6-30-07 Cures or merely Treatments?

Over on the Daily Dish one of Andrew's readers challenged the workability of the "market economy" healthcare system in the US helping to drive research. The idea that high future profits drive drug research is certainly valid, but the caveat pointed out by Andrew's reader is definitely a core problem in this system.

My best example to call the reader's attention to is the big bucks bonanza that drug companies and the healthcare industry at large have been cashing in on for the past quarter century. This would be the "cholesterol" campaign.

It began with the Framingham Study, which has garnered so many accolades, so much professional credibility, that it's impossible to assail in any way. Oddly enough, however, the directions for research by drug companies to discover a way to mitigate the effects of high cholesterol went into full swing at about the same point in time (late 1970's to early 1980's) as the discovery of the APO A-1 "Milano Gene."

Research into how this genetic fluke might be used to reverse the effects of high cholesterol is going VERY SLOWLY (isn't a quarter of a century enough time?), and it certainly isn't being funded by any drug companies. Also, it isn't that the discovery, back in the late 1970's, is lacking any merit. This avenue of research will most definitely yield a cure to the "high cholesterol" problem. Unfortunately, it'll kill the golden goose of ongoing drug sales of Lipitor and Crestor, et al, to endlessly "treat" the condition.

Consequently, we have a clear demonstration of "where the money is" in dealing with the cholesterol campaign, since a quarter of a century is long enough to show where it has actually gone. On the one hand, we have the cholesterol lowering drugs which, in our market driven healthcare system, are the biggest bonanza to come down the pipe. Statin drugs are the Golden Horn of Plenty for everyone because the customers all get lifetime prescriptions.

The most likely CURE, however, gets such skimpy funding for research that it's barely visible to the public, the healthcare community, or anyone else. Consider the viability of funding a single hypodermic shot, or any other method of genetic therapy involving a finite round of treatment, to the lifetime prescription of a statin drug. The choice is obviously going to be the one that produces the highest profit, and this is exactly how the cholesterol campaign has so far turned out.

An example of how the influence of drug companies can (and most definitely have) influenced research into APO A-1 Milano can be found, for example, in this link. Another way of looking at that particular round of activity in 2003, and an example of the skewed direction that "for profit" takes things like this, is the way in which that drug company attempted to put it to use.

By attempting to make it into a profitable "drug" the company ended up lowering their stock value much more than their test group's cholesterol.

The "pure science" work on APO A-1 Milano, however, does continue despite the efforts of chemical companies to push it out of view. Take a look at this report from last year, describing the work accomplished so far on developing a genetic therapy, and while you're there, take note of what the advertising around the edges is all about...

6-30-07 Sicko Rebuttals

Much as I like Michael Moore and the work he's doing, I find the level of factual reporting that he does in his documentaries to be lacking. You'd think that the places Michael Moore went to in order to show his viewers how healthcare SHOULD be would be populated by people who are overhwhelmingly satisfied with the single payer healthcare systems in their countries.

But read this review of "Sicko" from a Canadian movie critic, and tell me that Moore gave that healthcare system an unbiased presentation. It simply didn't happen.

Like all of his films, "Sicko" is not a documentary but a well-crafted work of propaganda. I would be the last one to say, however, that this sort of propaganda isn't needed in our current society. After all, the propaganda wars that are waged on just about every issue these days is sadly lacking in this level of slickness and popularity from the left.

What I find mildly repellant in Moore's work is the positioning he tends to favor, wherein he is merely exposing "the truth," that he is on moral high ground in his work, and that his films are straightforward "documentaries." I find this objectionable because it masks the very real problems we face on the various issues he's addressed. The films are polarizing, basically, and make things more contentious.

Basically, he's just preaching to the choir.

I feel that issues such as healthcare need people to view BOTH sides of these propaganda wars with a jaundiced eye. But people will polarize themselves into a final decision with as little inspection of the facts as simply going to watch a freakin' MOVIE... and that's it. For those who do that, and have concluded that healthcare is much better in Canada, for instance, take a gander at this little six minute movie on YouTube.

6-30-07 Morning Sunrise

On 12-30-06, the night before the First Night Reunion concert in Worcester, MA, the members of Zonkaraz got together to rehearse the songs they would be playing.

Paul Vuona (vocals, keyboard), Ric Porter (vocals, guitar), Jo List (vocals), Jon Webster (vocals, bass), Walter Crockett (tamborine, guitar), and Bill MacGillivray (drums) had not played together for two decades. This rehearsal was the very first time they would all get together onto a stage and play in twenty years.

