Is It Time To Put A Fork In The BATFE?
by ilene - March 5th, 2011 2:46 pm
Watch the video below too. In this case, felony murder rules would not likely apply because there was no intent. It sounds more like "Project Gunwalker" was a disasterous plan from the beginning that worked out, not surprisingly, disasterously. – Ilene
Courtesy of Karl Denninger, The Market Ticker
I’ve been following the Project Gunwalker story for a while.
For those who are not familiar with it, the story line is this: The BATFE, that’s right – the Federal Government - has been intentionally allowing "straw sales" of rifles and pistols to go through and then letting those guns be transported to Mexico.
These are sales where the person doing the buying isn’t the actual intended owner of the weapon. These guns are often bought in bulk, many at a time. It’s not illegal to buy a lot of guns, even all at once, but it is a felony to buy them for someone else.
Anyway, BATFE was allegedly allowing this to go on and approving sales they knew were bogus. Starting in 2009 several gun stores started getting suspicious – they were having people come in and paying with cash – sometimes with cash in paper bags – for multiple guns at once. Specifically, it is alleged that over five hundred AK-47 semi-automatic rifles and over 2,500 weapons in total, including rifles and pistols, were purchased in this manner.
The claim is made that the BATFE literally watched the sales happen, each checked through NICS’ "background check", each approved, despite being alerted by the gun store owners that the sales were suspicious.
The stores were told to proceed with the sales intentionally.
Let me repeat this: The allegation is that the BATFE intentionally allowed these weapons to be purchased despite knowing they were fraudulent straw purchases and then allowed them to be unlawfully transported into Mexico where they were delivered to various Mexican outlaws – including drug gangs.
Remember, we’ve been told that a lot of guns that Mexican drug lords are using are coming from the US? Well, no kidding, they are, if this allegation is correct: Our own government was knowingly allowing them to be purchased and illegally transported across the border.
That’s bad.
Then, Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was murdered. The serial numbers on the two assault rifles found at the scene matched two rifles ATF watched Jaime Avila buy in Phoenix nearly a year before. Officials won’t answer whether the bullet that killed
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Fever to Harness RNA Interference Cools – NYTimes.com
by ilene - February 10th, 2011 12:45 pm
Drugmakers’ Fever for the Power of RNA Interference Has Cooled
By ANDREW POLLACK
When RNA interference first electrified biologists several years ago, pharmaceutical companies rushed to harness what looked like a swift and surefire way to develop new drugs.
Billions of dollars later, however, some of those same companies are now losing their enthusiasm for RNAi, as it is called. And that is raising doubts about how quickly, if at all, the Nobel Prize-winning technique for turning off specific genes will yield the promised bounty of innovative medicines.
The biggest bombshell was dropped in November, when the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche said it would end its efforts to develop drugs using RNAi, after it had invested half a billion dollars in the field over four years.
Just last week, as part of a broader research cutback, Pfizer decided to shut down its 100-person unit working on RNAi and related technologies. Abbott Laboratories has also quietly shelved its RNAi drug development work.
“In 2005 and 2006, there was a very sudden buildup of expectation that RNAi was going to cure many diseases in a very short time frame,” said Dr. Johannes Fruehauf, vice president for research at Aura Biosciences, a small company pursuing the field. “Some of the hype, I believe, is going away and a more realistic view is setting in.”
The issue is that while drugs working through the RNAi mechanism can indeed shut off genes, it has been difficult to deliver such drugs to the cells where they are needed. At a time when hard-pressed pharmaceutical companies are already scaling back research expenditures, RNAi is losing out to alternatives that seem closer to producing marketable drugs.
“I have no doubt that at a certain point in time RNAi will make it to the market,” said Klaus Stein, head of therapeutic modalities for Roche. But he added, “When we looked into this, we came to the conclusion that we have opportunities that have higher priorities.”
More here: Fever to Harness RNA Interference Cools – NYTimes.com.
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Who Should Take Statins? The Debate Continues
by ilene - July 3rd, 2010 2:39 am
Who Should Take Statins? The Debate Continues
By Alice Park, courtesy of TIME
It is well known that the cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins can reduce the risk of heart attack among people who already have heart disease. But whether the medications can prevent a heart attack from occurring in the first place is still a hotly contested question among health experts.
Two new studies published on Monday in the Archives of Internal Medicine reignite the simmering debate.
One study revisits the merits of the controversial Jupiter trial (or Justification for the Use of Statins in Primary Prevention), which was published in 2008 in the New England Journal of Medicine. That trial concluded that the statin drug Crestor (rosuvastatin) lowered the combined risks of heart attack, stroke, other heart events or heart-related death by 47% in healthy patients with no history of heart problems or high cholesterol but high levels of C-reactive protein (CRP), a marker for inflammation. The findings prompted the Food and Drug Administration in February to expand the eligible patient population for Crestor by millions.
