Month: February 2022

Well, good news for me, anyway.

As many of you know, there's been an explosion in recent years of what are called CAR-T treatments for blood cancers in general and for multiple myeloma in particular. Unlike ordinary chemo treatments, CAR-T involves taking T cells from a patient (e.g., me) and shipping them off to a lab where they undergo genetic magic and are then infused back into the patient. It's a one-time treatment and shows considerable promise as an almost complete cure.¹

There are a bunch of CAR-T treatments being developed, but the one I've been following most closely has been a Chinese version licensed in the US by Johnson & Johnson. Today, it received its final FDA clearance:

The Food and Drug Administration on Monday cleared the therapy, named Carvykti, for the treatment of multiple myeloma in adult patients whose disease has worsened despite prior treatments with other drugs.

....In one of J&J’s U.S. studies, about 98% of the 97 multiple-myeloma patients treated with Carvykti had a significant reduction in the proteins that signal the presence of myeloma, and 83% had a complete remission, indicating no detectable cancer cells, at a median of 22 months after treatment.

Joseph Mikhael, chief medical officer of the International Myeloma Foundation, said the effectiveness demonstrated in the study was “really unprecedented. That’s why there’s so much excitement around it.”

This is obviously good news for me, but it's not unalloyed. First of all, CAR-T treatments have potentially serious side effects, though they're short-term and mostly seem to be quite controllable these days. Second, CAR-T treatments are typically given to patients who are at the end of their rope, which doesn't describe me. However, even with some risk involved, I'd rather try this while I'm still relatively healthy since I suspect the treatment is more effective the healthier you are. Third, CAR-T therapies cost about half a million bucks.

All that said, I'm going to push my oncologist to see what it takes for me to qualify for this. I don't expect anything immediate, but it would be nice to get approved for this within the next year or so.

¹In the blood cancer world, terminology is confusing. "Complete remission" doesn't actually mean complete remission. It means "cancer levels are so low they're undetectable." That's pretty good! But there are still a few cancerous cells roaming around that will probably make a comeback eventually.

For some reason, everyone seems to be missing the obvious reason why the US (and NATO more broadly) aren't attacking Russia directly: because we never have. Nor has Russia ever directly attacked us. This has been hard military doctrine in the nuclear era.

Instead, both countries have fought lots and lots of proxy wars, the most famous being Vietnam and Afghanistan. Ukraine is just the latest, and we're no more likely to attack Russia directly this time than we've ever been. Vladimir Putin helpfully reminded us of this a few days ago when he put his nuclear forces on alert.

Thomas Friedman once suggested that no two countries with McDonald's outlets would ever go to war. That's basically what Norman Angell said in 1909, and for a few years everyone thought he was a genius. But he was wrong then and Friedman's updated version is wrong now. The real lesson of modern war had to wait a few decades, and it's the same today as it was in 1950: No countries that are both nuclear powers will ever go to war.¹

Until they do, of course. This is a lesson of modern war, not a law of nature.

¹Aside from the occasional border skirmish, anyway.

Showing support for Ukraine is the order of the day, but none of the pictures in my photo queue could be made to fit a Ukrainian theme of any kind. So instead I made my own. This is a Spanish needles daisy with the background converted to blue and then run through a Photoshop filter.

Patrisse Cullors, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, wants us to take "Defund the Police" very, very seriously:

Her new book, An Abolitionist’s Handbook, offers 12 steps in the form of a guidebook that everyday activists can use to fight for an abolitionist present and future—and her bold, humanistic approach can be previewed in a recent essay for Variety.

“When people hear the word abolitionist,” Patrisse writes, “they usually think of slavery.” As with abolishing slavery, she argues, there can be no compromise, no half measures, and no rest. Is “defund the police” a literal call for a total, complete shutdown? For Patrisse and other abolitionists: absolutely. “This is not about fixing a broken system, we are not looking for better food or more access to education in prison. We are looking to abolish the entire system.”

This is about the last thing we need right now. But if you want to hear Cullors talk about it in more depth, click the link and sign up for her conversation with Mother Jones's James West on Thursday.

Why oh why?

For the life of me I don’t understand why Dems aren’t falling over themselves to praise how Biden has handled things and express immense relief that he, rather than a fully compromised Trump, is leading the global response, but this delusional nonsense is what’s filling the void. https://t.co/0qBkAF2tRK

— Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler) February 28, 2022

It's a good question. Democrats generally seem less inclined than Republicans to loudly boast about what they've done, and I've always ascribed this partly to a lack of conviction: They're afraid of committing themselves for fear that things might go sour later on and they'll look stupid.

As Brian says, we pay a price for this. We haven't boasted much about the stimulus bill getting the economy back on track, so the void has been filled by conservatives and the media going crazy about inflation. Everyone stayed quiet about the Afghanistan withdrawal, so the void was filled with nonstop coverage of "chaos" and bad planning. Right now, Dems are mostly fairly quiet about Biden's rather remarkable diplomatic successes over Ukraine—which are fairly subtle and need explaining—so the void is filled with Fox News talking heads claiming that Biden is "weak" and Putin isn't afraid of him.