Two band members weren't present at the rehearsal. One of these, Larry Preston (guitar) did play at the reunion concert the following night. Spider Hanson (percussion), however, had passed away. He was memorialized at the reunion concert the following night with a large picture onstage in the spot that he would have occupied. Replacing him for both the rehearsal and the concert was Michael Allard-Madaus. The rehearsal was the first time Mike had ever played with the band.

"Morning Sunrise," written by Paul Vuona, was the first song they would actually play after twenty years. Captured on video, then, this really is the very first time they actually played together in all that time. I'm sure you'll agree that this performance before a very small audience of about a dozen or so friends and family, despite it being only the rehearsal, demonstrates the talent this band's members always had, and clearly still have after all those years.

For those of you who didn't link to this page from Google Video, here's the link to the video.

6-29-07 Google Video

Well, after messing around with the Google Video website for a few days, it's much to my chagrin that I discovered their streaming framesize turns out to be the same as YouTube... And then they default the output stream to play that shrunk-down size (that they convert to no matter what framesize you upload) DOUBLED UP again!

It really makes no sense to me that they put everything in that 640 x 480 box, when everything that's uploaded to them is stored for streaming in 320 x 240 framesize...

I spent a lot of time uploading the same clip, formatted to 640 x 480 with all sorts of different compression settings, only to have every iteration I tried look absolutely terrible.

The only good thing about Google Video is that uploading has been very easy (compared to YouTube).

In the end, the ability to embed the video here on either blog is what really matters. Below is the Google Video embedding result...



...and the YouTube embedding result...

6-28-07 YouTube and Google Video

Despite the fact that Google bought YouTube several months ago, there are big differences between Google's video server and YouTube's video server.

The most frustrating thing about YouTube is the restricted frame size (352 x 240) which demands a lot of compression. In addition, the filesize to be uploaded to YouTube has to be under 100 megabytes, and the clip can't be over 10 minutes long. This means that, starting with the DV video file format I use for my source videos, I have to compress a four or five minute clip over 90% before I can even upload the material. Then, to make matters even worse, YouTube then further compresses the material by converting the uploaded file to Flash format, stripping out even more video information AND changing the audio to mono. And it gets even worse... this conversion is done "on the fly" while the clip is being uploaded.

But I could still live with all of that if uploading to YouTube's server wasn't so problematic.

It's a very popular website, and there's an almost 100% chance that any upload that takes more than a minute will get interrupted before it's done. I'm sure that one of the reasons is this "on the fly" conversion during the upload. For whatever reasons, though, an interrupted upload to YouTube (for me, anyway) will never resume. It has to be re-started from scratch, no matter how far along it might have gotten.

Each of the clips I've uploaded to YouTube since January has taken multiple re-starts. This usually makes the process of doing a 20 minute to half hour upload spread out over more than a day. All but one clip (magically only took two re-starts) have gone through this arduous process.

Yesterday, I gave Google Video a shot, and uploaded a clip. The upload got interrupted four times before it was done, but always resumed after as short as a few seconds to as long as five minutes. All this means is that I can start an upload and go do something else rather than "babysit" it.

I also discovered that uploaded clips have no size or duration limitations, which means I can upload better quality. The final nail in the YouTube coffin for me, though, was the video frame size standard, which is 640 x 480. This frame size is the resolution of NTSC video, the same resolution as regular television. It's the same resolution that my source video is done in.

Consequently, I'm experimenting to find the level of compression for upload files that'll yield the best video quality (without taking forever to upload) in the video that's ultimately served off Google Video. If this doesn't ALSO become problematic in some manner, I think I'll be migrating everything over there.

Yes, it's somewhat of a pop/celeb/15-minutes-of-fame sort of thing to have material up on YouTube these days, and it's a real hook to have people from around the world making comments and ratcheting up the number of views. But in the end, I'm not looking for fame, I just want to have a site that my favorite clips can get served from. This is one of the main reasons I started the Wormtown Taxi blog. Sharing the video that I've been able to capture, clips of my friends playing music... this is all it's about for me. If I can do that more efficiently on Google Video AND end up with better quality, then this is a no-brainer.

6-27-07 What About Afghanistan (yet again)

It never ceases to amaze me that the UN can make such accurate annual reports concerning illegal drug production and usage around the world. Here's a couple of articles on the UN's most recent annual report, from BBC and CSM. We get this information here in the US easily, but the mainstream TV media hardly notices.

The strangeness of the UN being able to obtain all the information necessary to make such reports on black market, illegal activity is something that usually gets no mention at all. How do they get their information?

Well, my sense of the matter is that illegal drugs are commodities. On the world market, these commodities are VERY valuable, and those who make money off the presence of illegal drugs in the world, one way or another, will be very interested in these data that the UN so dependably reports every year.

And then there's Afghanistan... which continues to demonstrate the power of a market driven economy...

