2centsworth.info

Another interesting article in today’s New York Times (Holy Mackerel and Other Guilt-Free Fish by Marian Burros). As the article says:

BACK in the 1950’s, when there were plenty of fish in the oceans and rivers, Americans — other than Catholics on Friday — had little interest in them. But now that we have discovered the pleasures and benefits of eating fish, many varieties are nearly depleted and many have been tainted by industrial pollution.

It then goes on to discuss which fish are recommended because they are non endangered, do not contain too much in the way of toxic chemicals, and actually taste good.

According to the article, the following fish can be eaten once a week by adults, according to an assessment of contaminant levels by Environmental Defense. Those marked with an asterisk can be eaten more than once a week.

WILD

*ANCHOVIES
ARCTIC CHAR, color added
*ATLANTIC BUTTERFISH
*BLACK COD (Sable, Butterfish on West Coast)
*BLACK SEA BASS Younger children no more than four times a month
*HADDOCK
*HAKE (white, silver and red)
HAKE (Chilean, Cape and Argentine)
*HALIBUT (Pacific only) Older children 3 times a month, younger children twice
*HERRING
*MACKEREL (Atlantic or Boston only)
MAHI-MAHI Younger children 3 times a month
*PACIFIC COD
*PACIFIC SAND DAB (yellowtail flounder)
*PACIFIC WHITING
*PLAICE
PORGIES
*SALMON (Pacific)
*SARDINES
*SHAD
SMELT
*SOLE (gray, petrale, rex, yellowfin)
SOLE (Dover; English or lemon, older children 3 times a month, younger children twice)
WHITEFISH

FARMED

CARP
CATFISH (domestic)
STRIPED BASS (rockfish)
*TILAPIA
*TROUT (rainbow); TROUT (steelhead)

SHELLFISH

*CLAMS (northern quahogs)
CLAMS (Atlantic surf, butter, Manila, ocean quahog, Pacific geoduck, Pacific littleneck and soft-shell)
*CRAB (Dungeness, snow) Dungeness: younger children once a week
CRAB (Florida stone, Jonah, king)
*CRAYFISH (United States)
*LOBSTER (American) Children 2 to 4 times a month
*MUSSELS (farmed blue; wild blue, children 2 to 3 times a month)
MUSSELS (New Zealand green, Mediterranean)
OYSTERS (farmed Eastern and Pacific)
*SCALLOPS (bay; Northeast, Canadian sea)
*SHRIMP (wild American pink, white, brown)
SHRIMP (spot prawns and northern shrimp)
*SQUID
*SPINY LOBSTER (Caribbean, United States, and Australia)

More information is available at Oceans Alive

The above is a headline in today’s New York Times (14 May 2006)… I think you could also call it the last nail in John McCain’s political coffin.

I voted for McCain in the first primary because I thought he was a man of integrity. I was astonished and disgusted at the tactics used by the Bush campaign to defeat him for the Republican nomination.

But I have been revising my opinion of McCain downwards ever since. Given his intelligence and background he must have had serious reservations about Bush’s justification for the war in Iraq and he certainly was aware of how incompetently the war was being prosecuted. And one suspects he despises Bush personally but he still cozied-up to the Bush campaign in the second election.

Here is a guy who paid a terrible personal price during our nation’s last unnecessary, incompetently led war… Who knows that there are young soldiers and marines now paying a similarly terrible price for the self-serving, bordering on traitorous, incompetence of the current administration.

And yet here McCain is once again acting as stooge for Bush and his cronies. Kissing Falwell’s ring isn’t quite as bad… People won’t die as a result but it is similarly stomach-turning.

Feet of Clay doesn’t do it justice.

Another interesting New York Times article (Senate Approves 2-Year Extension of Bush’s Tax Cuts – May 11, 2006)

The Republican-controlled Senate voted 54 to 44 to approve $70 billion in tax cuts benefiting, no surprise here, the country’s wealthiest taxpayers.

To put it in perspective, here is an excerpt from the NY Times article:

The overwhelming share of the tax cuts the Senate voted to extend will flow to the wealthiest taxpayers. People earning $1 million a year would save about $42,700, and reap about 22 percent of the total tax cut, according to the Tax Policy Center, a research group in Washington. People earning $40,000 to $50,000 a year would save about $47 and receive less than 1 percent of the benefits.

