More Broad Farce from the State Department, and Some Good News from Palo Alto

View 789 Thursday, September 12, 2013

 

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barrack Obama, January 31, 2009

 

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

 

What we have is all we will ever have.

Conservationist motto attributed to John Muir

 

If a freighter with 1000 tons of Sarin FOB Iskenderum, return address Russian Consulate, and a delivery address of Secretary John Kerry’s mile long driveway showed up in Boston harbor would US customs allow them to land? Perhaps there would be a long pdf document on how to reclaim the Sarin components for profit.

Today’s Wall Street Journal column:

Henninger: The Laurel and Hardy Presidency

After the Syrian slapstick, it’s time to sober up U.S. foreign policy.

After writing in the London Telegraph that Monday was "the worst day for U.S. and wider Western diplomacy since records began," former British ambassador Charles Crawford asked simply: "How has this happened?"

On the answer, opinions might differ. Or maybe not. A consensus assessment of the past week’s events could easily form around Oliver Hardy’s famous lament to the compulsive bumbler Stan Laurel: "Here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten us into!"

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323595004579069291111631648.html

Henninger goes a bit farther than I would, but makes some serious points. Whether they make a case for continuous US intervention in Syria is not so clear. Russia is arming Iran with S-300 Surface to Air missiles; unlike the surplus Seventy Years War surplus stuff Russia has sent into the Middle East in the past, this is pretty good stuff, and a good cause for Israeli concern. One more reason to remember that until the US got involved, Iran and Iraq were at war and neutralized each other.

Secretary Kerry is now talking tough and threatening a military strike against Syria unless they comply with what amount to impossible demands. There is no word on whether this strike will still be unbelievably small, now that we understand from the President that the US military does not do pin pricks. Meanwhile the President has asked Congress to delay the vote authorizing him to bombard unspecified locations in Syria with more than a pin prick. We can surmise that makers of teddy bears to put atop the broken things and dead people that will result from this unbelievably small bombardment are at work just in case, since bombs and missiles often break things and kill people. The President has said he doesn’t need Congress’s permission to lob a few missiles in the general direction of some part of Syria, so the vote doesn’t really matter.

There do seem to be many opportunities for another fine mess with Secretary Kerry and President Obama. The State Department needs adult supervision. Even under Reagan and Bush is spawned a Foreign Service unable to convince Saddam Hussein that he would become an actual enemy rather than continue his status as informal commensurate so long as he warred with Iran if he dared to actually invade Kuwait. The message State gave him was ambiguous and uninformative as well as unpersuasive. One of Bush’s political friends from Texas ought to have been sent as Ambassador but State claimed to have that post as a non-political plumb. The result was a fine mess. Then after we had conquered Iraq, State sent us the most incompetent proconsul in Mesopotamia since the fading Roman Empire in the person of Brenner. The result was another fine mess.

Obama needs to find an adult to supervise the Department of State. Let Kerry head a special organization to dispose of the Syrian Sarin. Maybe Mr. Gore could participate. There’s money to be made at this. But get some adult supervision to state before we have yet another fine mess.

I missed this and perhaps you did. It’s important good news.

A Drop of Blood. An Instant Diagnosis

Elizabeth Holmes: The Breakthrough of Instant Diagnosis

A Stanford dropout is bidding to make tests more accurate, less painful—and at a fraction of the current price.

By

JOSEPH RAGO

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324123004579055003869574012.html

Palo Alto, Calif.

‘The reality within our health-care system today is that when someone you care about gets really sick, by the time you find that out it’s most often too late to do anything about it. It’s heartbreaking. Because in those moments, there’s nothing you wouldn’t do to change it, and too often you’re helpless," says Elizabeth Holmes. "We’re finding cancer when you have a tumor, or heart disease by virtue of the fact that you’re having a heart attack."

She wants to change that.

Ms. Holmes, a 29-year-old chemical and electrical engineer and entrepreneur, dropped out of Stanford as an undergraduate after founding a life sciences company called Theranos in 2003. Her inventions, which she is discussing in detail here for the first time, could upend the industry of laboratory testing and might change the way we detect and treat disease.

– – –

The secret that hundreds of employees are now refining involves devices that automate and miniaturize more than 1,000 laboratory tests, from routine blood work to advanced genetic analyses. Theranos’s processes are faster, cheaper and more accurate than the conventional methods and require only microscopic blood volumes, not vial after vial of the stuff. The experience will be revelatory to anyone familiar with current practices, which often seem like medicine by Bram Stoker.

A Theranos technician first increases blood flow to your hand by applying a wrap similar to one of those skiing pocket warmers, then uses a fingerstick to draw a few droplets of blood from the capillaries at the end of your hand. The blood wicks into a tube in a cartridge that Ms. Holmes calls a "nanotainer," which holds microliters of a sample, or about the amount of a raindrop. The nanotainer is then run through the analyzers in a Theranos laboratory. Results are usually sent back to a physician, but a full blood work-up—metabolic and immune markers, cell count, etc.—was in my inbox by the time I walked out the door. (Phew: all clear.)

It’s the kind of modern, painless service that consumers rarely receive in U.S. health care, though Ms. Holmes makes the point the other way around: "We’re here in Silicon Valley inside the consumer technology world . . . and what we think we’re building is the first consumer health-care technology company. Patients are empowered by having better access to their own health information, and then by owning their own data."

And a Theranos clinic may be coming soon to a pharmacy near you. On Monday the company is launching a partnership with Walgreens for in-store sample-collection centers, with the first one in Palo Alto and expanding throughout California and beyond. Ms. Holmes’s long-term goal is to provide Theranos services "within five miles of virtually every American home."

The entire article is very much worth reading. The process is cheaper, faster, and more accurate than conventional lab work done even in the best places: my recent blood work at Kaiser involved nine vials of blood, which was no problem for me but could be for others at my age.

The only problem here is the Federal government which is being furiously lobbied by the existing health technicians unions (one can hardly blame them; perhaps they deserve some early retirement plan?) which seeks to protect their jobs. We can watch the outcome with abated breath…

If you missed this  http://www.mediaite.com/online/whoa-take-a-look-at-esquires-epically-bad-911-fail/

 

Re: Putin Speaks

Jerry,

Linked from Drudge Report, a New York Times Op-Ed by Vladimir V. Putin, president of Russia.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/12/opinion/putin-plea-for-caution-from-russia-on-syria.html?_r=0

He even indirectly mentioned the specter of teddy bears. I think Putin is kicking Obama’s butt.

Regards,

George

Colonel Putin is not a fool.  He also understands the Russian temperament. Although he prefers to take no chances,  I suspect he can win a purely democratic election. His motives are not clear, but Russian nationalism is certainly a part of his motivation.

And I again call attention to this: http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/09/05/mr-obama-youve-already-lost-syrian-war-here-how-to-win-big-one/