Snark Sightings - Observations on the world around us

More impotence commercial rants

2008-02-23T12:55:00.000-08:00

Anyone else notice the irony inherent in the Cialis impotence ad, where the guy is getting cozy with his lady-friend, and snaps off the kitchen spigot, leading to a gusher that interrups their romantic interlude?

Guess the makers of Cialis want us to associate their product with firm streams of gushing liquids in a romantic setting, huh?

Ya THINK???

2008-02-23T12:43:00.000-08:00

As I look around at the twisted world around us, I realize how screwed up our culture is when I see what passes for "entertainment", especially the videogames that my peers use as babysitters.

Many friends who have kids park their children's fat little asses in front of the television, X-box or Playstation in hand, and leave the kids to spend HOUR upon HOUR playing all the latest "FPS" (first-person shooter) games, which constitute a considerable majority of the most popular titles sold.

Well guess what? Just like MTV contributed to the coarsening of American culture, and the spread of rampant materialism with it, now an expert on the subject has come out with this:

TV plays role in youth violence, expert says

Visual imagery has a 'profound effect,' he says in wake of killing

By Rachel McGrath
Correspondent

Saturday, February 23, 2008

One of the nation's leading experts on young people and violence has a simple word of advice for Ventura County parents in the wake of the school shooting in Oxnard: "Turn off the TV."

Lt. Col. Dave Grossman is the author of the 1995 Pulitzer Prize-nominated book "On Killing" and has been involved in counseling or court cases connected with several high-profile shooting sprees such as the Jonesboro, Paducah, Springfield and Littleton school shootings.

"These juvenile mass murderers had all dropped out of life and immersed themselves in media violence," he said.

"Words and communication are what makes us human, but violent visual imagery has as profound effect on us as it does on animals," he said. "We have a generation of kids being raised on violence and seeking out violence in music, television shows and video games."

Grossman, 51, is a West Point psychology professor, professor of military science, and an Army Ranger who has combined his experiences to become the founder of a new field of scientific endeavor, which has been termed "killology." He has testified before U.S. Senate and Congressional committees and numerous state legislatures, and he is the director of the Killology Research Group, based in Arizona. He is the co-author with Gloria DeGaetano of "Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill: A Call to Action Against TV, Movie and Video Game Violence."

Grossman will address the issue of the root causes of school violence at a meeting open to the public next month in Camarillo. He had been invited by the Boys & Girls Club of Camarillo to be the guest speaker at the second annual ONEClub Breakfast before Ventura County's first classroom shooting at E.O. Green School in Oxnard.

Timing may prove useful

"We thought we'd be starting a conversation, not continuing one," said Boys & Girls Club of Camarillo President Greg Stuart, who booked Grossman nine months ago to address an invited audience on the issue of school safety. In light of the events in Oxnard, Stuart said, Grossman will host a two-hour session open to anyone who wants to attend.

Stuart said he's "horrified" at the way the timing of Grossman's visit has turned out, but he hopes it will be useful to a lot of parents who have fears about violence in the classroom. "We need to be taking all the steps we can to create healthy environments for our kids," he said. "We have to be aware of all the influences."

Ventura County Undersheriff Craig Husband is on the Board of Directors of the Camarillo Boys & Girls Club, and he suggested Grossman as a speaker.

"Grossman addresses the root causes of teen violence and explains what we're exposing our youth to at a very young age," said Husband. "He dissects and explains school violence and how we are desensitizing our youth through video games, television and movies."

Husband said there is a dramatic increase in violence in the society, and Ventura County is not immune to that trend. He said fights are becoming more frequent, and there are a growing number of incidents of after-school violence among young people, often gang-related, he said.

"It's important to get the community engaged and working on this issue," he said. "We've been preparing in law enforcement for something like this (school shooting) for several years, and all of Ventura County law enforcement knows the potential for this sort of thing is there."

"If you look at the communities involved in these mass school shootings like Columbine and Littleton, they are very like us in demographics," he said.

Interest stems from military

Speaking by phone from the headquarters of his research group in Jonesboro, Ariz., Grossman said he became interested in the subject after studying the psychology of killing as part of his military career.

"The military conditions human beings to kill using simulators and social conditioning, but it does so with discipline," he said. "We are doing the same thing with video games to children without any of the safeguards."

Husband said he thinks Grossman's theories make a lot of sense.

"They're making video games out of simulators which are used to train soldiers to shoot in combat," he said. "You can see their influence in the way these school shooters aim and shoot accurately and move from one target to the next, moving through people dispassionately. These games are teaching people to shoot and remove the human elements from the process which would ultimately hold us back."

Grossman also blames the media for making celebrities of those who go on shooting rampages and said there is a powerful copycat phenomenon going on, which in part explains why there have been so many campus shootings this month.

He urges parents to monitor their children and focus their child's attention on books, newspapers and the written word.

"As an adult, your children will never curse you for the TV shows and the DVD's they couldn't watch," he said. "They'll bless you for it."

Grossman's presentation will run from 10 a.m. to noon March 20 at the Education Conference Center, 5100 Adolfo Road, Camarillo.

Goodbye, and GOOD RIDDANCE

2008-02-23T11:49:00.001-08:00

These days, it seems like EVERYONE is trying to cut corners, get rich quick, rip people off, and generally not play by the rules...

I therefore was rather pleased to read this article from The Wall Street Journal:

Meatpacker to Shut Down
In Wake of Massive Recall

By DAVID KESMODEL
February 23, 2008 11:00 a.m.

Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Co., which issued the biggest meat recall in U.S. history last week, probably will shut down permanently, the company's general manager told The Wall Street Journal.

"I don't see any way we could reopen," Anthony Magidow said in a telephone interview from the meatpacker's plant in Chino, Calif., late Friday.

The meatpacker voluntarily suspended operations in early February, after the U.S. Department of Agriculture began investigating how it treated animals.