Critics of the Jupiter trial have contended that the benefits of the cholesterol drug may have been exaggerated because the trial was stopped early — after two years, instead of the planned five. Had the trial been allowed to continue, critics say, the differences in benefit between the treatment and placebo groups may have disappeared. That is the argument raised again by the new study in the Archives, by an international group of scientists led by Dr. Michel de Lorgeril at the University Joseph Fourier and the National Center of Scientific Research in Grenoble, France.
Jupiter was stopped prematurely when an independent monitoring board gleaned an overwhelming treatment benefit in the statin group. Although the early termination of randomized and blinded control studies is common — to ensure the safety of patients, study leaders frequently monitor the accruing data and stop the trial when one group shows a predetermined amount of benefit over the other — in Jupiter’s case, de Lorgeril’s group argues, the study never made clear what the predetermined benefit was.
What the data did show, however, is that when certain hard clinical endpoints — such as heart-related death — were considered, the difference between the two groups was not significant enough to warrant stopping the trial. Among the entire study population of more than 17,000, there was a total of only 240…
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Pharmboy Takes On Lilly
by ilene - January 15th, 2010 1:50 pm
Here’s Pharmboy’s first stock and options recommendation for the new year, or decade. He’s generally bullish on Lilly and presents two strategies – a simple buy/write strategy and a slightly more complicated strategy which includes selling puts and calls. - Ilene
Pharmboy Takes On Lilly
Courtesy of Pharmboy
Another year has come and gone, 2010 (twenty ten or two thousand ten – which do you prefer?) is here. The market is great for some, and a baffling experience for others. One thing we do know is that we all need, at some point, health care in one form or another! This year, my write-ups may focus on longer term strategies so that we don’t have to manage our trades on a daily basis. This means a bit more depth in the analysis of companies we invest in, and perhaps some longer term picks.
So, here we go for Pharmboy’s first segment for a new decade!
Eli Lilly (LLY) – is a global pharmaceutical company and is a member of the Fortune 500. Its global headquarters is located in Indianapolis, Indiana. The company was founded in 1876 by a pharmaceutical chemist, Eli Lilly, after whom the company was ultimately named. The company’s first innovation was changing the flavorings of medicines so that they were easier to take. The business grew and in 2008, had of $20Billion.
Among the company’s major pharmaceutical breakthroughs are: cephalosporin (antibiotic), erythromycin (antibiotic), insulin, and fluoxetine (Prozac). Among other distinctions, Lilly is the world’s largest manufacturer and distributor of medications used in a broad range of psychiatric and mental health-related conditions, including clinical depression, generalized anxiety disorder, narcotic addiction, insomnia, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and others. Below is a list of their brands:
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Crazymaker: Journal of American Media and Lifestyle
by ilene - October 29th, 2009 1:33 pm
Fun post for the evening, by Charles Hugh Smith, in case you missed it earlier. – Ilene
Crazymaker: Journal of American Media and Lifestyle
Courtesy of Charles Hugh Smith, Of Two Minds
If you wonder why our society is so schizophrenic--look no further than Crazymaker Journal.
I happened upon a fascinating new online publication: Crazymaker, the Journal of American Media and Lifestyle. I have to say the content set me back on my heels; rarely do I see such an honest portrayal of the carefully mixed messages dished out as "news" and "entertainment".
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Gregory Bateson addressed how a cognitive "double bind" could create a schizophrenic state of anxiety and dysfunction.
Their findings indicated that the tangles in communication often diagnosed as schizophrenia are not necessarily result of an organic brain dysfunction. Instead, they found that destructive double binds were a frequent pattern of communication among families of patients, and they proposed that growing up amidst perpetual double binds could lead to learned patterns of confusion in thinking and communication.
Human communication is complex; 90% of it is nonverbal (see also Albert Mehrabian) and context is an essential part of it. Communication consists of the words said, tone of voice, and body language. It also includes how these relate to what has been said in the past; what is not said, but is implied; how these are modified by other nonverbal cues, such as the environment in which it is said, and so forth.
For example, if someone says "I love you," one takes into account who is saying it, their tone of voice and body language, and the context in which it is said. It may be a declaration of passion or a serene reaffirmation, insincere and/or manipulative, an implied demand for a response, a joke, its public or private context may affect its meaning, and so forth.
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This is an apt description of the craziness created by media/marketing messages every minute of every hour of every day in the USA. Bake a super-rich cake, and oh my, why are you so fat? Now you have to torture yourself with diets which don’t work.
Girls: want to look hot and sexy? if you don’t, you’re a loathesome loser.
Guys: not ripped with bulging muscles? Too bad--you’re a loathesome loser, too. Image and exteriors are everything!
The media profits from selling marketing/adverts. Marketing…
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the Favorites backup site
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