Sunday, December 23, 2007

FDA Members Alleged to Be Involved in Scandalous Ethical Violations

This story provides a revealing look into the mechanics of the FDA drug approval (or disapproval) process, and the picture is not pretty.  If the allegations are true, it would appear that doctors serving on the FDA advisory panel have voted against granting approval to market potentially life-saving drugs largely—if not solely—for the reason that they have large financial investments in companies that produce rival treatments.  Does it get any uglier than this?

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

IBM Updates Free Symphony Suite

For those of you who like to try low-cost (or no-cost) alternatives to Microsoft Office, you might want to try IBM's free Lotus Symphony suite.  IBM released an update to this suite yesterday, though it is still in beta testing.

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Illegal Immigration in Small-town America

I see in the news that the little township of Riverside in Burlington County, New Jersey—where I lived briefly as a child in the early 60s—has voted to repeal a law that was voted in in July 2006.  The law would penalize employers or landlords $1,000 to $2,000 for hiring or renting to illegal aliens.  Riverside’s population of about 8,000 is estimated to be nearly half comprised of residents who are here illegally, many of whom come from Portugal and Brazil.

And why did this little township repeal this common-sense law?  Because they don’t believe they can afford to defend the legal challenges in federal courts!  What an outrage!  On the one hand the federal government demonstrates that it is absolutely willing to look the other way and not enforce its own immigration policy, and on the other they’re populating the courts with “justices” who will sometimes rule in favor of illegal immigrants—as happened earlier this year in Hazelton, Pennsylvania—thus stifling the efforts of small-town America in making and enforcing policy that is the federal government’s responsibility in the first place!

In the words of former Ohio congressman, Jim Traficant, “Beam me up!”

Friday, September 14, 2007

EBAY

I was just going to do an update on my EBAY stock post, because I see it has been doing rather nicely as of late.  But then I discovered I didn't post when I took my EBAY position, and I'd have sworn I had.  Oh well, you'll just have to take my word for it I suppose.  I purchased a long position in EBAY on April 19 at 34.80 per share.  Since then the position has been under water for most of that time.  There was a nice spike up in the first half of August that topped out above 37, after which it proceeded to sink back to the high 32s toward the end of that month.  Since then, however, it has been riding up nicely again and as I type, the price is 38.25, a gain of 9.91% from my entry price.

Wednesday, September 5, 2007

Redneck Humor

This one was just too good to pass up.  I happened to spot this photo on the Internet and couldn’t resist posting it here.  Recently having done some exterior work on my own humble abode I had to construct some homemade scaffolding also, but it certainly did not resemble this!

Monday, September 3, 2007

Obnoxious Bicyclist

Here’s another one of those bicyclists who has no problem at all with the fact that he’s violating the law and impeding the normal flow of traffic on a public road.  (See my blog post of May 28 for further info.)  It’s not easy to tell from this cell phone photo, but he’s riding right in the middle of the lane, and as you can see, I was the fourth in a line of vehicles being held up by this inconsiderate scofflaw.  This happened to be westbound on West Riverside Drive between Twelve O’clock Knob Rd. and Mill Ln. in Salem.  The speed limit there is 30 MPH, and we couldn’t have been travelling faster than 20 MPH.


Thursday, August 2, 2007

The Minnesota Bridge Collapse

What a shocking news story!  A 40-year-old bridge in Minneapolis suddenly collapses underneath bumper-to-bumper traffic at 6:05 p.m. local time last night.  I used to live in Eagan Township not too far from there in the early 70's, and I know I've traversed that bridge a number of times.  That's about the extent of my personal link to the incident, but something like that does always give one pause to realize how unpredictable life can be at times.

Google map of the bridge location