I’m back from a European vacation that took us to Dublin, southern France, Monaco (my daughter really wanted to see it), Genoa (to visit my cousins there), and Milan. I ate a lot of gelato, which is the most important part, isn’t it? Before I left I did file one Insider piece, the annual top 25 players under 25 list, and please read the intro because as usual many people didn’t.
Over at Paste, my review of Merlin, the really awful new game from Stefan Feld, also went up while I was gone. Feld has designed several games I love, including The Castles of Burgundy, so this point-salad mess was a huge disappointment.
Book signings! I’ll be at Politics & Prose in Washington DC, with my friend Jay Jaffe, to talk baseball and both of our books on July 14th at 6 pm, and will be at Paul Swydan’s new bookstore The Silver Unicorn in Acton, Massachusetts, on July 28th at 1 pm (waiting for the link but it is confirmed). I will also be at the Futures Game in DC on the 15th.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: The Guardian profiles art forgery detective James Martin, who now works for Sotheby’s and has advised museums and government agencies on dozens of cases of suspected counterfeit art pieces.
- WIRED has a very long read on the scandal around the cryptocurrency Tezos, which appears to have attracted several scam artists, shockingly, to a real bit of technological promise. Most of these so-called currencies are Ponzi schemes; Bitcoin itself is down 70% since November after a brief bubble over the winter. And the SEC is now clamping down on them by (correctly) identifying them as securities bought and sold as investments.
- Forbes examines the ongoing mystery of Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s missing wealth, which appears to be tied up in companies that he’s charged with regulating, or companies caught up in various other scandals, including one that is now enmeshed in Robert Mueller’s investigation.
- James Bridle’s medium post last year on algorithmically-generated Youtube videos that were totally inappropriate for the children they targeted went viral and led to promised changes in Youtube’s policies, but he writes now for the Guardian that things haven’t really changed much at all.
- Rebecca Traister’s much-shared Summer of Rage editorial covers a ton of ground in a brief space, but the main takeaway is that we are still governed by a small minority of white, Christian men, who seem increasingly uncomfortable when anyone from outside their circle of members and sycophants tries to share in their power.
- George Will wrote an op ed urging voters to vote against the Republican Party this November. Will is one of the very few leading conservative voices to take a pragmatic hard line against the current GOP.
- Russian buyers have been buying Trump properties, often at inflated prices via shell companies, which at least appears to be a mechanism for money laundering.
- The New York Times‘ opinion page had a massive editorial breakdown last week, as it ran a very good editorial decrying this bullshit ‘civility’ debate. I can only assume the page’s editor, James Bennet, was out sick that day.
- California put noted anti-vaccine crank Dr. Bob Sears on probation, rather than revoking his license outright, for writing a bogus letter exempting a toddler from all mandatory vaccinations. Of course, he’s denying wrongdoing even though he settled the case, and says he’ll continue to fight public health laws that require vaccinations for schoolchildren.
- Anti-vaxxers love to claim that Dr. Diane Harper has claimed that the HPV vaccine is harmful, but she made it very clear in a statement earlier in June that the vaccine is safe and she supports its use across the population to help lower the rates of cervical and other HPV-related cancers.
- A new study from Massachusetts General Hospital found that an old tuberculosis vaccine may permanently lower blood sugar levels in diabetics, although the effect can take a few years to kick in.
- Dr. Vinay Prasad, an oncologist active on social media, has provoked the ire of cancer researchers by calling out the bogus hype around ‘precision’ treatments that claim to use the patient’s genes to create more targeted anti-cancer medications. The data, he argues, do not show anywhere near the benefit that precision treatment’s proponents promise.
- The FDA just approved its first marijuana-derived prescription drug, which uses cannabidiol (CBD) to reduce seizures in two severe forms of epilepsy. The DEA still has to remove CBD from its list of Schedule I drugs before the medication can hit the market.
- Unfortunately, the FDA is also rubber-stamping approval of many drugs of dubious safety and/or efficacy as it caters to the pharmaceutical firms that fund it.