I dunno. I've never understood this. Am I wrong about Democrats' aversion to boasting about what they (or their president) have done? Are they talking a lot and I'm just not hearing it? Or what?

The New York Times reports today on a pair of studies that conclude with high certainty that the COVID-19 virus originated at the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan, not at the nearby Wuhan virology lab. Here's an annotated map that provides a simple look at how the virus initially spread:

I think it's possible that we'll never have 100% assurance of where the virus originated, but the evidence continues to point toward a natural source, not an engineered one. This is just one more nail in the coffin of the lab release theory.

In the New York Times, Chris Miller says there's a reason that Vladimir Putin keeps winning wars:

For the past decade, Americans have come to believe that Russia’s strength lies in hybrid tactics — cyberwarfare, misinformation campaigns, covert operations — and its ability to meddle in other countries’ domestic politics. Yet as we have searched for Russian phantoms behind every misinformed Facebook post, Russia has replaced the poorly equipped army it inherited from the Soviet Union with a modern fighting force, featuring everything from new missiles to advanced electronic warfare systems. Today the threat to Europe’s security is not hybrid warfare but hard power, visible in the cruise missiles that have struck across Ukraine.

In other words, Russia has a kick-ass military. That's why they keep winning.

IANARE, but doesn't this miss a tiny little something? Namely that until now Putin has fought only tiny little wars. Of course he's won in South Ossetia and Crimea and—if you stretch the definition of "win" considerably—Syria. This is like congratulating the United States for winning in Grenada and Kosovo. Big deal.

Having extremely limited and specific objectives is an excellent military strategy, and that's why Putin has won so many wars. But it says nothing about how good Russia's military is when it decides to fight a big war with unclear objectives. They are now trying to do approximately what we tried to do in Iraq, and only time will tell if they succeed.

But they might. It's likely that the Russian war in Ukraine will eventually turn into a counterinsurgency, and my read of history suggests that the only way for a counterinsurgency to succeed is to embrace ruthless brutality. It's to America's credit that we were never willing to go completely down that path in Iraq, but it's quite possible that Putin is. If he does, he will be more of a pariah than ever but he might just win. Ask the Chechnyans.

AFPAC is for conservatives who think CPAC has sold out to the woke liberals. In other words, their applause for Joe Arpaio last night was not just a misunderstanding:

Joe Arpaio tells the crowd at AFPAC that he has been named the biggest racist in the country. The crowd erupts in applause.

"What are you clapping for?" he asks the crowd. "I'm not!"

The crowd then cheers again when he says he's been accused of racial profiling.

— Jared Holt (@jaredlholt) February 26, 2022

I was roaming around in the vicinity of John Wayne Airport earlier today and decided to take a bunch of pictures of planes taking off. My goal was to find the best spot and then decide if it was good enough to merit coming back when the light was better.

In a nutshell, it wasn't. There's just no good place for this. However, there's no point in wasting the pictures I took, so here they are. Do I have any airplane nerds in the audience who can identify them? Click to embiggen.

In the New York Times today, Jamelle Bouie fires away at moderate Democrats who, he says, derailed President Biden's agenda and are now trying to blame progressives for their own failure.

I don't understand this. It's true, as Bouie says, that over the summer there was disagreement about whether to link the infrastructure bill and the social spending bill. Progressives wanted to pass them together while moderates wanted to vote on them separately. "That brought the Democratic Party’s momentum to a sudden halt."

Sure, I guess, but only because both sides stuck to their guns. I don't see how you can exclusively blame either moderates or progressives for this. Then this:

Nor have moderate and conservative Democrats tried to devise an agenda of their own. Instead, they’ve used their remaining political capital to kill the most popular items on the Democratic Party wish list, from tax hikes on the richest Americans and an increase in the minimum wage to a plan for price controls on prescription drugs. They couldn’t even be bothered to save the revamped child tax credit, one of the most effective antipoverty measures since at least the Great Society. Its expiration in December pushed millions of children back under the poverty line.

This doesn't make any sense. Practically every Democratic senator, moderate and progressive alike, supported all this stuff. It failed specifically because of two prickly senators, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. This says nothing at all about either moderates or progressives.

In any case, the real gripe among moderates has nothing to do with the social spending bill—which, again, they supported. Passing it would have been good for the country, but no one thinks either its success or failure will have the slightest impact on the political fortunes of Democrats this November. Rather, the moderate complaints are all about cultural stuff: defunding the police, CRT, immigration, and so forth.

That's the battleground, not the spending bill. And I'll say this: I'm generally sympathetic to the moderates on cultural issues. At the same time, if they think progressive cultural views are damaging the party, they need to fight back. If they instead stay silent because they're afraid of criticism, then they have no one but their own cowardly selves to blame if the rest of the world thinks that progressive views define the entire Democratic Party. Either speak up or accept responsibility for your silence. That's how politics works.