proven Innocent

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R. Allen Stanford is not a popular person to defend.

But one does not have to defend what Stanford allegedly did in building his financial empire to decry the treatment that he has received from the federal government since his indictment in early 2009.

Earlier posts on this blog pointed out the federal government’s unusually brutal treatment of Stanford pending his trial on business fraud charges that will probably take place sometime next year. The U.S. Department of “Justice” routinely responded to Stanford’s mistreatment by contending that nothing unusual had occurred with regard to Stanford and that he was being treated the same as any other defendant who was being held in prison pending trial.

Well, that contention appears to be bullshit, to put it mildly.

The Daily Mail Online finally obtained photos of Stanford after he had been attacked in prison (H/T Henry Blodget) and they depict injuries that are even worse than those described in Stanford’s court pleadings.

For years, we allowed an out-of-control federal task force – egged on by a vacuous mainstream media – to ride roughshod over local citizens’ Constitutional rights.

Now, before our eyes, the presumption of innocence has been eviscerated in the Stanford case with nary a peep of protest other than from Stanford’s attorneys and a few bloggers.

“When the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, the laws all being flat?”

“[D]o you really thing you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?”

Grand Pines at Bentwater

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Grand Pines Golf Club is the newest of the three courses at Bentwater, which is a residential development and country club on the north side of Lake Conroe about 60 miles north of downtown Houston. 

The first two Bentwater courses –  Tom Weiskopf and Jay Moorish designed the first (1989) and Scott Miller the second (1992) – are subdivison courses with homes built along some of the fairways and around some of the greens.

Grand Pines, which was designed by local golf course architect Jeff Blume (2007), is a different animal altogether from the first two Bentwater courses. Built on the north side of FM 1097 across the highway from the rest of the Bentwater development, Grand Pines is not a subdivision course – there are no homes to be seen around the course. Built literally next to the Sam Houston National Forest, Grand Pines is also quite hilly, which is unusual for courses built in the relatively flat coastal plain of Texas.  As you will note from the slideshow below, the combination of trees and elevation changes makes Grand Pines both a delight to look at and a challenging test of golf.

Grand Pines plays to a 133 slope rating and a tad over 7,200 yards from the tips and a 131 slope rating and about 6,700 yards from the men’s tees. It is clearly in the top 10 of Houston-area golf courses and a fine addition to the bustling Lake Conroe golf scene. Enjoy!

Autumn Golf in The Woodlands

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A photo tour during the wonderful Texas autumn to parts of four of the seven golf courses in The Woodlands, Texas. You can download a high resolution version of the slideshow here.

The Cancer Sleeper Cell

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cancer_biologyThe state of cancer research is a frequent topic on this blog (for example, here, here and here), so this NY Times excerpt from Columbia oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee’s new book – Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (Scribner November 16, 2010) – caught my eye. It’s well worth a read:

Why does cancer relapse?  .  .   . when a cancer disappears on a CT scan or becomes otherwise undetectable, we genuinely begin to believe that the disappearance is real, or even permanent, even though statistical reasoning might suggest the opposite. A resurrection implies a previous burial. Cancer’s “relapse” thus implies a belief that the disease was once truly dead.

But what if my patient’s cancer had never actually died, despite its invisibility on all scans and tests? .  .  .

In fact, this view of cancer – as tenaciously persistent and able to regenerate after apparently disappearing – has come to occupy the very center of cancer biology. Intriguingly, for some cancers, this regenerative power appears to be driven by a specific cell type lurking within the cancer that is capable of dormancy, growth and infinite regeneration – a cancer “stem cell.” [.  .  .]

But if tumors contain dedicated stem cells, then delivering maximal doses of poisons to kill the bulk of the tumor might achieve one response – a shrinkage of the tumor – but have no effect on relapse. If the rare stem cell lurking within a tumor somehow escapes death, then it will reassert itself and grow again. Cancers will come back like a garden that has been cleared by hacking at its weeds while leaving the roots behind. [.  .  .]

If such a phoenix-like cell truly exists within cancer, the implication for cancer therapy will be enormous: this cell might be the ultimate determinant of relapse. For decades, scientists have wondered if the efforts to treat certain cancers have stalled because we haven’t yet found the right kind of drug. But the notion that cancers contain stem cells might radically redirect our efforts to develop anticancer drugs. Is it possible that the quest to treat cancer has also stalled because we haven’t even found the right kind of cell?

The politics of increasing state power

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elephant_and_donkeyWill Wilkinson touches on an interesting dynamic of current political discourse in the U.S.:

It sometimes does seem as though the American left has more or less ceded the language of liberty to the right.  .   .   . Why is that?

I think "the left’s confusion over how to respond ideologically" to the right’s libertarian-sounding arguments flows in part from the left’s own confusion about what it stands for. If the contemporary right is an uneasy fusion of conservative and libertarian articles of faith, the contemporary left is an uneasy fusion of technocratic progressive and liberal-democratic conviction.