I think, just maybe, that the folks that voted for GW and the Republicans in Congress may finally be realizing that they’ve been taken to the cleaners. Unless you are among the tiny percentage of Americans who’s income is more than $1 million per year, you are getting royally screwed.

GW came into office with a budget surplus and we have had nothing but disasters of every kind ever since. We now have the largest budget deficits in history, GW’s self-inflicted war in Iraq is costing us $100’s of billions per year, more than 2,000 US soldiers and marines have died, Home Land Security is a laughing stock, Osama is still out there, and oh, by the way, GW and his Republican buddies in the House and Senate are going to leave office having made sure that they and their wealthy cronies won’t have to pay for it… The average US taxpayer will.

Remember the old TV ad’ with guy from the day-time soap saying “I’m not really a Doctor, I just play one on TV.”

Those were more innocent times, I cannot imagine the various actors playing doctors in today’s drug adverts bothering to warn us. In response, of course, we have grown more cynical about advertising in general and prescription drug advertising in particular.

But what if the guy really is a Doctor… Can you believe him then? I guess not… Or, at the very least, you better find out who is slipping money into his pocket.

The New York Times had a piece today entitled Generic Smear Campaign (May 9th 2006 by DANIEL CARLAT) which describes how doctors are no longer simply being paid to tout the benefits of various drugs… They are actually being paid to discredit or smear competitors’ drugs. Specifically, they are being paid to trash lower-cost, safer, generic drugs.

The article describes how three pharmaceutical companies (Sepracor, Sanofi-Aventis, and Takeda) have been paying university-affiliated psychiatrists to publish articles trashing a generic drug called trazodone. According to the New York Times piece, trazadone has been around for 25 years, has a good safety record, and costs as little as 10 cents a pill. In contrast the products from Sepracor, Sanofi-Aventis, and Takeda cost as much as $3 a pill. But every time a doctor prescribes the 10 cent trazadone pill it is a lost $3 sale for one of these pharmaceutical giants. Hence the disinformation campaign. And they are apparently having no problems finding psychiatrists willing to pocket their ethics along with some cash.

This all comes at the same time as Wyeth, another large pharmaceutical company, is pressuring the FDA to clamp down on the prescribing of bio-identical hormone replacement therapies (HRT) claiming they pose significant health risks to the women taking them. Of course, Wyeth’s touching concern with women’s heath has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the women are turning to the bio-identical HRT after a major 2002 health study found that Wyeth’s synthetic HRT increased a woman’s risk of heart attack, breast cancer, and stroke.

As a WashingtonPost.com article (Firm Seeks Crackdown on Custom Made Drugs by By ANDREW BRIDGES, The Associated Press April 21, 2006) put it:

Those findings hit Wyeth hard. Sales of the company’s Prempro and Premphase, which combine estrogen and progestin, and its Premarin, an estrogen-only pill, fell to $880 million in 2004 from $2.07 billion in 2001, the year before the Women’s Health Initiative released its hormone-replacement results. Compounding pharmacists and their backers allege that Wyeth seeks to stifle competition by calling in the FDA.

And, of course, with GW’s guys running the FDA, they may well succeed.

Since this is the first award we are giving out, a little explanation about the Anal Leakage Award is in order.

This award has been created for technologies that are sufficiently frustrating, obnoxious, or evil that we would all really prefer that the inventors had “puckered up” and kept it to themselves. It is named in honor of a certain undigestible fat used in many diet foods.

This particular award goes to Royal Philips Electronics. A recent New York Times article (May 7, 2006) entitled Someone Has to Pay for TV. But Who? And How? by Randall Stross describes a recent patent filing by RPE for a TV remote control which will lock the channel during commercials. And there is apparently a companion design concept for a video recorder which will not allow the user to fast forward through commercials.

This is a really brilliant use of technology and I am sure the engineers responsible for designing these devices are truly proud of their work. But, really, why stop there? Why not patent a device which locks the refrigerator during the commercials?… Or heck, how about the bathroom?