Bush’s Death Squad 2001: ‘The bill, the Terrorist Elimination Act of 2001, was introduced on Jan. 3 by Republican Bob Barr. It would nullify parts of
three previous executive orders prohibiting assassination or conspiracy to commit assassination. The new bill states that,
“as the threat from terrorism grows, America must continue to investigate effective ways to combat the menace posed by
those who would murder American citizens simply to make a political point.” ‘ Critics say this just legitimizes what we’ve been doing all along, that the prohibition on state-sponsored assassination has never been taken seriously. eye [via Wood s Lot]

With excitement I clicked on this link in Wood s Lot; an Interview with Samuel R. Delany! Alas, it is from 1996. Left me wondering what he’s up to now; found this interview from November, 2000. Interesting aside — he apparently interviews himself. “K. Leslie Steiner”, from the 1996 conversation, is said to be a pseudonym of his. The discussion early in the interview about how he declined face-to-face contact and insisted they conduct their interchange in written form takes on new meaning in that light.

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He beat me to the punch! I swear, I had the same association Chuck Taggart, at Looka!, had. As he put it:

“He reads! He reads! Here is my favorite line from The
Blank Stare’s address to last night’s joint session of Congress:

Some say my tax plan is too big, others say it
is too small. I respectfully disagree. This plan is just
right.

Even though it’s claimed that this man does not read books, we
can all rest in confidence that he has at least read “Goldilocks
and the Three Bears” (or at least his speechwriter has).

I guess this is how they’ll try to sell this thing to us — by
assuming that the American public is as simpleminded as Shrub.”

Eugenics Alive: coming soon to a country near you. On the threshold of human genome engineering, ‘fretting about the ethics of these issues is a thing that only Western countries are going to do. Elsewhere, eugenics — including
“genetic enhancement” — will not be fretted about or debated, it will just be done.’

A rough kind of eugenics has, in fact, been practiced in China for a long time. Several years ago, when I was living in that country, I mentioned Down’s
Syndrome in conversation with a Chinese colleague. She did not know the English term and I did not know the Chinese, so we had to look it up in a
dictionary. “Oh,” she said when she got it. “That’s not a problem in China. They don’t get out of the delivery room.”

As I said: While we are agonizing over the rights and wrongs of it, elsewhere they will just be doing it. National Review

And speaking of eugenics:

The “Genius Babies,” and How They Grew: the ‘truth’ about the “Nobel Prize sperm bank”, the Repository for Germinal Choice. Slate

Once-Weekly Prozac Approved by FDA. The formulation contains 90 mg. of the active ingredient, fluoxetine, in a time-release formula, and is intended for patients whose depressive symptoms have stabilized but need continued maintenance drug therapy to prevent a relapse. The truth of the matter, however, is that fluoxetine has such gradual rate of metabolism and elimination from the body that the plain old original Prozac formulation, which is usually 20 mg., can be given less frequently than daily — in some cases as infrequently as once a week — for many maintenance purposes, and (as scandalous as its price seemed when it first entered the marketplace in the early ’80’s) is considerably less expensive. Eli Lilly’s last decades of profit were built upon Prozac’s cash cow, but it has seen its market share erode with the introduction of subsequent (and in some cases superior) antidepressants, and the company will take a big hit in August when it loses patent protection over Prozac and a generic fluoxetine is launched by a competitor. A new formulation like Prozac Weekly will regain them proprietary rights.

In a similar maneuver, they’ve recently released the product Sarafem for premenstrual tension symptoms. This is plain old fluoxetine as well! The clinical literature has long noted benefit from SSRIs for PMS symptoms whether the sufferer is depressed or not, and many of us have long prescribed Prozac for that indication. There’s nothing different about Sarafem [except its ability to support Lilly’s stock prices?]

This is the second psychiatric instance of a new pharmaceutical marketing trend that seems particularly disingenuous from my vantage point. Here was the first — have you seen any of the TV ads for Zyban, marketed as a smoking cessation aid? The ads tell you it’s “not for everyone,” in particular mentioning that you shouldn’t take it if you’re taking the antidepressant Wellbutrin. They don’t explain why, but the reason is a simple one — Glaxo Wellcome’s Zyban is identical to Glaxo Wellcome’s Wellbutrin; they’re both, generically, bupropion, in the same 150 mg. sustained release form, at virtually the same price.