The USDA has said the slaughterhouse might be able to resume operating if it met certain conditions. But Mr. Magidow said, "we are a small private company," and cash has become tight. Among other problems, some customers stopped payment on checks they had sent the company for meat that is part of the recall of 143 million pounds of beef, he said.

Federal food-safety regulators said Thursday that they intend to require that Hallmark/Westland, a leading supplier to the National School Lunch Program, pay for the costs associated with destroying and replacing meat submitted to the program.

"If the USDA wants payment back, we're dead meat. We're done," said Mr. Magidow, 46 years old, who has worked at the company for more than 15 years. "There's no way we could pay it all back."

The company's president and owner, Steve Mendell, was unavailable to comment Friday, and the company's controller, Juan Acevedo, referred an interview request to Mr. Magidow.

Mr. Magidow said the company has laid off 250 workers and that a skeleton group of top managers is managing the recall. Until the plant suspended operations, it was earning a modest profit on annual sales of roughly $100 million, he said. "It's a low profit-margin business," he said.

In the last government fiscal year, the Agriculture Department paid Hallmark/Westland about $39 million for ground beef for food nutrition programs, including the school-lunch program. Hallmark/Westland was honored by the department as its Supplier of the Year for the 2004-05 school year. It began supplying meat to the program in 2003 after a rigorous application process with the Agriculture Department, which has authorized about 10 meatpackers nationwide to compete for contracts to supply beef to the program.

The USDA investigation began after the Humane Society of the United States released an undercover video showing workers at the Chino slaughterhouse trying to make sick or injured cows stand up with electrical-shock devices, fork lifts and high-pressure water hoses. State and federal animal-cruelty laws prohibit such activities.

The company quickly fired the two workers in the video and began taking steps to be reauthorized by the Agriculture Department. But the USDA issued a recall of 143 million pounds of beef on Feb. 17, after additional evidence showed the company had on rare occasions since February 2006 slaughtered cows that had fallen to the ground after passing a pre-slaughter inspection. In such cases, the company is supposed to contact a federal inspector before going ahead with the slaughter, and agency officials said it did not.

Slaughtering downer cows, those that can't walk or stand on their own, is generally prohibited under federal rules because the cows are believed to carry higher risks of diseases including mad-cow disease, which can cause a rare but fatal brain disorder in humans.

The government says much of the recalled meat has already been consumed, that the risk of harm is low and that no illnesses have been reported.

According to authors of a study prepared for Congress by the Government Accountability Office, the incubation period for mad-cow disease is two to eight years in cattle and up to 30 years in humans.

The Agriculture Department is under fire from lawmakers and consumer-advocacy groups because it failed to catch problems at the plant. Agency inspectors are continuously on hand at all meatpacking facilities. Congressional hearings on meat safety begin next week.

Regulators have said the facility could reopen if it met specific conditions. Most important, the company must "identify significant, and in this case multilayered, corrective actions that give us some level of confidence that it's not going to occur in the future," Agriculture Department official Kenneth Petersen told reporters during a briefing Thursday. "And then we verify their corrective actions over a multi-month period of time."

--Elizabeth Williamson contributed to this article.

Write to David Kesmodel at david.kesmodel@wsj.com

Tough break, Mr. Magidow - I'll bet that your boss Mr. Mendell lives in a huge house, drives a fancy sports sedan or "blingmobile" SUV and lives high on the hog, taking BOATLOADS Of money out of the business, resulting in the "low profit-margin business".... just a hunch...but I could be wrong...(but I DOUBT it...)

Meanwhile, the cows lived in squalor and were mistreated by the workers,
in an attempt to wring every last dollar out of them and the business,
while cutting corners on the care of the animals until their death.

You know, maybe those vegetarians are really ON to something...
the older I get, the more opposed I am to eating red meat...

Selective criteria

2008-02-21T00:49:00.000-08:00

This just in from a FORMERLY admired sports figure...

"Greg Norman honored with GWAA's Bartlett Award

HOUSTON (Feb. 19, 2008) Global golfer and global philanthropist Greg Norman whose commitment to charity has spanned three decades with such diverse causes as children's cancer research, relief to victims and families of Hurricane Katrina, the Tsunami and 9-11, and ecosystem oceanic research, has been honored with the Golf Writers Association of America's Charlie Bartlett Award.

The award, named for the first secretary of the GWAA, is given to a professional golfer for his/her unselfish contributions to the betterment of society. Norman will be honored at the GWAA Annual Awards Dinner April 9 in Augusta, Ga."

No word if Greg will be bringing his ex-wife, Laura, OR former Olympic skier Andy Mill, the two jilted ex-spouses that "Mr. Smooth" and his new squeeze, Chris Evert, DUMPED so that they could marry each other....guess ol' Greggy and Chrissie WILL NOT be in the running for any awards for the BETTERMENT OF MARRIAGE or HONORING COMMITMENTS....

Friggin SICK of ED ads....

2008-02-20T22:35:00.000-08:00

I guess I have a high threshold for pain, but something snapped in me tonight, and I'm thinking of starting a crusade against all those STUPID "erectile dysfunction" advertisements that are SHOVELED down our throats....

The one that put me over the edge was the "Viva Viagra" ad featuring Cro-Magnon Man on his motorcycle, grinning lasciviously at his female mark, while the music track gleefully choruses"Viva Viagra" about three hundred times....

That sound you hear off in the distance??? That would be Elvis whirring in his grave...

Hey boys, I'm really sorry you have limp noodles, but interrupting my watching of the Accenture Match Play Championship to explain what priaprism is, and why a four-hour boner is considered a serious life-threatening condition just got to be too much to bear tonight....

(Isn't that exactly why these poor baby boomers are TAKING THIS SHTUFF?? So they can have a four-hour woody woodpecker, and keep their little lovebirds interested in them???)

