The Patch for Alzheimer's

The Associated Press reports that testing has begun on a patch to treat Alzheimer's Disease symptoms. (Ok, the picture is a birth control patch, but I needed a pic.)

The article explains that Alzheimer's disease is essentially like plaque build-up in your brain. (Well, it's actually a protein.) Ewww....well, they have found that the patch, which disperses the drug Exelon straight into the bloodstream, causes fewer side effects (nausea and vomiting) than the pill form of the drug, which naturally has to go through the gastrointestinal tract first. Many Alzheimer's patients may have difficulty swallowing pills, so this is also a benefit.

So, umm...anybody see any down sides to this? I do. Even though the article didn't report this, I bet it's like every other patch out there, and carries a risk of blood clots or stroke. Maybe it causes less nausea, but let's remember that we're delivering a massive dose of medication through the skin. We're not toads...we don't really work that way. There are class action suits going on now for some of those birth control patches and nicotine patches, because they've caused some serious problems. I think there needs to be a little more done on the whole delivery system in general before we start marketing these things to everyone. Besides, if Alzheimer's causes forgetfulness, what if you put one on, forget you did it, and add another?

Suspended Animation: Coming soon to a freezer near you?

According to Wired News, suspended animation may not be as far away as we once thought. Suspended animation tests have been successfully carried out on pigs, and we may be as little as two years away from clinical trials on humans. Mike Duggan, a veterinary surgeon, and Hasan Alam, a trauma surgeon from the Massachusetts General Hospital, have cryogenically frozen 200 pigs for an hour each, and they are getting up to two hours now. They say it's great for surgeries, since it buys them a lot of extra time for a procedure.

We have long had the ability to freeze people. There are people in California right now wrapped in aluminum foil and frozen, waiting for cures for their currently terminal diseases to be found. The problem is the unfreezing process. You know how when you freeze, say, a strawberry and it looks great frozen, but turns into a mushy mess when you thaw it? That's what happens to cells when we unfreeze them...so far. They take on too much water and burst. So until they figure out how to safely thaw the popsicle people, they're staying right where they are, even if they do find a cure for the diseases.

ONDCP: I'm not listening!

For the second time in as many years, a report has been issued by the Washington D.C.-based think tank Citizens Against Government Waste that casts another light on the statistics the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP)keeps feeding us. Their report suggests that ONDCP has wasted billions of taxpayers' dollars since its formation in 1988 on ineffective and counter-productive policies that fail to meet the agency's core objectives. According to the report, "The federal government and the ONDCP have chosen to ignore evidence suggesting that the methods being used in the war on drugs are not effective...the federal government has become so obsessed with marijuana use that it is spending money unwisely."

In particular, this year's report spotlights the huge spending and counterproductiveness of both the ONDCP's National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign and the Justice Department's decision to prosecute medicinal cannabis patients and their caregivers. The report states that "The government has thrown more than $1 billion at a campaign that has only succeeded in increasing the number of teenage marijuana users," since reviews of the media campaign have found that it often has the opposite effect, and encourages, rather than discourages, cannabis use among young viewers. The Justice Department's campaign was talked about in similarly useless terms, saying "It is useless to throw millions of dollars into attacking patients that are simply trying to find the most effectual medicine possible. ... [S]tates must be given the right to create and enforce these [medical marijuana] laws within their jurisdiction." This report comes in the wake of yet another Congressional decision (259-163) to continue punishing medicinal marijuana patients even when they are authorized to cultivate and use the drug within their own state laws.

The CAGW report also rebukes the "Gateway Theory" yet again, saying policies aimed specifically at reducing marijuana availability are unlikely to make a dent in the use and availability of harder drugs. If all kids ever hear about is marijuana, will they know how to react when they are offered something else? If the ONDCP keeps creating ads that make kids more likely to use marijuana, aren't they just keeping themselves in work?