6-16-07 Glowing In The Dark

The usefulness of "Depleted Uranium" is that it's a very dense, heavy metal. This means that if you make it into bullets or larger shells and fire them at something, they will penetrate better than softer metals because of the high density. Metal fashioned from depleted uranium also makes good armor, such as the armor plating on military vehicles used in Afghanistan and Iraq by the US military.

Meanwhile, the other side of the coin is that this term, "depleted uranium," simply means that it's usefulness as a radioactive material has dropped to the point where it really isn't cost effective to recycle it for that purpose. It's the uranium left over after all the U-235 that our current technology is capable of extracting has been... extracted. It does NOT mean, however, that it's no longer radioactive, nor that it isn't capable of inducing the various symptoms of long term radiation poisoning, especially when it's vaporized on impact and people breathe in the radioactive particles.

If you want to learn more about what depleted uranium is, this Wikipedia article on DU is very informative.

Many people are very concerned about the use of DU in weaponry, and provide evidence that it's cause for concern. Leuren Moret's website, for instance, has some eye opening videos that might shock you out of your seat. Another website called The Depleted Uranium Education Project, contains a lot of material that might convince you that this is a serious problem.

But this online tidbit from a TV station in Hawaii might do a better job of reporting just the right amount of information from America's island paradise to make you realize that this really IS a cause for concern.

6-12-07 Video Idiocy

In Pennsylvania and other states, laws are now on the books that make it a felony to make audio recordings of police in public (or anyone else, for that matter), doing public functions such as traffic stops. These laws have been quietly passed as "anti-wiretapping" laws, expressly to prevent anyone in public being recorded (audio, not video) without their consent or a court order. The one exception, of course, is the ubiquitous "dashboard cameras" that police departments around the country send in to TV shows such as "Cops" and so forth. It's not only legal for the police to record anyone without their consent, they even get to have it shown on TV.

But if a citizen should want to videotape (with audio) the police in public, doing public functions such as a traffic stop, it's a felony. Here's the latest story from Pennsylvania, where a passenger in a car that was stopped by police started videotaping them after they (apparently) swore at the driver.

It's clear that these laws have been passed and are being used to prevent anyone from getting recordings of various police activities, especially anything that would endanger undercover operations or otherwise jeopardize police in the conduct of their duties. But using it to confiscate the evidence of possible police wrongdoing in a traffic stop is definitely not being received too well in this quarter. I find it reprehensible.

6-12-07 Gay Bomb

This is a must read, just for the sake of knowing what lengths our government is willing to go in making the world safe for democracy.

6-12-07 Gag Me With A Gavel, pt 3

As this story continues to unfold, albeit too slowly to ever be able to qualify as a "speedy trial," the most basic fact of these cases continues to be missing. WHO made the original complaint? If the sexual activity was consensual, then it couldn't have been the girls involved, and it certainly couldn't have been the boys who were charged. So, who was it that made the original complaint?

The most recent developments, reported in this NY Times story from yesterday, certainly dispels my previous musings regarding the racial overtones of the case, but also explicitly brings that very same thing up. It turns out that the girl was also African-American, as is Georgia Attorney General Thurbert Baker, who is vigorously prosecuting this case. He's prosecuting it so vigorously, in fact, that even now that an appeals judge has thrown out the verdict completely, this southern Baptist prosecutor STILL won't let it go!

This has apparently devolved into yet another case of a prosecutor who's stuck with his "I'm right, and I'll never back down..." stance, even if the rest of the world stands outside that prosecutor's office chanting in protest. The Duke rape case has demonstrated what happens to the prosecutors when they admit they're wrong, so we can expect that no prosecutor will ever do that again. Standing up for what one believes is right can be admirable. Sadly, standing up for what one believes is right can also be carried well past any semblance of sanity.

6-8-09 Live Free Or Die

New Hampshire's motto, which can be seen on any NH license plate, is "Live Free, or Die." It's an interesting conundrum for Ed and Elaine Brown, however, after each them have been sentenced to 5-1/2 years in prison for tax evasion. The stance they took was that the federal income tax laws don't really exist, because, according to them and many others across the country, the ratification records for the amendment to the Constitution allowing for income taxes has yet to be produced for anyone to see.

I looked up "fait accomplis" for this post, since I use it often enough, and discovered that I had been dropping the "s" all these years... But I'd rather mis-spell a word in public than not understand what a fait accomplis is, in real life. I sympathize with anyone whose conviction and mettle is powerful enough to bring them to a level of sacrifice, for the sake of a principle they believe in, that pretty much ruins their life. But it does seem to me that the levying of taxes is an accomplished fact in real life, regardless of the legal mumbo-jumbo that's ever used to convince all of us non-judical types that the levying of taxes is "legal."