Has anyone else noticed that the inanity factor of these ads is on the upswing recently? We've now moved beyond the implied innuendo of the symbolism of the couple in the separate bathtubs in the great outdoors to prolonged clinical explanations of why you need this magic elixir to put the lead back in your pencil, and how inconvenient unexpected kitchen plumbing explosions contributes to an unsatisfying satisfying sex life, but the male form of "The Pill" is there to save the day....

ENOUGH ALREADY!!!

STOP THE MADNESS!!!

OH, AND BY THE WAY, THE PATHETIC LOSER ASHHOLE AT PO BOX 158, AGOURA HILLS, CA 91376 NEEDS THIS SHIT BECAUSE HIS NEEDLE DICK DOESN'T WORK WITHOUT CHEMICAL ASSISTANCE - HERE'S HOPING THAT DICK DROPS OFF BECAUSE IT'S BEEN PLACES IT SHOULD NOT EVER HAVE BEEN...EVER!!! YOU ARE A COMPLETE CLASSLESS ASSHOLE "Jimmy", AND YOU DESERVE TO DROP DEAD FROM EVERY STD KNOWN TO MAN - BUT SOMEDAY YOU'LL REAP WHAT YOU'VE SOWED, YOU DEPRAVED, PREDATORY MOTHERFUCKER!!! ....GOD WILL PREVAIL!!!
+3/20, 5/21, 7/16 07+
+

More from our good friends and trading partners, the Chinese

2007-05-19T21:51:00.000-07:00

"As long as you bring money, anyone can buy..."

Those are the words that thousands of pet owners can now inscribe on the graves of their dead animal companions, thanks to the Corporate Whores that are running the American economy these days.

In their rush to circumvent American food standards and gut the American manufacturing base to save a few pennies, the robber barons who manage quarter to quarter to "beat the numbers" without regard to the long-term (and short-term) consequences of their decisions and actions have done it again...and our pets are dying and being sickened daily as a result.

Every day it seems, another manufacturer of pet food adds another brand to the ever growing list of tainted pet food that has been spiked with contaminated wheat gluten sourced from our trusted trade partners, the Chinese.

It has been well-known for a long, long time that China is a hotbed of corruption, shady dealing, sub-standard business practices, theft, copyright infringement and a host of other unethical behaviors. This article below only ratifies that litany of sins, and it would appear that nothing has changed....

American greed plus Chinese greed equals dead American pets.

Truly, we have reaped what we have sown, and I only pray that the pendulum that has swung SO far to the favor of the unethical, lying, cheating, thieving Chinese will swing back to America, and a resurgence in American production, American manufacturing and American standards and ethics will ultimately prevail, and leave the Chinese to spread their crappy standards amongst themselves, like they used to.

In the meantime, we now have dead and dying American pets, and probably sick or dying American PEOPLE if we allow this lapse in oversight and standards to continue....you KNOW that we are in trouble when a relatively conservative Republican is taking this stance....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/30/AR2007043001865_pf.html

Pet Deaths Spur Call for Better FDA Screening
Imports Raise Concern About Human Foods

By Rick Weiss and Ariana Eunjung Cha
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, May 1, 2007; A01

Amid growing revelations that suppliers in China frequently spike pet food and other food ingredients with contaminants to boost profits, momentum is building in Washington to bolster the Food and Drug Administration's capacity to detect and screen out adulterated imports.

Several Chinese suppliers conceded over the weekend that adding melamine to pet food ingredients -- now blamed for the deaths of many animals in the United States and possible contamination of the human food supply -- is but the latest technique for fooling U.S. companies into thinking they are purchasing a high-quality product.

Before melamine there was urea, Chinese traders said -- another nitrogen-rich chemical that was used to give false high scores on tests of protein content but was abandoned after it made animals ill.

The task of guarding against contaminants in imports has become far more complicated because an increasing portion of the tens of billions of dollars in Chinese food and agricultural imports involves powders and concentrates for the processed-food industry -- including the wheat gluten and rice protein at the center of the pet food scandal. Animal feed imports alone grew sevenfold from 2001 to 2006, the Commerce Department says.

Such products pose three problems: Their makeup is not obvious by mere visual inspection; they can be easily and invisibly contaminated or intentionally spiked with chemicals that are not on the FDA's standard battery of tests; and their origins are often vague, because they have been through several stages of processing and trade.

Now an increasing number of legislators, scientists and others are saying it is time to modernize FDA's authority to trace the sources of food imports and punish scofflaws -- legal powers that experts say have barely evolved over the past 70 years.

Many also want to expand the agency's food-safety budget.

"I do think this pet food thing has shown people, including people at the very highest levels of the administration, that something needs to be fixed," said William Hubbard, associate director of the FDA from 1991 to 2005. "If this isn't a wake-up call, then people are so asleep they are catatonic."

Which new powers to give the FDA, however -- and how to spend any extra funding -- remains contentious. And some legislators want assurances that the agency is worthy of added support.

"Leadership has been missing for far too long, and that needs to change quickly," said Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), who chairs the subcommittee that funds the agency. Others have complained that Senate-confirmed FDA commissioners have been in place for less than one-third of President Bush's tenure.

Relying largely on laws passed in 1906 and 1938, which among other things empower it to detain "filthy, putrid or decomposed" foods, the FDA today oversees $1 trillion worth of products annually, including about half of all imports. The $2 billion agency regulates products that together account for fully 25 cents of every dollar American consumers spend, and sheer volume makes it impossible to inspect more than a small fraction of incoming food.

"It's a huge amount," said Dan Michels, a former director of the FDA's Office of Enforcement and now a Silver Spring-based regulatory consultant. "You can't even look at everything, let alone sample and test it."

About 99 percent of imported foods are simply acknowledged by computer and waved ashore.

Inspections were easier when imports were identifiable foods. Products that looked like oranges were clearly oranges, even if they sometimes had to be tested for pesticides. Raspberries were raspberries, even if some were tainted with bacteria.