Aha, maybe that's it. They know, deep down, that the whole taxation-regulation of drugs issue makes sense. We've had whole committees of economists, long-term studies, and years and years of paperwork going back to the Nixon administration to support taxation and regulation, particularly of marijuana. But they're not going to hear it, because if there's no one to prosecute and fight, they've got nothing to do. It keeps them working to be obsessed with eradicating a drug that they probably admit between closed doors that they can't. If their ads create more drug users, cool. More people to bust.

Maybe they should be thinking about a realistic policy to address drug use among kids, instead of sending more people to jail...it's not working. Still, they keep standing there firmly like a kid with his hands over his ears, shouting, "La la la la....I'm not hearing this!"

Sony, what were you thinking?

Does this ad make you want to go out and buy yourself a PSP? Sony apparently thinks it does. This ad ran first on billboards in the Netherlands, and can still be seen on the official Dutch PSP site. It has been produced in support of the new launch of a white PSP (as opposed to the regular black one), and is drawing an awful lot of flak in the US as well. It is important to note that the billboards have thus far only appeared in Amsterdam, where racial tensions are perhaps a little less overtly charged. The ads were created by TBWA, a company that specializes in "disruptive marketing." Their website says that "Disruption is the art of asking better questions, challenging conventional wisdom and overturning assumptions and prejudices that get in the way of imagining new possibilities and visionary ideas."

Wait. Hold on...let me get this straight. Did Sony just pay somebody to challenge the idea that racism is bad? What exactly are we supposed to infer from this sort of statement? I guess it does generate press for Sony, but this doesn't exactly seem like a smart move ever, not to mention one for a company who's currently facing some flagging fan support because of all the wrangling over the PS3. Yes, we've had some racially charged sorts of sentiments appearing in ads before, but the last ones I can remember were for Cross Colours, and that one promoted a vision of unity, not domination.

I hope Sony's just looking at this now and shaking their heads, because that's what the rest of the world is doing too. I join them in asking, "Sony, what were you thinking?"

UPDATE: Sony did in fact pull the billboard campaign on Tuesday, July 11, and apologized to critics of the campaign. That's better. Whether it's overt or covert, and whether it's supposed to make you think or not, it's still racism...

This guy eats what you won't.

I used to think I'd eaten some nasty stuff in my day, but I've only eaten ONE of the things Steve has. In his blog, aptly named Steve, Don't Eat It!, Steve eats unspeakable things and lives to tell about them. It's not really so much a gross-out type of thing as it is hilarious to read, because the prose he writes is so vivid that you really can taste the stuff he eats. Steve eats things from pickled pork rinds to potted meat to...well, you should just go see for yourself.

As Steve says, "Join me in saying F You to my taste buds..."

So this is what really goes on at the White House...

Ok, here's something I came across that was amusing, and seemed pretty a propos to most of the things I'm usually spouting about here. Presented for your viewing pleasure,

My United States of Whateva

Who's Listening to You? Part II: Online

Just in case you thought you were safer online than on the phone, once again our rulers are giving us reason to doubt. According to CNET news, the FBI is in the middle of drafting legislation that would require ISPs to provide wiretapping hubs for police surveillance operations and makers of networking products to build in backdoors that would allow eavesdropping. This bill would do a number of downright creepy things:

• Require any manufacturer of "routing" and "addressing" hardware to offer upgrades or other "modifications" that are needed to support Internet wiretapping.

In other words, this means that they want manufacturers to dupe unsuspecting customers by offering them "upgrades" for their software, when really all it's going to do is open the machine's back door to somebody else.

• Authorize the expansion of wiretapping requirements to "commercial" Internet services including instant messaging if the FCC deems it to be in the "public interest." This privilege would likely include in-game chats offered by Microsoft's Xbox 360 gaming system as well.

So, they get to listen to your instant messages too.

• Force Internet service providers to sift through their customers' communications to identify, for instance, only VoIP calls. (The language requires companies to adhere to "processing or filtering methods or procedures applied by a law enforcement agency.") That means police could simply ask broadband providers like AT&T, Comcast or Verizon for wiretap info--instead of having to figure out what VoIP service was being used.

Your phone records wouldn't be private either, since they would be able to just ask for them, without any real cause or reason, because the law says they can. Don't we have principles about a "warrantless search"?

