sublime life

June 13, 2013

Your Own Life

Well, not long after I wrote about the absurdity of a company’s efforts to patent DNA locations and that Big Agriculture owns modified genes in seeds, the Supreme Court came out with a decision today saying a corporate entity cannot stake claim to naturally existing DNA.

For once, someone agreed with me.

Clarence Thomas, who wrote the majority opinion in the Big Agriculture case, wrote the opinion for the court issued today.

“We merely hold that genes and the information they encode are not patent eligible… simply because they have been isolated from the surrounding genetic material,” he wrote.

The company CAN hold patents on DNA that it has changed, which is very much akin to the previously-mentioned, genetically-modified seed case.

Click on the pic below to read the full decision:

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June 12, 2013

Trust Us

One of the nice things about the law, despite everyone’s grumblings, is that it’s based on black and white interpretation. When a judge comes down with a decision, he bases it on his interpretation of the text.

The law can be based on bills passed by legislature, contract clauses and decisions from previous cases. There’s always some written letter which the law is read, digested and interpreted. Period.

Then there’s this.

A judge ruled yesterday that organic farmers cannot bar the evil, giant, biotech Monsanto from suing them for unwittingly using seeds from organic plants that are cross-pollinated from genetically-modified plants. The judge said Monsanto has already promised it wouldn’t sue organic farmers in said circumstances and that it states so on its website:

“…we do not pursue farmers for the accidental presence of our patented technology in their fields or crops.”

Apparently that’s supposed to be enough to sate organic farmers’ fears that they could be sued when they accidentally use Monsanto-tainted seeds.

Monsanto likes to play like it’s this very altruistic, yet capitalistic company who only sues and intimidates farmers because those farmers are breaking patent law. But their genetically-modified seeds are working their genes into regular, organic corn. That means once “organic” seeds begin to see more of the Monstanto genes, then the organic crop magically becomes Monsanto property and subject to a contract which the organic farmer never signed.

This is unnerving and scary. Patenting life I mean.

Even scarier? That justices would base their opinion not on case law, not on passed legislation, but a website. A website? Why not base a decision on the back of a cereal box or a billboard ad?

Judges need to stick to the law and the pure sources thereof. We can argue and bicker all day on a court’s opinion about the law. But when those opinions are based on text that is not designated law, it’s dangerous. It means that we could essentially make our own laws on our own websites. We can make a contract that’s binding on the Internet that doesn’t require any signature.

Also, Congress, presidents and the federal courts have been very generous with Monsanto in the past. But now they don’t even have to go through them anymore. They can just write their own contracts online, with no approval from authority.

Yeah, scary.

Oh yeah, that legal case about whether it was legal to patent life, was settled in the Supreme Court. The decision was a boon for Monsanto, who was not a party in the case. But the justice who wrote the majority opinion in that case, Clarence Thomas, is the former general counsel of Monsanto.

Food for thought.

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June 4, 2013

Congressional Blame

I’m going to start with a few numbers.

Here goes.

Congressional approval rating before November 2012 election: 18%

Percentage of Congressional incumbents reelected in 2012: 90%

Congressional approval now: 16%

[Stats according to Gallup and Bloomberg]

When you ask people about our good ‘ole Bicameral insane asylum, the reaction is strong, swift and furious. People really don’t like our Reps and Senators.

Why? Well, the general accusation is that they don’t get anything done. Apparently when you take 600 people from all over the country, stick them in a room and then they don’t bang out legislation like clockwork, their constituents get angry.

Another reason I keep hearing is something along the lines of “they need to stop bickering and just do what’s best for the country.” Yeah, right. Congress doesn’t really work for America. They work for their voters.

John Boehner doesn’t worry about what affects New Yorkers, he works for the 8th District of Ohio. Nancy Pelosi doesn’t cater to Texas, she works for the voters in the 12th District of California. Everything they do, every vote they make is motivated by what the voters in that district will do to them every other November.