But processed ingredients are often nondescript. And in China, where a national passion for commerce has far outpaced the adoption of regulatory controls, marketers have repeatedly been caught adulterating such products -- spiking pig feed with diet pill chemicals to make swine leaner, for example, and hiding sawdust in fishmeal.

Officials at Chinese companies that make melamine, which is used in plastics but can also give falsely elevated readings of a food's nutritional value, have acknowledged that the chemical is sometimes sold to makers of animal food ingredients.

"It's always been like that, people buying it as animal feed," said Xu Qin Bin, a sales representative for Shandong Sanhe Chemical Co.

Other melamine brokers said the standard policy is, in effect, one of "don't ask, don't tell."

"As long as you bring money, anyone can buy," said Zhao Yan of the Shandong Taian Ningyang County Weiye Chemical Co., which markets melamine.

A recent shift from old-fashioned trade fairs to online trading has facilitated this shadowy market by adding a layer of anonymity between producers and consumers.

By far the largest online marketplace in China, and perhaps the world, is Alibaba.com. It is based in the southeastern city of Hangzhou and specializes in business-to-business transactions. On Alibaba, buyers can order garden gnomes, customized political campaign buttons, bolts of taffeta, as well as wheat gluten and other foodstuffs -- all with a click of a mouse.

On a typical day, Alibaba vendors advertise about 1.75 million individual products, more than 30,000 of them agricultural.

Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Co. and Binzhou Futian Biology Technology Co., the two companies under investigation by Chinese and U.S. officials, sell vegetable proteins on Alibaba. Scores of others hawk wheat gluten, rice protein or corn gluten -- virtually all advertising their products as high-quality "feed grade," "food grade" or "export grade" and none offering inferior "industrial" grade.

In its ad, Xuzhou Anying, which American authorities say supplied toxic wheat gluten to pet food makers, does not specify what uses its wheat gluten is meant for. But it cites "feed additives" as one of its main exports and claims that its gluten is "reference grade three a" -- a term that FDA officials say has no formal regulatory meaning.

When reached by phone, seven wheat gluten companies advertising on Alibaba declined to answer specific questions about where their products come from. {Ed.Note: NICE!!! And we buy from these SOB's??? Are we STUPID??? I think you know the answer to that one...STUPID and GREEDY!!!}

That kind of opacity poses enormous challenges to pet food makers, said Rodney Noel, a state chemist in Indiana and a member of the pet food committee of the Association of American Feed Control. "How can these companies know the source?" Noel asked. "They don't necessarily know if it came from China or Timbuktu." {Ed. Note: No, Rodney, it DOES NOT pose "an enormous challenge" - just buy from qualified American suppliers who follow established AMERICAN standards for food ingredients, for both PETS and PEOPLE!!!}

It also poses problems for the FDA, which has limited authority to demand records identifying the sources of food.

But that is just one of many ways in which the agency is hobbled, experts said. Another: Despite a temporary post-Sept. 11, 2001, staff increase inspired by fears of terrorist attacks on food, the number of FDA employees working on port inspections has returned to pre-Sept. 11 levels -- part of a gradual shriveling of the agency's food safety division relative to its burgeoning pharmaceutical branch.

Moreover, while the Agriculture Department -- which has parallel responsibilities for imported beef and poultry -- has the legal authority to designate 10 U.S. ports as the only ones eligible to accept foreign meat, allowing its inspectors to focus their efforts in those places, FDA inspectors -- who are far fewer in number -- must cover every U.S. border crossing.

Inspectors would also benefit from portable high-speed analyzers. Most samples today are sent overnight to distant labs. And because officials can sideline only those shipments they deem suspicious, imported foodstuffs are typically well into the chain of commerce by the time test results come back.

That problem is exacerbated by FDA's lack of authority to order recalls, which means it must rely on the cooperation of companies when products need to be pulled off shelves. And that assumes the agency has managed to detect a contaminant, which is not easy.

"There is this popular assumption -- maybe it comes from people watching 'CSI' -- that you can put a sample in a machine and get all the answers," said Michels, the consultant. "Unfortunately, it's not like that." You have to have some idea of what you might be looking for."

Congress has a variety of avenues open to it as it considers how to strengthen the beleaguered agency. One is to make permanent some provisions of the Bioterrorism Act of 2002. In response to the pet food crisis, the FDA invoked the act recently for the first time -- not because of any suspicion that bioterrorism was at play but because of the added powers it provides to obtain shipping records and detain shipments.

Some advocates want an expansion of the so-called Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) program that USDA uses to prevent microbial contamination of meat and poultry, and which the FDA recently adopted for imported seafood. The program makes companies legally liable for identifying where contamination is likely to occur and instituting suitable controls at those points.

"As long as the system depends on government inspectors to detect problems and pull dangerous foods, it's a failed system," said Michael Taylor, former director of the Agriculture Department's Food Safety and Inspection Service and a former FDA deputy commissioner. HACCP, Taylor said, "allows us to hold companies accountable."

Discussion of enhancements could start this week, as Congress begins to debate reauthorizing the Prescription Drug User Fee Act, a controversial program that aims to speed drug approvals with injections of pharmaceutical company money.

"We need to take FDA from being a toothless agency to one with the authority to act to protect the public health," DeLauro said.

That effort could still stall, but it is riding a wave it never thought it would catch: a wellspring of concern for the nation's dogs and cats.

Staff writer Nancy Trejos and researcher Crissie Ding contributed to this report. Cha and Ding reported from China.

Beauties and The Beast at the LPGA's Ginn Open

2007-04-13T16:12:00.000-07:00

USS Amgen taking on water under Captain Kevin

2007-04-13T06:44:00.000-07:00

The cat is FINALLY out of the bag, so to speak, and the sacred cow is in the process of being slaughtered.