• Eliminate the current legal requirement saying the Justice Department must publish a public "notice of the actual number of communications interceptions" every year. That notice currently also must disclose the "maximum capacity" required to accommodate all of the legally authorized taps that government agencies will "conduct and use simultaneously."

In other words, they'd like to eliminate that bothersome clause that says they have to report when and how often they wiretap and how much capacity they use for these wiretaps. Wait, doesn't this amount to a warrantless search?

"People expect their information to be private unless the government meets certain legal standards," says Jim Harper, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute and member of a Homeland Security advisory board. "Right now the Department of Justice is pushing the wrong way on all this." Harper also said the proposal would "have a negative impact on Internet users' privacy."

This is a really serious problem lately. In the interest of rooting out supposed terrorists and continuing Bush's War on A Word, it is becoming increasingly possible for the privacy and rights of innocent Americans to be infringed upon in the name of "safety" and "national security." The FBI claims that it is necessary to expand the provisions of the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) because criminals have now turned to using other sophisticated technologies like VoIP and instant messenging.

I've got serious problems with this. I support keeping Americans safe, just like anyone else does, but I don't support it at the expense of the Bill of Rights. The Fourth Amendment proclaims the "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." Allowing all of these people in the back of our computers and onto our networks is a violation of the Fourth Amendment. Don't tell me that you have to get into everyone's business just to root out terrorists. We're catching plenty without these measures in place. We've worried more about terrorism in the past five years than ever before in the history of this country, and things happened every year. Remember back a decade or so ago when there would be a hijacking story on the news? It was just a little blurb about some extremists, usually from a Middle Eastern nation, who hijacked a flight. It would be a 30-second blip, and that's it. Now they're all major news items, since every single one is assumed to be a serious threat to "Homeland Security" and every one is assumed to have some connection to Al-Qaeda. Well, I've got a little theory here. Call me a conspiracy theorist if you will, but it seems that the current administration (not just the guy in charge, but Our Government in general) has done an awful lot of work on bringing us all "under control", and things like a terrorist attack served as some great little ways to pass legislation that wouldn't fly otherwise. This place is increasingly running like a totalitarian dictatorship, although it's all passing under our radar because it's being disguised as "safety measures." Dictators rule through fear; so does Our Government. If they can keep us scared of something (big bad terrorists, nukes in Iraq and Iran, etc.), they can pass whatever they want if they can convince the American sheeple that they need this stuff to be safe.

And what security measures would we be forced to compromise in order to be further "protected" from terrorists? Wouldn't making it easier for the Feds to browse our networks also make it easier for hackers and wardrivers? Seems to me that making it easier for one to get in just makes it easier for all, and then we've got a circle that just made it easier for "terrorists" to do what they were supposed to be prevented from doing in the first place.

Currently, this legislation is a little late in the timeline to make it in this year, but some version of it could be seen as early as next year. This is said to be a "top congressional priority" for 2007. The FBI is showing it to industry reps, hoping something will happen. So just in case you've been wondering who's breathing heavy on the other end of your phone, it could be Your Government. It could also be them breathing heavily on the other end of your ISP connection.

Your Government Isn't Special.

I came across a little info recently that I'd like to share with all (any?) of you who read this blog.  The e-mail it was sent in bore the title,

NBA or NFL?

and asked me to decide, based on the information given, which professional organization it was talking about.  So here are the statistics.  You decide...

36 have been accused of spousal abuse.  
7 have been arrested for fraud.  
19 have been accused of writing bad checks.  
117 have directly or indirectly bankrupted at least 2 businesses.  
3 have done time for assault.  
71, I repeat, 71, cannot get a credit card due to bad credit.  
14 have been arrested on drug-related charges.  
8 have been arrested for shoplifting.  
21 currently are defendants in lawsuits,
and 84 have been arrested for drunk driving in the last year.

Can you guess which organization this is?

Actually, it's neither.  It's the 535 members of the United States Congress.  Guess they're not as special as they want us to believe...