- BuzzFeed looks at the unlikely comeback of Twitter, which I was told even by people within ESPN was a dying medium and not worth the time writers were spending on it.
- The Royals floated a trial balloon around their plans to sign convicted child molester Luke Heimlich, and it went over about as well as you’d expect. The Kansas City Star‘s Vahe Gregorian wrote a great piece on why they shouldn’t do it. Here’s my take in two sentences: If you believe Heimlich deserves a “second chance,” then you have to explain why you’re giving him one even though he’s denying he ever committed the crimes to which he confessed. If you believe that he’s telling the truth now and didn’t commit those acts, then you have to explain why you think a 6-year-old girl fabricated these stories about her abuse and why you’re taking the word of someone with everything to gain over the word of a child victim.
- Q-Tip once again teased the solo album he’s been promising for five years in a tweet two weeks ago.
- No, Mr. President, crime in Germany is not way up, it’s way down, at its lowest level in decades.
- The Representative from my hometown of Smithtown, New York, held a campaign rally featuring Hungarian neo-Nazi Sebastian Gorka this week.
- Maine Senator Susan Collins has somehow acquired the label of a “moderate” Republican, but wrote a letter to constituents defending Trump’s policy of separating immigrant families. Her term is up in 2020.
- Walgreens faced a backlash last week when an Arizona pharmacist refused to do his job when a woman came in with a prescription for a drug to terminate her non-viable pregnancy. Walgreens claimed the employee acted “within company guidelines.”
- A family of Syrian refugees whose Damascus chocolate factory was destroyed in the civil war have restarted their business in Nova Scotia (article in French). Their products include a limited edition line of pride-themed packaged chocolate bars. As our President and his myrmidons continue to attack immigrants as criminals and leeches, it’s worth remembering that many refugees had lives and careers that were destroyed by war – they were doctors or lawyers or craftspersons and want little more than a safe place to live and work.
- Tweet of the week:
1) No they don’t.
2) No they don’t.
3) Yes they can.
4) No, they reduce SIDS by 50%.
5) No they don’t.
6) No they fucking don’t.
7) No they don’t except for fleetingly rare anaphylaxis.
8) No they don’t.
9) No they don’t.Vaccines cause adults. pic.twitter.com/pcAeClyuYW
— Doc Bastard (@DocBastard) June 19, 2018
Regarding cryptocurrencies, Zawinski said it so well I have to quote him at length:
‘Bitcoin and blockchains lash together an unusual distributed database with a libertarian economic model.
People who understand databases realize that blockchains only work as long as there are incentives to keep a sufficient number of non-colluding miners active, preventing collusion is probably impossible, and that scaling blockchains up to handle an interesting transaction rate is very hard, but that no-government money is really interesting.
People who understand economics and particularly economic history understand why central banks manage their currencies, thin markets like the ones for cryptocurrencies are easy to corrupt, and a payment system needs a way to undo bogus payments, but that free permanent database ledger is really interesting.
Not surprisingly, the most enthusiastic bitcoin and blockchain proponents are the ones who understand neither databases nor economics.’
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2018/05/today-in-dunning-krugerrand-news-2/
Two admittedly obtuse questions that I don’t know how to address. First, how can we be mad at the pharmacist for not doing their job but also encourage border agents to not do theirs? Second, why should we believe that vaccination is safe and effective but also not believe hype around gene-targeted cancer therapy? I don’t have these conflicts in my mind, but I can’t find the way to otherwise persuade someone who might – if someone were to argue in this way, I don’t know that “false equivalency” would do the trick. I’m vexed!
To speak to your second question, I would use the argument that we have over 200 years of evidence that vaccines are safe and effective (I’m using Edward Jenner in 1791 as my start date for vaccines) and the only significant study against has been retracted for inaccuracies and numerous unmentioned conflicts of interest. Gene targeted cancer therapy has only been around for the last decade or so, and as a result we have far less empirical evidence and long term data with which to work. Therefore skepticism seems more warranted. The first question seems far more tied up in judgements about obeying authority and letter of the law vs. spirit of the law.