I am almost GIDDY with Schadenfreude that this highly-anointed organization that has rested on its bloated laurels for the last ten years is FINALLY getting its comeuppance, and the collective scales that have covered the business press' eyes are beginning to fall away...

Today's NEW YORK TIMES article from Andrew Pollack was a welcome breath of fresh air, and to do it justice, I've decided to thread my responses in amongst the pithy points that Mr. Pollack raises, along with prominent biotechnology analysts and interested parties.

THIS is gonna be fun! {THESE ARE ALL ONLY MY HUMBLE OPINIONS, BY THE WAY} - this is all for FUN, and for LAUGHS ONLY - your mileage may vary & past returns may not be indicative of future performance (truer words were never spoken, by the way) ...
Mr. Pollack must have been channeling in the Spring and Summer of 2002, and after FIVE long years of simmering in bile, produced this outpouring of revelations that captures what I've been feeling..so thank you, Mr. Pollack - your efforts are welcome, AND appreciated...on to the flogging and excoriation...

Amgen receives a dose of troubleBiotechnology whiz suffers setbacks with two blockbuster drugs

BY ANDREW POLLACK, The New York Times
Last Updated:04/12/2007 09:14:33 PM PDT

Just three months ago, Amgen was still considered one of the biggest success stories of the fast-growing biotechnology industry. Now some analysts are comparing it to a lumbering, stumbling pharmaceutical giant that leans too heavily on an aging product portfolio.

{"Some analysts" have finally come to their senses to recognize this organization for what it is...it IS a lumbering, stumbling, DYSFUNCTIONAL organization that has not discovered MUCH OF ANYTHING NEW of significant commercial value since 1991 when NEUPOGEN was introduced. More later...read this BusinessWeek article from 2002 for some serious perspective on the background...}

A series of setbacks, some unexpected and some perhaps self-inflicted, pose the greatest challenge in the company's heretofore charmed 27-year history.

{In reality, there's not much unexpected, but there are MANY self-inflicted setbacks, caused primarily by an organizational culture that pays more attention to the valuation of their stock option grants and pressing their own personal and political agendas, than building a business that has some staying power with a viable product pipeline. The middle management level in the Sales and Marketing area was characterized by political grandstanding and backbiting, as Amgen has aggressively hired "the best and the brightest" from "big pharma", and then turns them loose on one another in a Darwinian power struggle to press each manager's personal political agenda without coordinating the internal dynamics that are required to successfully develop and market a viable product pipeline. (Whew, THAT felt good...) This is an organizational structure that can be described as ARROGANT HUBRIS."}

And some crucial events in coming weeks could make clearer whether the company has simply hit a stretch of "choppy water" - as its chief executive contends - or whether, as some analysts say, the company's best days may be behind it.

{In my opinion, the company hit "choppy water" the day it gave Captain Kevin the keys to the good ship Amgen, and the best days ended almost TEN YEARS ago - remember this old saw? The critical lack of management integration and guiding lower level management to "play nice" in the sandbox with one another is one of the most glaring leadership failures of this once-fine organization. One of Amgen's core values is "Compete intensely and win"...although someone forgot to add "with the outside world" after intensely... Arrogant hubris? Look no further...}

"The barrage of bad news that's come out on Amgen in the past 60 days is absolutely unprecedented in the biotech sector," said Mark Schoenebaum, a biotechnology stock analyst at Bear Stearns. Amgen's shares are down nearly 20 percent since late January, knocking about $20 billion off the company's market value. But the stock has edged up a bit since its recent low of $55.13 on March 29, as some investors have apparently adopted management's view that it is too soon for a fire sale.

{Those investors are the same ones who beat their chests loudly and trumpet that "Amgen is the bellwether of the biotech industry" and "Amgen is a world-class organization".... they might have been in the early to mid '90's, but since 1998 this organization has become a bloated, wasteful whale rotting on the beach, and the stench has finally blown downwind to the rest of the world.}

"We are not in a crisis, that's for sure," Kevin W. Sharer, Amgen's chairman and chief executive, said in an interview.

In a crisis, "people don't know what to do," he said. "People's hair is on fire. Confidence is challenged. We're not there."

{You SHOULD be...seven YEARS ago...}

Rather, he said, "we're in some pretty choppy water." {So was the Titanic, Captain..}

{No, Captain- confidence is one thing that you definitely do not lack....the management strategy of wringing every last drop of Medicare billing and product line extension from your tired EPOGEN and NEUPOGEN franchises is being shown to be the proverbial "fart in church"...ARANESP and NEULASTA are a patent attorney's strategy to exploit a loophole in FDA filing rules by modifying the original chemical compound with an additional sugar molecule to delay the decay of the compound's metabolism by extending its dosage...it's a tired strategy that was brought on to delay the lack of discovery by the R&D department, and the sand's running out of that hourglass...how's that statue of Custer, by the way???}

The biggest waves are several recent studies suggesting that the company's blockbuster anemia drugs, Aranesp and Epogen, might be harming patients, particularly if overused. Those products accounted for $6.6 billion of Amgen's $14.3 billion in revenue last year.

{Another ineffective strategy - search far and wide to identify new uses beyond the initial indication in anemia patients. The dialysis center and hospital channels are played out, so let's find new indications for the product....OOPS....THAT wasn't supposed to happen....bummer...NOW what do we do??? Dust off the Spin-Machine 5000....again...}

The Food and Drug Administration put new warnings on the drugs last month, citing studies suggesting that Aranesp and Epogen might cause heart problems or hasten the death of cancer patients.

{Maybe that's because that's not what the product was designed to do??? Maybe that's because the crew pursued that strategy to keep the billing pipelines full by expanding their product indications while they tried to buy time and actually DISCOVER something marketable in the lab??? Maybe they've run out of time, and the gamble didn't work???}

On Wednesday, the company said it would briefly delay the reporting of its first-quarter results, originally scheduled for next week, to allow it to include data from a clinical trial of Aranesp. The financial results are now expected April 23.