So then what do you do? You have roughly 1 in 10 who don’t like their representative and/or senator. And yet 9 in 10 of those incumbents keep getting sent back to Capitol Hill. Talk about a mixed message. People like their own guy, just not the other people their guy has to deal with.

If it’s one thing you got to give to those Tea Party groups, they know how to bring the fear out of representatives in D.C. If a Republican doesn’t toe the Tea Party line, they start looking for a new Capitol tenant.

Conservatives are scared out of their minds that the Tea Party will conjure an opponent in their upcoming primary.

The Tea Party backers have proven a point. A little bit of angst, organization and involvement can generate change. Digging up a primary opponent will make a Congressman think twice about what they vote for and who they side with.

Every Congressman and Congresswoman should have that fear, regardless of their party or their district. But with a 90 percent reelection rating, the disapproval rating will never matter.

So to all of you who complain about Congress, and there are a lot of you, do something about it. If you keep sending the same people back to D.C. over and over again, you’re going to get the same result… over and over.

You get the government you elect.

(a version of this post appeared on medium.com)

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May 27, 2013

Big Thought

I firmly believe that most all human problems are attributed to one flaw: our unwillingness to think when it’s inconvenient. We all have the capacity to think. It’s just that it takes effort most of the time and it seems like a task to think beyond what we experience.

Investment failures, prejudicial bias, political partisanship, relationship problems, they can all be traced back to a refusal to review, to think.

Not thinking makes life easy. We don’t have to see others’ points of view or try to comprehend something unpleasant. Life is simple when we can take something that we don’t want to deal with and put it in a closet and shut the door.

Being a black-and-white thinker is effortless. Despite all of our attempts to make our mind a canvas with one dimension, it goes against nature. The world is like a gem, with facets all around that refract light into different colors from different angles. To understand all of those differences, you need to be willing to look at them.

When we sit in our own personal corners and watch the world from that perspective, we stop growing. This is when we become “set in our ways.” We don’t want to learn new ways of doing things. We don’t want to make the effort to comprehend someone else’s point of view. We don’t want to understand different cultures. We don’t want to know why some abstract painting is art. We want people to do things our way. We want people to speak our language. That’s when things get dangerous. When we stop progressing, we draw lines in the sand and would rather fight than think about an alternative.

Lack of thinking generates a world of calamity. It creates enemies, starts wars and sets us all on the path of disaster.

There are those who will say “there are times when you must act and not think.” This is true, especially in times of a response to violence or the specter of violence. But our action can be the appropriate reaction when we think about how we’ll react before we are forced to confront a situation and make a hasty decision.

Be a thinker. Everything starts with a thought, an idea. Reason, choice, action, worship, epiphany and emotion— they are all products of thought. What goes on in your mind eventually matriculates to your actions. What you think influences what you do and what you do is who you are. Every bad deed and every good deed you’ve done started in your mind first before it became an action.

Be a thinker. No matter how disturbing or difficult the situation, thinking may not find you the answer, but it will get you closer.

Be a thinker. People may deride you because you seem unwilling to settle on one view. They’ll call you a lazy dreamer, pretentious and say your head’s in the clouds. They’ll say you think too much and don’t do. It isn’t true. Just because you take your time acting doesn’t mean you don’t take action; it means you know when to act.

At the end of the day, this is all about understanding both yourself and your world. It’s important to understand and to apply thinking to everything you experience because it spawns new ideas and new approaches to old problems. Understanding leads to generating better solutions both for you and your world.

Living with one view is not thinking. Living with a single stance stymies understanding. That stagnancy causes your mind to atrophy and you end up being only what the world will allow.

Think about it.

(originally posted on Medium.com)

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May 8, 2013

Time and a Half

There are a lot of fringe benefits about our work life that we really owe to unions. We didn’t get them tanks to the goodness of our employers’s hearts. We got them literally through blood. Regardless of what people know of history, workers died to get the 40-hour work week, weekends and overtime.

