Month: September 2017

Falling slowly

~ susie

I was watching the movie “Once” this afternoon, and the powerful longing to be with a group of musicians playing together swept over me. This movie really captures the joy of making music. Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova:

We need a lot more Jesus in the CIA

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Right?

Pompeo, an evangelical Christian, has said previously that Islamist terrorists will “continue to press against us until we make sure that we pray and stand and fight and make sure that we know that Jesus Christ is our savior is truly the only solution for our world.”

The concerns are not that Pompeo is religious but that his religious convictions are bleeding over into the CIA.

According to four sources familiar with the matter, Pompeo, who attends weekly Bible studies held in government buildings, referenced God and Christianity repeatedly in his first all-hands speech and in a recent trip report while traveling overseas. According to a profile by the Washington Post’s Greg Miller, Pompeo is working on starting a chaplaincy for the CIA campus like the military has.

The CIA did not dispute these events. “Director Pompeo is a man of faith,” the spokesperson said. “The idea that he should not practice his faith because he is Director of CIA is absurd.”

Michael Weinstein, a former Air Force officer who founded the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, says he has been seeing increasing complaints from those inside the intelligence community. Weinstein’s foundation, which focuses on preventing religious pressure from creeping into the military, also has clients in the intelligence community, mostly from the CIA, the National Security Agency, and the Defense Intelligence Agency.

According to Weinstein, agency employees don’t want to go public with their complaints because of fear of retribution or being labeled as “leakers.” They don’t typically file formal complaints within the government. But certain things are making them especially uncomfortable, such as officials signing off with the phrase “have a blessed day.”

That’s something “straight out of The Handmaid’s Tale,” Weinstein said.

“We are unaware of any such complaints being registered at CIA,” the spokesperson said.

Is this what the Founders had in mind? Nope

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Day 16 of 365: Twice Daily, 12 hours apart.

Our patent system needs a complete overhaul, and it’s nowhere more urgent than with pharmaceuticals — especially when most of the R&D costs were covered by U.S. taxpayers:

The drugmaker Allergan announced Friday that it had transferred its patents on a best-selling eye drug to the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe in upstate New York — an unusual gambit to protect the drug from a patent dispute.

Under the deal, which involves the dry-eye drug Restasis, Allergan will pay the tribe $13.75 million. In exchange, the tribe will claim sovereign immunity as grounds to dismiss a patent challenge through a unit of the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The tribe will lease the patents back to Allergan, and will receive $15 million in annual royalties as long as the patents remain valid.

The surprising legal move rippled quickly through the pharmaceutical world on Friday, setting off speculation about whether other drug companies would soon follow suit in order to protect their patents from challenges through a patent-review process that the industry despises.

If Allergan succeeds in holding onto its patents, “we will probably see multiple branded companies housing their patents with Indian tribes,” Ronny Gal, an analyst for Bernstein, said in a video message to investors on Friday.

For the Mohawk tribe, a community of 13,000 who live in a rural region on the border of New York State and Canada, the deal offers the promise of a new revenue stream that would bring in income beyond that of a casino the tribe runs near the reservation.