One sees progressive managerial elitism most clearly in the left’s public-health and environmental paternalism. The rarely uttered idea is that the people who know best need to force the rest of us to do what’s good for us. Whatever you think of this sort of state paternalism, it isn’t liberal or liberty-enhancing in any non-tortured sense. The progressive technocrat’s attitude toward liberty is: "Trust us. You’re better off without so much of it."

The more the left is inclined to stick up for this sort of "activist government" as a progressive, humanitarian force, the less it is inclined to couch its arguments in terms of liberty. And that’s just honest. More honest, I would add, than social conservatives who in one breath praise liberty and in the next demand the state imposition of their favourite flavour of morality.

I agree with [Peter] Beinart that engaging the right’s worries about liberty by couching the left’s agenda in the language of liberty would improve the Democrats’ prospects. But I don’t think he should discount the extent to which a consistently liberal philosophy of government clashes with cherished and deep-seated parts of the American left’s identity. (For example, the part that insists on defending Woodrow Wilson despite the profound depths of his illiberalism.)

Those Americans currently agitated about the threat Democrats pose to liberty are not wrong to be worried. Where they go wrong is in thinking Republicans are better on this score. Democrats might be able to argue this point effectively if only their own commitment to liberty was less conflicted.

The inclination of both major political parties to increase state power has ominous implications for citizens. Is it possible to change?

Tablet Tales

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More on the Samsung Galaxy Tab here.

There is more than one way to skin a cat

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legal-drugs At least that’s the case when it comes to getting around dubious drug prohibition policies. Check out this WSJ article:

When the housing market crashed in 2008, David Llewellyn’s construction business went with it. Casting around for a new gig, he decided to commercialize something he’d long done as a hobby: making drugs.

But the 49-year-old Scotsman didn’t go into the illegal drug trade. Instead, he entered the so-called "legal high" business-a burgeoning industry producing new psychoactive powders and pills that are marketed as "not for human consumption."

Mr. Llewellyn, a self-described former crack addict, started out making mephedrone, a stimulant also known as Meow Meow that was already popular with the European clubbing set. Once governments began banning it earlier this year, Mr. Llewellyn and a chemistry-savvy partner started selling something they dubbed Nopaine-a stimulant they concocted by tweaking the molecular structure of the attention-deficit drug Ritalin. [.  .  .]

Mr. Llewellyn is part of a wave of laboratory-adept European entrepreneurs who see gold in the gray zone between legal and illegal drugs. They pose a stiff challenge for European law-enforcement, which is struggling to keep up with all the new concoctions. Last year, 24 new "psychoactive substances" were identified in Europe, almost double the number reported in 2008,  .  .  .

Particularly interesting is Mr. Llewellyn’s “foolproof” safety testing method for new drugs:

[Mr. Llewellyn] boasts that his safety testing method is foolproof: He and several colleagues sit in a room and take a new product "almost to overdose levels" to see what happens. "We’ll all sit with a pen and a pad, some good music on, and one person who’s straight who’s watching everything," he says.

Will justice be done in Jeff Skilling’s case?

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skilling Oral argument before a Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals panel in Houston occurs today on the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal and remand of former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling’s appeal of his criminal conviction.

Although the Supreme Court did not overturn all counts of Skilling’s conviction, it remanded the remaining counts to the Fifth Circuit to determine whether any of them should stand given the Supreme Court’s reversal of the other counts based on the invalid “honest services” wire fraud charges.

In essence, Skilling is arguing on remand that the government relied on the amorphous nature of that invalid theory of criminality in obtaining a conviction against him on numerous different charges. Having relied on that invalid theory of criminality, Skilling contends that the government cannot now prove that the jury didn’t rely on it in convicting Skilling on the other charges, too. Although results rarely occur as they should in misdirected criminal prosecutions, Skilling really should win his release and a re-trial.

Meanwhile, rather than address the merits of Skilling’s important case, the Wall Street Journal – which already has a dubious record of coverage in Enron-related criminal prosecutions – serves up the following characterization of the Enron-related prosecutions in this recent article on another miscarriage of justice related to the demise of Enron:

The U.S. government’s Enron Task Force criminally charged about 30 individuals, including Mr. Brown, but said there were more than 100 other unindicted co-conspirators. The task force got guilty pleas from more than a dozen people and won a 2006 fraud conviction against former Enron President Jeffrey Skilling.

Some of the group’s courtroom victories have been upended on appeal. Mr. Skilling’s conviction and 24-year sentence are under appeals-court review following a Supreme Court decision invalidating part of his case.

“Some of the [Enron Task Force’s] courtroom victories have been upended on appeal“? In reality, not any of the criminal convictions that the Enron Task Force obtained after a trial have been upheld on appeal. Not one.

Seems like something that the nation’s leading business newspaper would get right, don’t you think?