Many years ago, Jim got a BA in Radiation Biophysics from the University of Kansas. He then got a PhD in Molecular Biology from UCLA and did postdoctoral research in yeast genetics at UC Berkeley and mouse retroviruses at Stanford. He joined biosys in Palo Alto, producing insect parasitic nematodes for pest control. In the early 1990’s, he moved to Gainesville, FL and founded a company that eventually became Entomos. He left the firm as it reorganized into Pasteuria Biosciences and chose not to found a new firm due a clash of values with venture capital investors, who generally lack all values. Upon leaving, he chose to be a stay at home dad, gentleman farmer, cook and horse wrangler. He discovered the online world through commenting at Glenn Greenwald’s blog in the Salon days and was involved in the briefly successful Chris Dodd move to block the bill to renew FISA. He then went on to blog at Firedoglake and served a brief stint as evening editor there. When the Emptywheel blog moved out of Firedoglake back to standalone status, Jim tagged along and blogged on anthrax, viruses, John Galt, Pakistan and Afghanistan. He is now a mostly lapsed blogger looking for a work-around to the depressing realization that pointing out the details of government malfeasance and elite immunity has approximately zero effect.
Back in late September, just a week before Ebola panic hit a peak in the US when a patient in Dallas was diagnosed with the disease, the CDC produced a remarkable study in which they modeled the expected number of Ebola cases both with and without intervention. That study received a huge amount of press […]
Back when she was Pakistan’s Ambassador to the United States, Sherry Rehman rankled the Obama Administration when she said in an interview with Christiane Amanpour that US drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal regions “radicalize footsoldiers, tribes and entire villages“. Rehman’s time as Ambassador came to an end with the election of President Nawaz Sharif in […]
Many outlets are reporting on the disclosure earlier this week that there appears to be active recruiting for Islamic State taking place in Afghanistan’s Helmand province. Here is AP as carried by ABC News: Afghan officials confirmed for the first time Monday that the extremist Islamic State group is active in the south, recruiting fighters, […]
John Kerry visited Pakistan yesterday to provide the delayed announcement of $250 million from the US to aid displaced Pakistanis and rebuild infrastructure in the wake of the Zarb-e-Azb offensive against terrorists in Pakistan’s tribal areas. We get some detail from the New York Times for how the aid is to be used: The $250 […]
SIGAR, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, has released a report (pdf) describing very disturbing problems with salaries for the Afghan National Police. The report concludes: The U.S. government is spending more than $300 million annually for ANP salaries with little assurance that these funds are going to active police personnel or that the […]
Despite the rampant corruption of his administration and his many other faults, Hamid Karzai was a consistent critic of US-led night raids that led to many senseless civilian deaths, disappearances and torture. Those raids, and the US death squads that carried them out, were right at the top of the list of reasons Karzai refused […]
Hell froze over yesterday: The United States military is investigating reports of civilian casualties that may have occurred as part of the American-led fight against the Sunni militancy known as the Islamic State, a senior Pentagon official said Tuesday. Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, told reporters during a news conference that investigators […]
On Sunday, Dawn’s editors knew that Pakistan’s lawmakers would enact the bills needed to establish military courts and published a stern condemnation of the move in an editorial with the telling title “A Sad Day”: In the end, our political leadership proved unable to defend the constitutional and democratic roots of the system or resist […]
I’ve long followed events along the porous Pakistan-Iran border area, as there are often events taking place there that have very different descriptions on opposite sides of the border. As recently as December 28, three Iranian IRGC members were killed in the area. This is a departure from the usual pattern, where border guards instead […]
Yesterday afternoon, an AP article proudly announced to us that the war in Afghanistan has ended: Unfortunately, the AP headline is total bullshit. There was indeed a ceremony in Kabul yesterday. And yes, it did mark (for the second time), the end of the international force called ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) assembled under NATO […]