Your first question speaks to the difference (IMO) between *normal* jobs and law enforcement jobs. Any system of laws is based upon moral judgements, and simply *doing one’s job* has not been an excuse for obeying certain orders. Law enforcement agents frequently have to make their own judgements on the job, and their judgement should be open to scrutiny in a free society. Holding law enforcement (and military, etc). to a different standard is not necessarily hypocritical.
I’m better equipped to answer you second question. First, there’s a large body of scientific evidence that vaccines are safe and effective. Contrary evidence has not held up to scientific scrutiny (and has been frankly falsified in the case of the vaccine-autism link). The science of gene-targeted cancer therapy has not withstood the same scrutiny, and the biological complexity of cancer makes this a much more difficult problem than infectious disease. That’s not to say that cancer genetics and genomics is not a worthy field of research. It’s just that the field is relatively young and there is much basic biology that has to be understood before moving on to translational studies.
Who is “encouraging border agents to not do theirs?” The debate is over ICE’s role, not the decisions of individual agents. Rational people believe separating children from their families and putting them in concentration camps is inhumane. The analogous situation with Walgreens would be if the company declined to offer the medication in question at all its pharmacies.
Thanks for your responses!
The article on targeted cancer therapies tries to address a number of issues but does a very poor job differentiating them from each other.
1. Targeted cancer therapies only work for a very small percentage of the population for a few reasons. One is that they it’s a relatively new field and there are a limited number of drugs available. Another is that these are usually second line therapies used after chemo/radiation/surgery, and many types of cancer respond to traditional therapy before needing to try targeted therapy.
2. The claim that immunotherapy isn’t targeted is misleading, and this critic is clearly using it to manipulate his stats. Merck’s Keytruda is leading the immunotherapy field because of the extensive work they’ve done on finding mutation profiles that are most likely to respond to the treatment.
3. The issue with doctor’s giving the drugs to people outside of the approved uses happens for two reasons. One is compassionate use/right to try.These are patients with no other options so the doctors find the most promising trial drug and ask the drug company if they can try it. The other reason (which is unacceptable) is poor education, and the entire industry needs to do a better job here. Plus the government needs to crack down on the companies that allow their sales people to market their drugs for unapproved uses, it does happen and should come with stiff penalties.
4. The criticism of superlatives used at conferences is ridiculous. These are passionate people who are excited about the work they are doing and wouldn’t be working on these projects if they didn’t believe they had the potential to make a huge impact.
5. The article doesn’t mention that good targeted therapies typically have much more mild side effects compared to chemotherapy and radiation because they are attacking the tumor in a much more selective fashion.
We have made huge steps forward in therapies to treat and cure cancer over the last few decades and will continue to make progress going forward. Targeted therapies are a piece of the puzzle along with immunotherapy, chemo, radiation and surgery. Articles like this are not helpful in educating the public on the successes and shortfalls of the field. The doctor they are highlighting is basically acting as a professional troll, taking legitimate criticisms of the field and amplifying them to an extreme.
I largely agree with your points, and this comment is not specifically directed at cancer research, but the problem of how the popular news media covers scientific stories. There are a lot of perverse incentives that lead to a *hype* problem in science reporting. Part of this is the fault of media outlets themselves. There are very few journalists with the scientific training to understand what they are reporting on, so some hyperbole may be unintentional. Some is probably intentional too–sensationalism sells. Maybe it has always been this way (yellow journalism is not new), but I feel that the online media is more susceptible to over-hyping stores (i.e. the clickbait phenomenon).
Scientists are not blameless. Playing impact factor games and chasing the the glamour mags (Science/Nature/Cell) can lead to exaggerated claims of the impact of the work, with the same exaggerated claims getting amplified into the popular media. I do not know what the solution is. Self policing by scientists is what we have now, but when scientific debates spill into the media, the public is often left more confused (“Scientists are constantly changing their minds, so why bother listening to them…”). Increasing public scientific literacy would be the most helpful, but I don’t see that happening anytime soon.