Critical Exponent

The New Yok Times tells of a report by the Government Acountability Office on the unusual, political treatment given to the “morning-after” pill by the FDA:

Top agency officials were deeply involved in the decision, which was “very, very rare,” a top F.D.A. review official told investigators. The officials’ decision to ignore the recommendation of an independent advisory committee as well as the agency’s own scientific review staff was unprecedented, the report found. And a top official’s “novel” rationale for rejecting the application contradicted past agency practices, it concluded….

The report suggested that it quickly became apparent that the agency was not going to follow its usual path when it came to the pill. “For example,” it said, “F.D.A. review staff told us that they were told early in the review process that the decision would be made by high-level management.”

It gets better:

Congressional investigators had been unable to uncover the role in the Plan B decision played by the former agency commissioner, Dr. Mark B. McClellan, because agency officials told investigators that all of his e-mail messages and written correspondence on the subject had been deleted or thrown out. The Democrats charged that these acts contravened federal records laws.

And how does the extreme right feel about dogma overruling science and politics overruling protocol? Gee, surprise:

Wendy Wright, executive vice president of Concerned Women for America, a conservative women’s advocacy group in Washington, said that the report’s finding that top agency officials had overruled staffers was comforting. “The F.D.A. has been making some pretty serious mistakes lately,” Ms. Wright said.

Come read how gay marriage has ruined everything. Better yet, watch this exclusive report from The Daily Show.

Here’s a response I got from Target about the whole emergency contraception situation:

Dear Target Guest

In our ongoing effort to provide great service to our guests, Target consistently ensures that prescriptions for the emergency contraceptive Plan B are filled. As an Equal Opportunity Employer, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 also requires us to accommodate our team members’ sincerely held religious beliefs.

In the rare event that a pharmacist’s beliefs conflict with filling a guest’s prescription for the emergency contraceptive Plan B, our policy requires our pharmacists to take responsibility for ensuring that the guest’s prescription is filled in a timely and respectful manner, either by another Target pharmacist or a different pharmacy.

The emergency contraceptive Plan B is the only medication for which this policy applies.Under no circumstances can the pharmacist prevent the prescription from being filled, make discourteous or judgmental remarks, or discuss his or her religious beliefs with the guest.

Target abides by all state and local laws and, in the event that other laws conflict with our policy, we follow the law.

We’re surprised and disappointed by Planned Parenthood’s negative campaign. We’ve been talking with Planned Parenthood to clarify our policy and reinforce our commitment to ensuring that our guests’ prescriptions for the emergency contraceptive Plan B are filled. Our policy is similar to that of many other retailers and follows the recommendations of the American Pharmacists Association. That’s why it’s unclear why Target is being singled out.

We’re committed to meeting the needs of our female guests and will continue to deliver upon that commitment.

Sincerely,

[ name deleted ]
Target Executive Offices

Knox and I are working on a new ride on Boston’s Jewish History for Hub on Wheels. Read all about it!

The Boston neighborhoods of Dorchester, Mattapan, and West Roxbury once hosted thriving Jewish communities. The people there were mainly orthodox Jews from Eastern Europe who immigrated in the late 1800s and moved to the area from their first Boston homes in the tenements of the North End. This southward displacement criss-crossed that of earlier Jewish immigrants from Western Europe who, having reached middle class, were already moving from their homes in the then-South End to Brookline and Newton.

Knox and I learned all this today as we were biking around the city with Dick, a guy we met through the folks at Hub on Wheels, who is also interested in designing a bike tour of Jewish Boston. Dick has already thought a lot about what such a tour would include, and today was all about going to see the sites on his list.

It’s amazing how much history one can glean if one looks in the right place. These neighborhoods are currently populated by working-class African-American communities. Many of the churches, however, were once synagogues, and magen Davids and menorahs still adorn the façades. Hebrew schools have found new life as parochial schools or community centers. The G & G Delicatessen, once the hub of neighborhood life and local politics, is now a hardware store, yet its old name is still laid out in a floor mosaic at the entrance.

I’m just beginning to learn about this whole topic; at the moment I’m working my way through Hillel Levine’s and Lawrence Harmon’s The Death of An American Jewish Community: A tragedy of Good Intentions, a book that appears to lay blame for the fragmentation of the Jewish neighborhoods on the notorious policy of redlining and unscrupulous practices by some real-estate brokers. I’d also like to read Gerald Gamm’s Urban Exodus: Why the Jews Left Boston and the Catholics Stayed for a different take on the same subject.

If you have any ideas for sites and history we can include in this bike ride– and particularly if you can recollect what Jewish life was like in these neighborhoods– we’d love to hear from you.

The Kansas Board of Education backs “Intelligent (sic) Design,” as a “conservative Republican majority [on the Board] overruled a 26-member science committee and turned aside the National Academy of Sciences and the National Science Teachers Association.”

It’s funny, I(sic)D proponents claim they are not injecting religion into schools while at the same time their central claim is that life is too complicated to have arisen without a “higher power.” Higher power? Helloooo? I don’t care whether it’s Jesus on the cross or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, it’s religion. I don’t care much whether someone has a failure of the imagination to understand how complex structures can arise from simple rules, but it is so wrong to indoctrinate our children out of their natural curiosity and capacity for critical thinking: if they can’t understand something, it’s obviously non-understandable and must be God’s business but not ours.

“This is a sad day, not only for Kansas kids, but for Kansas,” said Janet Waugh, who voted against the new standards. “We’re becoming a laughingstock, not only of the nation, but of the world.”

Yep.

The New York Times reports on five cases of polio in an Amish community in Minnesota.

Over a year ago, I got a second-hand Lexmark Z52 ink-jet printer. I set it up to work on my Linux box, using the driver that Lexmark provided for download. Unfortunately, I could not get the printer calibration program to work correctly; it would refuse to print its test files. I figured I had the printer working well enough and would get back to this later.

About a year ago, when I got the wireless router, I also tried to get the printer to work over Samba so that Knox could access it from his Windows laptop the same way that he can access shared directories on my Linux box. I never got that to work either.

This weekend, I finally resolved both issues– they had the same cause. See, my lpd server was set to examine files for printability (this appears to have been the default, despite the man page), so all the binary files from Windows or from the printer calibration program were failing unless I explicitly passed the -b flag to lpr to specify a binary file. This is easy to do in Samba (one just modifies the print command parameter in smb.conf) but not so easy to do in the Lexmark printer calibration program (since it is compiled code and has no configuration file).

The solution, then, turned out to be simple: I just added the line
check_for_nonprintable@no
to my /etc/lpd.conf file, and now it does not try to prohibit file formats it does not recognize. I no longer need to specify the -b flag to lpr, and the printer calibration program works 100%.

It took me a while to figure this out, as I was focusing on the printer-sharing issue and thought there was a Samba problem. It turns out Samba was working beautifully; it was just lpd being over-protective.

While I’m on the topic, kudos to Lexmark for providing Linux drivers and a Linux Developer Kit!

The Boston Globe Magazine has a cover story on the Jewish renaissance in Boston:

To be sure, Greater Boston’s Jewish community is as diverse as any and its newfound unity relative. In addition to Reform and Conservative congregations, Orthodox and Hasidic synagogues can be found in Brookline, Allston, and Brighton, where thousands of Russian and Ukrainian Jews have settled. And no one expects Boston to supplant New York as the hub of American Jewry. But a remarkable string of recent events has helped Boston position itself to be the country’s capital of Jewish academia.