But there’s always those who are doing everything they can to roll all of that back. The latest attempt? Conservatives want to give employees and employers the option of comp time versus overtime.

Comp time is when you earn time off for every hour you work over 40 as opposed to time and a half wages. Government workers have comp time though it’s not available in the private sector. Conservatives are trying to give them the option.

On the surface, it doesn’t seem so bad. It gives workers the chance to choose time off or the extra money. The conservative argument? ‘We’re trying to provide workers flexibility.’

It’s one thing I can’t stand about conservatives is their intentional framing of certain legislation. They say it’s about helping workers spend time with their families. Come on. We’re not stupid. It’s REALLY about businesses saving money on having to pay overtime.

One thing you won’t hear the conservatives go on about in their efforts to pass comp time is the fact that employers can dictate when and how much comp time you can take off. They can’t tell you how to spend your time and a half.

There are REASONS why we have certain regulations when it comes to work. It’s for the workers. If you’re going to change the law, at least be honest about the reasons why you’re trying to change it.

I think that’s what irks me so much. It’s the syntax that’s diametrically opposite of their intentions. Like ‘No Child Left Behind.’ That wasn’t really about children. It was about shutting down low-performance schools, ergo fewer campuses and higher student-to-teacher ration which means less in taxes.

Then there’s Voter ID, which conservatives said was about reducing voter fraud. Several studies, expensive studies, have concluded that there’s really no such thing.

But the Voter ID initiatives were never really about making sure a voters were who they were at the poll. It was really about keeping poor voters, who likely won’t have an ID and will likely vote Democratic, from showing up at the poll at all. Voter ID was a solution to a non-existent problem.

I’m not naive. I know that’s politics. It’s not too much to ask though to be honest about what you’re trying to do. Don’t say something is for workers when it’s really for businesses. Don’t say something’s about education when it’s really about shutting down schools and reducing taxes.

They should at least have the decency to hide their misdirections in the bill and don’t say anything about it until it’s made law, you know, like the Democrats did.

(Interesting observation about this post, Andrew Carnegie once pushed violence against his striking union workers. His foundation helped sponsor the Voter ID study.)

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May 2, 2013

Slavery, Bacon, Gays and Jesus

One of the things that has always bothered me about the Bible is the flexibility of the social codes. So many Christians are willing to tout the infallibility of the text and yet claim some of the more unsavory aspects are no longer applicable.

Jesus didn’t have a problem with slavery. (More often than not, the Bible referred to them as “servants” but really, they were slaves.) He never condemned it. He never advocated that a person’s life is their own. In fact, he actually healed a man’s dying servant. He was willing to save the slave’s life but not give them freedom. The Bible is riddled with rules that delineate the relationship between master and slave.

There were many times during the days of American slavery where owners would use the Bible as justification for their owning slaves.

But today, we have a moral repulsion to slavery. It’s even an established right in America that you can’t be owned by anyone.

Then there’s divorce. Jesus was pretty clear on this one.

“Now I say this to you: anyone who divorces his wife — I am not speaking of an illicit marriage — and marries another, is guilty of adultery.’” (Matthew 19:9)

Sooooo, either there are a sea of adulterers out there (half of all marriages) or we’re not having a whole lot of proper marriages.

I’m willing to bet that a lot of divorced Christians don’t consider themselves adulterers. I can’t stop myself form typing out that Evangelicals have the highest divorce rate among Christians.

Many times I hear the arguments from fellow Christians that Jesus preached during a different time in history, when slavery was allowed and divorce was frowned upon. They say that the times have changed since He walked the Earth.

This applies to the entire Bible of course. Polygamy, slavery, stonings— they were legal, encouraged even. Divorce, eating pork, women serving food while on their periods—they were forbidden. Yet so many Christians want to use the Bible to justify their positions to castigate homosexuality, hate Muslims, legislate morality among others.

Homosexuality is a personal favorite. Just like eating pork and divorce, it is condemned in the Bible. Why is it that views on divorce, premarital sex and ham have relaxed but not on being gay?

