10-29-06 NIH Gets Tough

Buried in amongst all the splashy, glitzy news that garners the big advertising bucks in the news business this week is a fairly low key story about how a whole shitload of National Institute of Health employees are up in arms about the new conflict of interest protocols.

This is the AP story from the Washington Post.

Since the "story" is about the reaction of employees to a supposed change in the regulations about conflict of interest, you'd think that a hard news story MIGHT include what those changes actually were. But that is a very difficult thing to find. It certainly isn't even touched upon by the mainstream media. The "story" is merely about how pissed off some of these people are.

In my search for the missing data, I ended up entering the NIH website and found that they really spent some time on this, with a nice study of the impact amongst employees concerning this change.

They even sent a memo about it to all staff, just to let them know how concerned they were about all of this.

Obviously, the people in charge of NIH must know what a hot potato this is. After all, "everybody knows" that you got into "government service" to really rake in the dough...

At any rate, if you're interested at all in the actual missing data, it can be found by wandering around the website. From this page, one finds links to some pdf files. The one we apparently want is called Added Clinical Research Protocol Review Guide and Forms, and then that document has a link to the Conflict of Interest Guide, which is another pdf document, that (I suppose) is what all the fuss is about.

The bottom line on this "story", of course, is that the NIH is apparently trying their very best to do something to stem the tide of bullshit surrounding them from cross-connecting government and commercial conflict of interest stains. After all, just take a look at how much conflict of interest has been turning the FDA into a laughingstock. I'd say it's a laudable thing to attempt doing something to prevent NIH from turning into the same thing. Judging by the fact that the mainstream media "story" is all about how such a large number of people IN the NIH are pissed off enough to consider leaving over it, ...well, it's pretty obvious this change has probably hit the nail right on the head!

10-13-06 Habeus Corpus

It's a long trail from the National Security Act of 1947 to the Military Commissions Act of 2006, but the basic trend has been to establish a shadow government and let that shadow government do whatever the hell it wants. To say that this is all a recent development is to have only noticed the trend during the Bush Administration. A little less than four decades ago, this kind of thing bubbled up to the surface... sort of... with the Nixon Administration, at least to the point where enough people realized what a sleazeball the guy was before it was too late. Now, however, it's obvious that not enough people realized what sleazeballs the current bunch of criminals in power really are before all this crap had gone down.

It was Eisenhower's farewell speech that was the first attempt by a public official to tell the American public what was looming on the horizon. And it was the Kennedy Administration that lent some hope to the prospect that this would not happen to our country. On June 10, 1963, this was affirmed by JFK in his famous Pax Americana speech, foreswearing against the very thing that has now come about.

He was killed. And on that day, I believe that America was also killed.

We can hope that Habeus Corpus will be defended in the Supreme Court, and the attempted erasure of it by congress in the Military Commissions Act will be struck down for the grossly unconstitutional proviso that it is.

But a far more ominous thing has happened. The American public has not screamed in protest against this legislation. The major media have not made it the biggest news story, and the fact of the matter is that some closeted gay former representative from Florida has America more engrossed than the loss of the most basic and fundamental freedom being erased by the sleazeballs in power.

So, let's do a little reading. Let's find out what Habeus Corpus is all about.

Answers.com: Habeus Corpus

Wikipedia: Habeus Corpus

Those are two places to find out what it really means, where it came from, and so forth.

It goes back to the Magna Carta in 1215 in England, article 39, which states, "No free man shall be arrested, or imprisoned, or deprived of his property, or outlawed, or exiled, or in any way destroyed, nor shall we go against him or send against him, unless by legal judgement of his peers, or by the law of the land." This single principle allowed the rest of the history of freedom to unfold for the individual in Western Civilization. It is the foundation upon which all other personal rights and freedom rests.

Do you think that the erasure of Habeus Corpus is the single most horrific political event to have happened in the history of modern civilization?

I certainly do!

But, apparently, the big story isn't big enough to really take over the major media the way that, say, an OJ Simpson trial would. It's all about ratings, and the free market economy certainly applies to major media news. What sells is sleaze, violence, and fear. Of course, if they really wanted to be responsible they could certainly sell the erasure of Habeus Corpus on the fear factor!

But they don't.

After all, it's a Latin phrase... and who the hell can get dumbed down America to pay any slightest attention to anything that's written in Latin???

I only pray that Carl Rove's "October Surprise" doesn't work... and the control of congress slips out of the Republicans' hands after the election.

10-9-06 August 15th

As I had posted here on July 25th and here on August 19th, the Chinese Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak had originally been scheduled to "create an artificial sun" on or about August 15th. I speculated that if the Chinese were that far ahead of everybody else on this particular road to fusion, that it would really be something spectacular! Of course, I didn't really believe that they were that far ahead of everybody else, and what I was really worried about was finding out that they had managed to make some significant land mass disappear.

Well, if you were as worried about this as I was, I'm sure you forgot all about it too. I had taken my attention completely off of it until today when I thought, "Gee! I wonder if the chinese tokamak has been tested yet?" I did a quick search and VOILA!

Boston Globe Article

...I just didn't want to leave anyone hanging on this...

10-8-06 Medicated Nation

We can probably say that there was never a time in human history when drugs weren't used, for whatever reason. The twentieth century, however, changed the way drugs were used by people. Today, drugs are elevated in importance, way beyond anything that had ever been considered.

The reasons for this involve the advances of science, and the advances in how to generate wealth, among other things. I don't think anyone can point a finger in any particular direction and say, "this is the problem." There are too many directions to point, basically.

One direction we can point to regarding drugs, however, is that children are increasingly medicated, and this is described in an article today in the Washington Post. This article mentions that children are now beginning to outpace the elderly in prescription medication consumption. Even more disturbing is that 20% of pediatric office visits are for psycho-social problems, behavioral problems.

Washington Post Article

The idea of medicating someone to "straighten out their behavior" is so abhorrent to me, that it would be difficult to not go on a very long rant. But it's even worse when you're talking about medicating children to keep them from squirming in their seats at school.

Children are naturally ebullient, enthusiastic, energetic, and usually in great need of adult guidance regarding how to acquire social graces. An understanding, guiding hand that can be firm and impose some level of exemplary authority over children is needed for them to realize the goals of "growing up" and "becoming an adult".

But when "education" is no more than babysitting, when educators have no slightest authority for fear of litigation, and the curricula of schools are beyond boredom, the "solution" of medication to keep them from squirming in their seats is no less than the most oppressive ruination of future generations that could ever be imagined.

According to Elizabeth J. Roberts, the author of the Washington Post article, "There was a time in the profession of child psychiatry when doctors insisted on hours of evaluation of a child before making a diagnosis or prescribing a medication. Today some of my colleagues in psychiatry brag that they can make an initial assessment of a child and write a prescription in less than 20 minutes. Some parents tell me it took their pediatrician only five minutes. Who's the winner in this race?"

"Unfortunately, when a child is diagnosed with a mental illness, almost everyone benefits. The schools get more state funding for the education of a mentally handicapped student. Teachers have more subdued students in their already overcrowded classrooms. Finally, parents are not forced to examine their poor parenting practices, because they have the perfect excuse: Their child has a chemical imbalance."

It's sad to realize that the medication of children is today not only sanctioned and promoted, but it is full of rewards. This is the most insidious of mechanisms, to reward it so heavily.

And this is just one aspect of the drug culture that we now live in. It permeates every single corner of our society, now. From childhood through old age, medication is flourishing beyond imagination, with billions of tons of exotic chemicals being fed into the human gene pool on an annual basis.

Who benefits?