{More buying of time to spin the results...that should be a MEMORABLE day, to say the least...}

Late Tuesday, Amgen said that its chief financial officer, Richard D. Nanula, was resigning to "pursue other opportunities," but would stay on for three months to effect a transition. It also said that Robert Bradway would succeed him as the finance chief. Adding to its woes, Amgen recently reported that patients in a clinical trial combining its new colon cancer drug, Vectibix, with other treatments were more likely to die than patients who got only the other treatments. As a result, Vectibix is likely to remain only a niche drug for now.

{Ahhh...SOMEONE'S gotta take the fall...so it might as well be the creative, financing CFO from Mauschwitz, you know, the one who took on all the debt back in '02 to buy back stock so we could prop up the EPS figures....SOMEONE needs to pay, right??? And ANOTHER product that goes pffffft???
Biotech ain't easy, folks, and past successes have blinded some people to the realities that "blockbuster" products don't just fall from Heaven...you hit it big, once upon a time...}

Sizing up Amgen's situation in a report titled "Looking More Like Large Pharma," a Citigroup analyst, Yaron Werber, has predicted that Amgen's revenues will grow only 4 percent a year through 2010. That would be well below its 20 percent annual sales growth from 2003 to 2006.

{Finally, someone who's willing to call it like it really IS, and has been...if not for the aggressive marketing of expanding the two tired product franchises beyond their originally intended indications, this slowing revenue growth was becoming apparent 5-7 years ago...the 20 percent growth was under the Binder regime...that ended in May 2000. It should have been obvious, but who knew???}

The company has mainly reacted to the mounting uncertainty about future sales by taking cost-control steps like a hiring slowdown and postponing the opening of a new factory in Ireland. If sales drop further, Amgen says, more cuts can be made. {I'll BET they can...but probably NOT where they SHOULD be made...}
{Exactly what DO all those people do??? Under the current regime, Amgen's headcount has expanded SIGNIFICANTLY, and capital projects have also expanded, with at least four new mid-rise executive and administrative buildings on the sprawling Thousand Oaks campus...seems to me that many of those beautiful new homes in Dos Vientos might be coming up for sale in the next few months....of course, the Captain will keep his salary and bonus structure intact...but I also hope that JM & HI both experience THEIR time in the unemployment line, ....you slimy, pompous M*F*'s...it would only be fair...}

Results due in May

Just how painful should become clearer in the next few weeks. By early May, the company is expected to release the results of a crucial study testing Aranesp's effect on the longevity of patients with small-cell lung cancer. Aranesp is approved to treat the anemia caused by cancer chemotherapy.

If the May results indicate that patients taking Aranesp are more likely to die sooner than they might otherwise, "the tide will turn" against the drugs, said Dr. John A. Glaspy, a professor of medicine at UCLA.

{If I were a betting individual, I'd get my clam-diggers out...}

"We will not be able to justify treating lots of patients" with Aranesp, said Glaspy, who has received consulting and research fees from Amgen.

{Uh, Doc, do I hear those "consulting and research fees" drying up, and wallets slamming shut in the background???}

An FDA advisory committee plans to meet May 10 to discuss the safety of the anemia drugs. And later that month another big drugmaker, Roche, might win FDA approval for an anemia drug that would compete with Amgen's products.

(Ahhh...competition...better handled in court than in the marketplace ...it's in this organization's DNA...ever since they hitched their wagon to J&J's star, this organization's tagline as "a law firm with a biotech company attached" has been played out over and over...}

Epogen and Aranesp are both genetically engineered versions of erythropoietin, or EPO, a protein made in the kidneys to stimulate production of oxygen-carrying red blood cells. Johnson & Johnson sells a version of Epogen, marketed as Procrit, under a license from Amgen.

The drugs have been shown to reduce the need for blood transfusions in patients with kidney disease and in cancer patients getting chemotherapy.

But in November, a study found that patients with kidney failure who were treated aggressively with an EPO drug had more deaths and heart problems than patients who took only enough of the drugs to raise their levels of red blood cells by more modest amounts.

{Let's think about this LOGICALLY, SHALL WE...if a product intended to stimulate red-cell production is administered to people with cancer cells, doesn't it logically follow that the cancer cells will probably be STIMULATED as well??? You don't need a PhD in Molecular Biology to figure THAT out, but in their never-ending quest to milk the EPO cash cow as long as possible while they've struggled to discover ANYTHING novel, they've reached pretty far and wide to try and find SOME new indication that will turn the "blockbuster" billing tap back on....they've gambled on a risky strategy, and it appears that a strategic blunder has been made...it'll be REALLY interesting to see how they spin those Danish results on April 23....}

Then a number of studies came out suggesting that use of Aranesp by cancer patients could worsen their disease or hasten their deaths.

(Ya THINK???}

Amgen did not immediately disclose the results of one of the trials, done by Danish researchers, prompting an inquiry by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

{Naughty naughty....THAT'S where the arrogance and hubris undoes them...now we're fighting a war on TWO fronts....science AND business/regulatory...}

Amgen executives, and some outside scientists, say it is still far from clear if the drugs are truly dangerous. Most of the studies showing risks have problems in their methodology or have not yet been published. {Of course they do...Amgen ALWAYS does everything perfectly...they're the bellwhether of the biotech industry...didn't you know that???} The risks also seem to be mainly in patients whose red-cell counts are raised beyond the level recommended by the drugs' labels.

{But isn't that the product strategy??? Encourage MORE usage of EPOGEN/ARANESP??? How else can you keep the billing tap turned on???}

New products key

Whatever happens with sales of its anemia drugs, if Amgen is to remain a fast-growing company it must develop new products. But it has yet to show a particular skill in that area, even though it does have many test drugs in its pipeline.