Bottom line: if values change from one era to another, then we can’t cherry pick elements out of the Bible that we want to apply and others that we don’t. Buffet-style morality based on the Bible isn’t based on the Bible at all.

When you do that, you’re selections aren’t Bible-based— they’re really the mores that WE want to see enforced. If you really believe in God or Jesus Christ, then you would already know that people don’t have the authority to play Solomon with the Good Book.

Let’s just admit that Christians are using the Bible and its text as a front for their own personal fears and hatred of things they don’t like. When they say that the Bible says homosexuality is wrong, they’re really saying that THEY personally think homosexuality is wrong and that they have the authority to deem it so.

Well, we are not God or Jesus.

But we are divorcees, gays, bacon lovers, sinners and most importantly, free.

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April 25, 2013

I am Ryan Laza

(this first appeared on Medium.com)

One of the things I can’t stand to hear is the term “going viral” or some other variant that includes “went” and “gone.” It’s like some form of communication materializes into a virus and jumps from one poor sap to another, infecting them with a nonstop reel of cat videos.

Most of the time, it’s a harmless vid of babies doing baby things or some overly exuberant stuntman wannabe lighting himself on fire. Sometimes though, it becomes a bad side effect of crowd sleuthing and an increasingly slipshod media.

When Adam Lanza walked into Sandy Hook Elementary and slaughtered innocent children, social media users and eventually news outlets pointed to his brother’s Facebook page, saying it was the killer’s page.

Ryan had to defend himself and, ironically, used social media to explain to people that it wasn’t him.

It’s no secret, traditional media, and subsequently social media, are more bent on getting something first rather than waiting and getting it right. It’s better to correct it later than get it after everyone else.

After the Boston Marathon bombing, the New York Post tried to label an innocent Saudi man as a suspect. Social media and sites like Reddit immediately put the word out. The word was wrong though.

Police later sent out Tweets saying that wasn’t true.

You have to wonder, who beget who? Did social media create the intense pressure to get something first or did that pressure (and it’s ensuing errors) drive social media to find the truth? It’s a growing dilemma.

Under the wrong circumstances, crowd sleuthing may eventually create a dangerous witch hunt.

Social media can definitely help though. Just ask the FBI. After they released photos of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, they got floods of tips from the social media universe which ultimately helped them ID the brothers. This is all nice and good.

The problem with social media and its viral brethren is the same problem we have with actual viruses. When information is wrong, it gets spread as truth and it’s hard to correct.

Hopefully over time, we’ll learn the optimal way to use social media when police are looking for a suspect. I think we’re already getting there in some form. Whenever that Saudi national was ruled out as a suspect in the Boston bombing, Reddit users were quick to echo the news.

Maybe we’re learning that we need vaccines against viral speculation.

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April 16, 2013

Own Life

Who owns life? Simple question. We’d all like to think that we are our own owners. It’s my hand, my face, my eyes, my legs. Even when we die our organs can be donated only if we agree to it beforehand.

A few medical research companies are begging to differ though. They are arguing to the Supreme Court that they can patent specific genes in our genome, something we all have in our DNA.

Their position? Because these specific genes, which are linked to breast cancer, have been isolated and identified, they therefore are intellectual property. They are preventing other companies from pursuing treatments for these specific genes. They are also holding these gene locations hostage by not allowing doctors to view a patient’s DNA to determine if they have a gene for breast cancer.

It’s kind of like saying, ‘I found gold in a national forest, therefore it’s intellectual property and anyone who owns gold owns patented material.’

Let’s also keep in mind that the Human Genome Project actually mapped the entire human DNA sequence, not pharmaceutical companies.

Kind of bold I think. But they can’t own something we already own. If the Supreme Court buys this absurd notion then I won’t be able to take Tylenol for my headache because Advil has already patented my brain. If I have carpal tunnel syndrome, I can’t wear a brace because a surgeon has perfected some treatment.

