When you get right down to it, the antibiotic resistance crisis is mostly driven by profitability. It simply isn't profitable to invest all that money in R&D, clinical trials, and marketing of antibiotics. Despite their obvious critical utility, the demand for antibiotics that are effective against multidrug-resistant pathogens is, overall, not very high.

Turns out, the E. coli isolated from a woman's infected urine isn't actually pan-resistant.

Thinking about the fact that candidates are actually campaigning in California despite having a very late primary, I'm wondering how the state could have more of an impact on the rest of the country.

Cassandra whispers to me of disaster and catastrophe:
"Harden your heart, o wanderer
the road is long, the horizon far
no surcease of sorrow shall come to succor thee,
no hope of rescue, of salvation, of love
through the grey desert thou shalt tread
alone, forsaken, unlooked for, unwanted, unmissed."

I just finished watching ”Sand Pebbles” which stars Steve McQueen, and it’s a brilliant, intricately subtle anti-war movie that has excruciatingly painful relevance to the present day absurdity of the continued occupation of Iraq by the U.S. “Sand Pebbles” chronicles the tribulations of Jake Holman, an engineer in the U.S. Navy assigned to a gunboat patrolling the Yangtze. The setting is China during the tumultous revolutionary era, as Chiang Kai-shek attempts to oust the warlords whom the western powers support. The specter of Soviet involvement looms large, and so the U.S. characteristically sticks its nose into something that they probably shouldn’t have. Getting involved in other nations’ civil wars seems to be a pretty bad idea if you ask me.

There are certain parts of the year that seem to get me down. That perception may simply be apophenia. A meaningless confluence of stimuli that cause me to believe there is some sort of pattern. Like listening for voices on blank cassette tapes. Or seeing the image of the Virgin Mary on a scrap of tree bark.

I am currently watching Showtime where they have Radiohead in concert (2004), and I am amazed at how the first few chords and guitar strums of their songs can evoke such vivid memories and even bring a smile to my face.

In this tired hour
of spent beer cans
and cigarette butts
the chewed ragged ends of
hoping for some sort of change
waiting for the winds
to turn aside the drifting course of the clouds
for the sun to shine forth

I sunk into a depressive mood this afternoon. Maybe it's just adrenalitis or something. All of the sudden I was exhausted despite it not being a strenuous day at all. The stress of the past 11 months, especially of the last four, has finally caught up to me, and, frankly, I want nothing more than to pass out saturated by tequila catching some sunlight on the beach.

JRM forwards me an interesting read.

Time runs out.