{Welcome to Achilles' heel...or Amgen's hell....memorize those words: "yet to show a particular skill"}

To this day, Amgen still largely lives off Epogen, first approved in 1989, and Neupogen, a drug approved in 1991 that prevents infections in patients receiving chemotherapy.

Its biggest new products since then, Aranesp and Neulasta, were modifications of the original two. And its other big product, the rheumatoid arthritis drug Enbrel, was not homegrown but came as part of the company's $10 billion acquisition of Immunex in 2002.

{Add a benign sugar molecule compound to the original compound to qualify the product legally as a new product, reset the patent clock, ratchet up the marketing machine, and turn the patent exclusivity billing tap back on ....it's a derivative of the "Big Pharma" strategy...

Like Janet Jackson sang so eloquently "What have you done for me lately" (to earn your high P/E and bloated market cap)???

They overpaid for Immunex, RN engineered some financial fancy steps, they stalled as long as they could, but it appears that they've apparently run out of time, and banked on a strategy that turned sour on them...poor babies...}

After being promoted to chief executive in 2000, Sharer recruited Roger M. Perlmutter from Merck to run research and development. The research effort has roughly tripled since 2002, to more than 6,000 people and $3.4 billion in spending, and the number of drug candidates under development has similarly soared.

Denosumab, a drug for osteoporosis and bone cancer, could be a blockbuster, and some investors say that it is now more important than ever to Amgen's future. But it will be two or three years before it is known whether the drug is safe and effective enough to win approval.

{And in the meantime???...the current strategy appears to have backfired...stay tuned to find out if the captain of the ship can successfully navigate "the choppy water" that he's navigated them into.......meanwhile, BAIL like crazy...}

Chinese wheat gluten - Imagine that....

2007-04-12T07:19:00.000-07:00

Western profit-whores + Chinese ethical lapses = DEAD AMERICAN PETS

"...only a middleman".... yeah, RIGHT!!!! And these people are our trading partners, HUH? And there's pressure to make them MORE prominent in our global trading scheme????

We as a nation are SUNK if we offshore our food supply to China/India or any other area that does not share American standards and values, whatever THOSE are...(profit at any cost???) And this from someone who thinks of himself as a relatively conservative Republican??? If we continue down this path, we as a nation ARE screwed!!!

Here are the details from the New York Times' David Barboza:
"

"Chinese company focus of pet probe

Answers sought on contamination

BY DAVID BARBOZA, The New York Times

Article Last Updated:04/11/2007 09:07:46 PM PDT

XUZHOU, China - Behind an unmarked gate in this booming city well north of Shanghai lies a large building at the heart of an investigation over tainted pet food that has killed at least 16 cats and dogs in the United States, sickened 12,000 and prompted a nationwide recall.

This is the property of the Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Co., a small agricultural products business investigators have identified as the source of contaminated wheat gluten that was shipped to a major pet food supplier in the United States.

Some American regulators suspect there was deliberate mixing of substances. They are looking into the possibility that melamine, the chemical linked to the pets' deaths, was mixed into the wheat gluten in China as a way to bolster the protein content, according to a person who was briefed on the investigation.

Though American and Chinese regulators are searching for answers, local residents and workers are unwittingly providing clues about how the pet food supply may have become contaminated.

The case is also exposing some of the enormous challenges confronting the global marketplace as China becomes a worldwide supplier of agricultural products.

There are strong indications that Xuzhou Anying, a company whose main office seems to consist of just two rooms and an adjoining warehouse here, possessed substantial supplies of melamine and even sought to buy quantities of it over the Internet.

If melamine was intentionally blended into the wheat gluten, the findings could become a vast setback for agricultural trade between the United States and China, a country known for lax food-safety regulations.

Stephen Sundlof, director of the Center for Veterinary Medicine at the Food and Drug Administration, said at a news conference last week that the agency had found unusually high concentrations of melamine in some batches of wheat gluten, as much as 6.6 percent.

Xuzhou Anying, though, has tried to distance itself from the pet food recall in the United States, saying it does not manufacture or export wheat gluten and acts only as a middleman trading in agricultural goods and chemicals.

In a telephone interview last week, the company's manager, Mao Lijun, said he had no idea how wheat gluten with his company's label ended up in the United States or how melamine, a chemical commonly used to make plastics, fertilizer and fire retardant, was mixed into a product that was eventually shipped there.

Though some American scientists still question whether melamine is toxic enough to kill pets, the chemical is not approved for use in human or pet food in the United States. The FDA says it may have led to kidney failure in some pets.

Here in Xuzhou, a metropolitan region of about 1.6 million, Mao turned away visitors to his office, declaring that he had nothing more to say on the matter.

But there are indications that Xuzhou Anying has manufacturing facilities in this area and also had access to melamine, which is sometimes used as a fertilizer in Asia. For instance, in recent months Xuzhou Anying has posted several requests on Web trading sites seeking to purchase large quantities of melamine..

Chinese regulators say they are now carrying out a nationwide inspection of wheat gluten supplies. American regulators have banned all wheat gluten from China, but there has been no recall so far in China of wheat gluten made by Xuzhou Anying, though the company's wheat gluten could be used to make bread, bakery and other food items."

They're bad news for the Western world....

2007-03-24T09:23:00.000-07:00

As a pet owner and animal lover, I have been horrified at the news surrounding the tainted pet food that has killed over 16 animals so far. Today's development pushed me over the edge...

Today's news :

..."The Food and Drug Administration has said the investigation into the pet deaths was focused on wheat gluten in the food. The gluten itself would not cause kidney failure, but it could have been contaminated, the FDA said.

Paul Henderson, chief executive of Menu Foods, confirmed Friday that the wheat gluten was purchased from China.

Bob Rosenberg, senior vice president of government affairs for the National Pest Management Association, said it would be unusual for the wheat to be tainted."