What's an accomplished fact is that those in charge call the shots. What's an accomplished fact is that no matter who's in charge, they're gonna end up squeezing you... unless you somehow manage to get yourself into a position where you're in charge... then, you'll probably end up squeezing people and "taxing" them, one way or another, too.

Those around the country who espouse joining the so-called "tax revolt" against the "illegal" nature of federal income taxes have my best wishes. It would be fun to see them win this argument. Unfortunately, even if it was an argument that was won, the level of taxation would simply shift, and most definitely would not be reduced.

And so, ...the point? What is the point? Well, I really don't get it. Ed and Elaine Brown are holed up on their self-sustaining property with the help of friends, just an hour or so drive north of where I live. Instead of giving up their fight and walking out, they're committed to never giving up.

Here's a June 7th article in the New York Times about this standoff, and here's Ed and Elaine's Weblog.

When it comes to the list of things that I'd be willing to risk my life for, refusing to pay income tax isn't on it. Besides, "living free" doesn't include being, effectively, under house arrest, as that's the cul-de-sac the Browns have artfully entered. Again I ask, "What's the POINT???" The NH motto is definitely not "get away without paying taxes or die" is it?

6-7-07 Gag Me With A Gavel, pt2

Back in December, I made this post regarding a 17 year old guy who had consensual oral sex with a 15 year old girl and got caught, and charged with a felony. In my post, I didn't get the facts of the case entirely correct. It's not a "Romeo and Juliet" type of situation. It happened at a wild party where drugs and alcohol were apparently being used. Love and affection may not have been the main driving force behind their liaison. Nonetheless, a two year age difference is still the issue here.

Today, I spotted updated news about this case that makes me wonder just how much additional missing information there might be.

I'll let the news story speak for itself, but the only crime here, in my opinion, is that this kid had to be born south of the Mason/Dixon line.

The driving force behind this prosecution certainly can't be sanity, or any desire to protect the community. The driving force behind this prosecution can only be racist. It is, after all, taking place in Georgia. And because the facts of the case are still not complete in any news story that I can find about it, I'll venture to guess that the girl was white. Even if she wasn't, the dogged determination of the prosecution to put this kid behind bars for the best years of his life, and then forever after brand him as a sex offender, leaves me with the view that this prosecutorial vigor can only be driven by southern white racism.

6-6-07 Statistical Analysis

Is it Science or is it Statistical Analysis or is it "stat cooking"? When it comes to the process whereby drug companies get their new drug products tested, it's beginning to look more and more like the same sort of manipulation that brought the term "WMD" into the language, ie- someone's cooking the statistics.

In this Science Daily article we find that statistical analysis of drug testing shows that if the drug company pays for the testing, the results are much more likely to come out in their favor.

Duh!

But we need this sort of statistical analysis to "prove" that something might be amiss, don't we? Especially after millions of tons of statin drugs have been consumed by the population for over a decade, and the drug companies have made their billions and billions of dollars in profit. Who cares whether the science involved in all of this is completely absent? At least the stockholders were given a good ride, eh?

6-2-07 Honorable Discharge

Adam Kokesh is an honorably discharged marine who fought in Fallujah, and is now a student at George Washington University. Now he's a target at home. Why? Because he isn't shutting up about what this so called war in Iraq is all about.

Maybe you never saw the story of Ron Kovik, the marine who came back from Vietnam a paraplegic and ended up protesting that war, but it would be a good time to go out and rent the movie. The title is "Born On The Fourth Of July," starring everyone's favorite Scientologist, Tom Cruise. You can watch it and believe that such things could never happen again, that honorable men who fought for their country could never again be targets of the US government, just because of what they choose to say.

But demonstrating against the phonied up wars that our government has been foisting upon the world for the past six decades in the name of "keeping the world safe for democracy" (and other Orwellian phrases) has always been met with the kind of reaction that we were taught only happens in dictatorships and squalid little countries run by madmen. The more things change, the more they remain the same...

Here are links to news stories and blog posts about this patriotic hero on the homefront from The Washington Post, Wonkette, CBS News, and if those aren't enough to pique your interest, maybe Adam Kokesh's personal weblog might do it.

Since the beginning of the Korean conflict, honorable men have been going to war for this government in the belief that they are doing the right thing for their country, that they are making a personal sacrifice for honor and duty. Afterwards, they've been coming back home, many of them maimed and injured, and many more not coming back at all. When they find that their service to their country begins looking like something less than what they originally thought it was, perhaps there are many who choose to say nothing. But those that do open their mouths will find, as Adam Kokesh has found, that this government will say anything to justify their wars, and promise anything to those who will do the actual fighting for them, but when it comes to delivering on promises and keeping AMERICA safe for democracy, this government has consistently demonstrated nothing honorable at all.