It’s not like life hasn’t been patented before. Big Agriculture owns patents to products that they’ve genetically modified to be resistant to pesticides, endure tougher weather and grow in abundance. I disagree with those SCOTUS positions as well.

But at least in those cases, the genes were modified by the company, not simply discovered.

It’s yet another case of business vs. public good. If money can be made off of something, we suddenly see our rights restricted.

If the Supreme Court sides with the pharmaceutical companies, I guess I need to go down to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and file an application to patent knees. This way I can take Aleve when they hurt after a run.

Take that Ben Gay.

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April 10, 2013

Language Theory

About two weeks ago an article came out about seven terms that drive scientists crazy when they’re misused by the public.

Theory. Hypothesis. Model. Skeptic. Significant. Nature v. Nurture. Natural. They seem very simple. We all know the basic definitions.

The problem is scientists have specific connotations they use for the specific terms when it comes to their respective fields. Lay people use them improperly, at least when referring to science and research, according to the scientists.

The article made a lot of sense. Scientists are peeved that terms they assign proper usage is being twisted by those who aren’t scientists. People like to enlist them in arguments twhen they want to pontificate on a subject that includes a scientific element, say climate change.

The most interesting tidbit of the article is the absolutely stupid comments listed below it on Yahoo. The ire? Well apparently people don’t like being told that they’re probably using a word wrong. It illustrates a major problem with the public— no one really wants to go through the effort to think about what they’re saying and how they’re saying it.

I work in communications and I see every day the follies that unfold because people don’t know how to convey simple ideas to each other properly with proper usage. Why is it that terms are used mistakenly over and over again? Because people are too lazy to consider the terms of their language and how it affects their interaction.

The commenters pissed off that scientists have the nerve to point out the definition of scientific principles proves the point of the story: people are ignorant and they don’t realize that they’re ignorant.

The saddest part is they don’t care either.

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March 31, 2013

New Hope CCLXVI

For the first time in 2,000 years, the Roman Catholic Church has a pope born in the New World.

He’s doing things differently too. Francis, the Jesuit, opts for less opulence when it comes to the pomp that surrounds the pontiff. His muted demeanor is a symbol for what the church should be doing right now, operating with a little humility. After several years of the pedophile priest scandals, it’s time to make amends and show the flock that their leadership is worthy.

And yet, a month into his new vocation, some aren’t happy with Francis because he’s not kissing the asses of particular factions which Benedict courted.

I was born and raised a Catholic and I had always been proud of my religious heritage. This is mostly because I was brought up in an area with a lot of heavy evangelical influence. Since the pedophile accusations and allegations of the coverup came to the surface, I don’t find myself kneeling in the church very often. I sure as hell haven’t been to confession.

I’m angry at the upper echelon of Catholic management because instead of trying to hide the pederasts and their scandals, they should have hung them out to dry and turned them into the police.

Why didn’t they do that? My theory is money. They knew once it got out that they had a problem, there would be lawsuits, losses and settlements. They didn’t care about having predators preying on the flock, they were concerned most with their finances.

That is obscene. If this is a religion and espouses beliefs and rituals done in the name of a God, then how could they live with themselves knowing children are being victimized?

I’m also angry with fellow Catholics for their passiveness in dealing with the problem. If they really wanted to stop the problem, they should have hit the church where it counts the most— the pocketbook. One Sunday without tithes from every Catholic in this world and Rome would have had a course correction in their legal strategy.

Pope John Paul II (on the path to sainthood) and Pope Benedict dealt poorly with this and willfully ~~ignored~~ sidestepped the problem. Now there’s a new man in a white cap. There’s a lot of hope that he can solve these problems.

But what are people concerned with now? He washed two women’s feet at a recent ceremony and that angered traditionalists.

So we’re more concerned about a pope washing women’s feet and not priests fondling children?

I’m so relieved we have our priorities straight.

Godspeed Frank.

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(a version of this post appeared on medium.com)

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