"It would make no sense to spray a crop itself with rodenticide," Rosenberg said, adding that grain shippers typically put bait stations around the perimeter of their storage facilities..."

So let me get this straight, we've already GUTTED our American manufacturing base so that the CEO's can make big bonuses by saving a few bucks and sending their labor offshore to China and now we're buying WHEAT GLUTEN from them, too??? And it's KILLING OUR ANIMAL COMPANIONS???

These people are bad news....their standards are NOT the same as ours, and we are becoming FAR, FAR, FAR too dependent upon them for EVERYTHING, from heavy industrial and manufacturing capacity and capability to WHEAT GLUTEN for pet food. Our reliance upon them will probably be our undoing as a nation.

They are taking us over without firing a shot, because the corporate-whores are selling us out. They are only interested in beating their next quarterly estimate, so that they can feather their nests with big bonuses, and they are selling this country down the river, inch by inch.

And no one seems to care...and now our pets are dropping dead and suffering KIDNEY FAILURE because some pet-food corporate-whore wanted to save a few bucks and pad his margins by using shitty Chinese wheat gluten....

Hey MenuFoods CEO Paul Henderson, I hope all your wealth is tied up in your company's stock, and that it continues to tank, and that you are ruined as a result. Your SHORT-SIGHTEDNESS and cost-cutting just came back to bite you squarely in your fat, white ass - you SOLD out, and your wave just closed out on you...

I grieve for the pet owners - I hope Henderson and his cronies end up broke and destitute...bastards....

Son of Kyoto

2007-02-02T07:33:00.000-08:00

So, the pundits have spoken, and global warming is officially man made.... (I have to admit, the sun DOES seem more intense NOW than it did when I was a kid back in the '70's, so I AM on board with the core topic - it's how we go about SOLVING it FAIRLY that bugs me...)

The scientists said it was "very likely" -- or more than 90 percent probable -- that human activities led by burning fossil fuels explained most of the warming in the past 50 years.
"February 2, 2007 may be remembered as the day the question mark was removed from whether (people) are to blame for climate change," said Achim Steiner, head of the U.N. Environment Program.
The Kyoto Protocol is the main plan for capping emissions of greenhouse gases until 2012 but it has been severely weakened since the United States, the top source of greenhouse gases, pulled out in 2001. Emissions by many backers of Kyoto are far over target. {Typical U.N. - do as I say, not as I do....}

"Bush pulled out of Kyoto, saying caps would harm the economy and that Kyoto should include developing nations. He focuses instead on big investments in hydrogen and biofuels." {Yeah, why should WE be the only ones who have to tow the line, and foot the bill? Right on, President Bush!!!} So, when do CHINA and INDIA have to step up to the plate and take as much ownership and accountability as the United States, or does the U.N. just give them a free pass???

It's more pervasive than that...

2007-01-27T09:42:00.000-08:00

Found this article on "The Poltergeist Curse" while doing some research on one of the actors...

I got news for you guys...it's not the POLTERGEIST curse, it's the HOLLYWOOD curse...

You people keep living the kind of lives that you do, and creating the kind of "art" that you doo (think that's a misspelling???), eventually some weird shtuff is gonna getcha....

Letter of the law vs. spirit of the law???

2007-01-24T14:42:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago, I was driving down one of the busy local thoroughfares, and my eye was drawn towards what appeared to be fishing line festooned to the top of the streetlights along the street.

Then, last week, this article appeared in a local paper, and explained what the "fishing line" REALLY is...

Now I'm basically a "live and let live" kinda guy, but the rationale behind this structure strikes me as somewhat odd, and I'm puzzled how stringing fishing line throughout the neighborhood will "make our property values go up." (They said the same thing about a local school bond initiative that would have been a complete boondoggle, but I digress...)

Irrespective that public property is being used for a religious display, not unlike a creche on the steps of City Hall, the thing that disturbed me the MOST about this development is that the local hawks and birds are being killed and maimed by it...

According to the article: "Three red-tailed hawks in the area were said to be dead or injured after flying into the wire. "They had broken wings, which is consistent with flying into wires," said Linda Parks, the Ventura County supervisor who oversees Oak Park."

Great - this thing is put up as to stretch the description of its intended purpose, and exploit a loophole in Rabbinic Law, and it's also killing the local hawks and birds...not cool....

Think about it - this thing is like a giant cheesecutter that's been strung up around the neighborhood, and in an effort to be discrete, its supporters are causing injury to the local bird population.

If it's such a "nice thing for the community to have", then why not be more PROUD of it and make it more visible to hawks, people and everyone and everything!!! Rather than hiding it, ENHANCE it with some mylar streamers that will let the birds know that it's there, rather than hiding it in such as manner that they get low-bridged by it when they're flying about the area?

Maybe it isn't such a "huge blessing" after all...

More decline of Western Civ....

2007-01-23T06:54:00.000-08:00

According to this report from AP, according to a recent survey taken by The Pew Research Center, "80 percent of 18- to 25-year-olds in this country see getting rich as a top life goal for their generation."

Let's see here, we're facing one of the biggest challenges to Western Civilization since the Nazi's in World War II, and today's kids see their top life goal as a new iPod.

Again, lay the blame at the feet of the parents, who undoubtedly replace time and guidance with material possessions to assuage their guilt at wanting to "have it all" by pursuing careers AND children...

And they say that MTV doesn't encourage a creeping sense of materialism and entitlement...mark my words, you heard it here first....someday, archaeologists will trace the decline of Western civilization back to 8-1-81, the day that MTV was let loose on American culture...

This just in from the Monty Python and the Holy Grail file...

2007-01-23T02:38:00.000-08:00

The only thing that wasn't said was "I fart in your general direction" or the comment about someone's mother being a hamster and someone's father smelling of elderberries:

Group Says al-Qaida No. 2 Mocks Bush and here