Dec 9, 2003 | Dollars & Crosses
From Yahoo News (December 5, 2003):
A fossil of a small sea creature extracted from a 425-million-year-old British rock formation is the oldest unequivocally male fossil known, researchers say....Details revealed include gills, eyes, limbs designed for swimming and the oldest known male organ in the fossil record. It was this last that led researchers to name the new species, Colymbosathon ecplecticos, which is Greek for "amazing swimmer with large penis."
Dec 9, 2003 | Dollars & Crosses
From the Detroit News:
"Bipartisanship is when the stupid party and the evil party get together and do something truly stupid and evil." -- M. Stanton Evans [12/7/2003]
Dec 9, 2003 | Dollars & Crosses
"Democracy the Loser as Putin Triumphs" -- analysis from the right-wing Daily Telegraph:
Analysts at one financial firm, Aton, summed up the shock in a research note: "Yesterday's election shows what the people actually think: they are stridently nationalist, want wealth redistributed and have little interest in liberal or democratic values." Igor Mintusov, of Nikkolo M, political campaign consultants, said: "It is a sad day for liberalism. The liberals in Russia are finished in the short term." [12/9/2003]
Bear in mind that the election was entirely "democratic," the real loser was not majority rule, but individual liberty. "Liberal" in this context means, roughly, "individualist."Dec 8, 2003 | Dollars & Crosses
From Yahoo News:
[D]irty bomb warheads--24 ready to use, 14 dismantled--[are] missing from a storage depot near the Trans-Dniester Tiraspol military airport [in Moldova]....
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and other agencies have expressed repeated concern about reports that the Trans-Dniester region is a major weapons smuggling center. Moldova is a former Soviet republic and thousands of tons of weapons and ammunition remain stored in Trans-Dniester....
Nantoi said reports first reached him in 1998 that Alazan rockets... had been fitted with warheads modified to carry radioactive material. Since then, the rockets and warheads appear to have disappeared from their storage area.... [12/08/2003]
Dec 8, 2003 | Dollars & Crosses
I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.--Thomas Jefferson
What would Thomas Jefferson think of George W. Bush's expanding welfare state?Dec 8, 2003 | Dollars & Crosses
Looks like the Swiss have approved the sale of ImClone's cancer drug, Erbitux.
From the WSJ:
...This is vindication for those who promoted the drug at and outside of ImClone, only to see its potential trampled in the media rush to condemn the stock sales of Martha Stewart and Sam Waksal. But any satisfaction is certainly tinged by the knowledge that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration passed up an opportunity to approve Erbitux nearly two years ago, and that tens of thousands of colorectal cancer victims have since died needlessly premature deaths.
Erbitux isn't a miracle cure for most patients. But it will improve and extend many lives. Consider this back-of-the-envelope calculation. The American Cancer Society predicts about 57,000 Americans (or 156 per day) will die from colorectal cancer this year. Studies suggest that more than 20% of them would have responded dramatically to Erbitux in combination with chemo (a greater than 50% reduction in tumor size), while for many others the disease would have at least stabilized. "Conceivably, as many as 100 people died today that wouldn't have if they had been able to obtain Erbitux," says Steve Walker of the Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs...
...Commissioner Mark McClellan needs to remind his bureaucrats that every day of delay has real human costs.
Not to mention 7 years of the life of Sam Waksal.
Recommended Reading:
ImClone's Sam Waksal Should Have Read Ayn Rand's 'Atlas Shrugged'
If Sam Waksal had read 'Atlas Shrugged,' he may have walked free.
The SEC's "Insider Trading" Witch Hunt Against ImClone's Sam Waksal: Scapegoat for the Sins of the FDA
Observe the injustice involved here. The FDA obstructed the launch of a product; then the SEC forced the termination of that product's primary creator. Yet it's not any regulator but the creator -- Sam Waksal -- who faces jail time for helping his family mitigate regulatory destructiveness.