In my opinion, there is no justification except the attempt to increase market share through deceptive marketing for one company to push the same pharmaceutical under different brand names for different indications. Instead, the product labelling of their existing product should be changed to reflect any added indications they receive from the FDA. I have already seen several cases in which patients have been prescribed Zyban by their primary care MDs while receiving Wellbutrin from mental health practitioners, either because of a lack of crosstalk among the parties or ignorance on the part of one practitioner of the ingredients in the other prescription. And the potential medical consequences of such inadvertent “doubling up” of bupropion dosing, including seizures, are nontrivial! TV advertising which prompts patients to develop brand recognition of medications and ask for products from their physicians by brand name is part of the problem. I find that, over the last decade, there’s been erosion in patients’ understanding of the concept of generic equivalents of medications. Unless there’s a good reason to prefer a particular company’s brand (and there rarely is), I do all my prescribing by the generic name of the medication.

Sex-Change Deputy to Break New Ground. “Another milestone was reached
on Tuesday in the Lone Star state when a Texas sheriff said one of his top deputies would
become the first police officer in the state to undergo a sex change operation.

Bexar County Sheriff Ralph Lopez said he had given the male deputy permission to start
wearing a woman’s uniform and ordered the other deputies not to razz him about it.” Might be the first time Texas lawmakers are ordered to mind their manners with a lady…

Open Season on the Outer Planets. Space scientists at the recent Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston brainstormed about the next two decades of exploration of the outer planets under NASA’s newly-formed Outer Planets Program Directorate. Outer planet projects are expected to be picked in open competition among a concentration of innovative and sometimes outrageous proposals.

Today’s New York Times could fill a weblog, as in the next six entries:

In Dawn of Society, Dance Was Center Stage. An Israeli archaeologist says he has pieced together evidence of a role for dance as early as the transition from hunter-gatherer to pastoral society in the Middle East. New York Times

A Short, Speckled History of a Transplanted Hand. After twenty-nine months, the hand is amputated by the same surgeon who had originally done the transplant. The patient says he feels the best he has since he received the hand, and acknowledges his responsibility for not keeping up with the anti-rejection drug regimen and the physical therapy necessary to maintain its viability. This man who originally told his surgeons he had lost his hand in an industrial accident turned out to instead have received the injury while in prison serving time for fraud. His con game evaded months of pre-transplant interviewing and psychological testing. Nine patients in six countries have since received transplanted hands, including three who have gotten double transplants of both the right and left hands. The New York Times report says that all appear to be doing well.

Experiment in Assisted Living Exposes Regulatory Confusion. The article describes the way assisted living in New York has been transformed [and I’ve seen the same thing here in Massachusetts]. Starting out as a means of allowing a continuum of escalating care so that elders can “age in place” in a setting of their own choosing, assisted living centers have instead become ways to house enfeebled Alzheimer’s patients with less regulatory oversight, and hence less adequate care, than in nursing homes. In essence, the industry has backed its way into being part of the healthcare industry rather than a housing alternative, in the process securing itself a niche in which it’s protected from regulation that would eat into its profits.

The headline says “China Ratifies Human Rights Treaty.” But read further and you see that they “voted not to accept a key provision in the pact.” Human rights groups are guardedly optomistic that this will make a real difference, but I’m dubious. This seems like window-dressing to deflect scrutiny of China’s record on human rights two weeks before a U.N. human rights conference in Geneva. New York Times

Clinton Pardons Called ‘Accident Waiting to Happen’: “From the beginning of his presidency,
Bill Clinton moved to take away the Justice Department’s
traditional role of being first to review requests for
clemency, the agency’s former pardon attorney told a
congressional committee Wednesday.

‘The final Clinton pardons were an accident waiting to
happen,’ Margaret Colgate Love, who served as pardon
attorney from 1990 to 1997, told the House Judiciary
subcommittee on the Constitution. New York Times

A 7.0 Earthquake Shakes Pacific Northwest. Does it seem to you that newsworthy earthquakes seem to hit disparate places on the globe in clusters? Within the month, we’ve seen the Gujarat quake, the El Salvador quake, and now this. Is this a geophysical clustering or a sampling effect of what the media pay attention to? In related news, researchers studying the magnitude-7.7 Indian quake now say that faults beneath California’s populous areas “could
produce larger earthquakes than
previously thought… The type of fault that produced the deadly Jan. 26 quake – a
blind thrust fault – is also found in California, including at least
one running directly beneath the skyscrapers of downtown Los
Angeles.” Blind thrust faults are difficult to map because they do not break the surface. Earlier estimates capped the potential force of a blind thrust quake in California at not much more than the 1989 San Francisco earthquake or the 1994 Northridge quake, but the researchers are revising their estimates considerably upward after looking at Gujarat.