Written by: Patrick Galvin 
Meth, which had seen a rapid decline in use and popularity, is now exploding back onto the scene quite literally, whilst bypassing psuedophedrine laws that had curbed it’s use earlier.
TULSA, Okla. – This is the new formula for methamphetamine: a two-liter soda bottle, a few handfuls of cold pills and some noxious chemicals. Shake the bottle and the volatile reaction produces one of the world’s most addictive drugs.
The “shake-and-bake” approach has become popular because it requires a relatively small number of pills of the decongestant pseudoephedrine — an amount easily obtained under even the toughest anti-meth laws that have been adopted across the nation to restrict large purchases of some cold medication.
In Market News this week, look for Benadryl’s parent company stock to go up.
Using the new formula, batches of meth are much smaller but just as dangerous as the old system, which sometimes produces powerful explosions, touches off intense fires and releases drug ingredients that must be handled as toxic waste.
“If there is any oxygen at all in the bottle, it has a propensity to make a giant fireball,” said Sgt. Jason Clark of the Missouri State Highway Patrol’s Division of Drug and Crime Control. “You’re not dealing with rocket scientists here anyway. If they get unlucky at all, it can have a very devastating reaction.”
After the chemical reaction, what’s left is a crystalline powder that users smoke, snort or inject. They often discard the bottle, which now contains a poisonous brown and white sludge.
Sweet. Now when I see cars swerving on the highway, I know it’s not because they’re drunk, but because they lit their hand ON FIRE. I’m sure the Adopt-A-Highway program is going to hit a couple of speed-bumps.
“It simplified the process so much that everybody’s making their own dope,” said Kevin Williams, sheriff of Marion County, Ala., about 80 miles west of Birmingham.
Is it just me, or do police use the word “dope” to describe every illicit substance on the planet? Heroin? Dope. Marijuana? Dope. Cocaine? Dope. Meth? Dope. What’s next to be called dope? Alcohol?
“It can be your next-door neighbor doing it. It can be one of your family members living downstairs in the basement.”
Grandpa???
Data from the Justice Department and the DEA data suggest the method could only be in its early stages, and “shake-and-bake” labs have recently been discovered as far north as Indiana and as far east as West Virginia.
Malcom Gladwell wrote about illicit drug use in The Tipping Point, explaining that focus should be on limiting the consequences of drug use, since demand is much harder to curtail, especially when dealing with a truculent youth population. Drugs such as cocaine could be dealt with more effectively by focusing on dosage more than demand, as they did with cigarettes and the amount of nicotine they contained. That way, people are less likely to become permanently addicted or to overdose, and experimentation will more likely pass without life-long effect. But what do you do with a drug that could spontaneously combust at any point during it’s conception? Dosages go out the window.
It’s times like these that I wonder if marijuana’s effects have been over-zealously vilified in the media. Legalization, anyone?
Written by: Mike 
From Reuters
CHICAGO (Reuters) – A woman is suing a Chicago-area zoo for a 2008 fall near a dolphin exhibit, accusing zookeepers of encouraging the mammals to splash water and then failing to protect spectators from wet surfaces, local media reported on Thursday.
Allecyn Edwards is demanding more than $50,000 for lost wages, medical expenses and emotional trauma from the Chicago Zoological Society and the Forest Preserve District of Cook County, which operate the zoo in Chicago’s southwest suburbs.
Well played Miss Edwards. While others are busy having fun, watching and interacting with the animals, you are scouting the area for ways to sue the zoo due to your lack of common sense.
You’re at zoo, there is water and wild animals – WHAT DO YOU EXPECT TO HAPPEN? Would you really have acted any different if there were signs around; “Caution: Walkways Could Become Wet”. You either are smart, and understand the area around you, or are dumb as a brick and expect everyone to spoon feed everything to you. I think based on this we can vote for the latter.
I really, really, really hope this woman finds the justice she so clearly deserves. No one in this country should be subjected to emotional trauma at a zoo, and loose wages because of it. Note the incredible amount of sarcasm in this last paragraph.
Written by: Patrick Galvin According to several studies, competition among private insurers is borderline monopolistic:
WASHINGTON – One of the most widely accepted arguments against a government medical plan for the middle class is that it would quash competition — just what private insurers seem to be doing themselves in many parts of the U.S.
Several studies show that in lots of places, one or two companies dominate the market. Critics say monopolistic conditions drive up premiums paid by employers and individuals.
I won’t go very far into this one, mainly because I’ve purged enough about healthcare this week. This information may seem redundant to some, suspect to others, and still doesn’t change opinions about HOW to increase competition. In other words, I’m just passing on the news ’til something big happens. Enjoy.
Written by: Mike As an iPhone owner I can’t help but check the app store at least a few times a week to see if there are any cool new apps. Sadly, most of the new apps are fart jokes, and 25 dollar GPS apps. It’s my goal in this series to profile these absurd apps, and give them all the glory they deserve.
First up
Really?? I’m going to pay 1 dollar to have an app on my phone tell me to whisper sweet nothings in my girlfriends ear while nibbling on her ear? The most unimaginative human beings on the planet must love this app.
“Honey, let us make love”
“That sounds well Herb. Lets get in the mood first”
“Okay Barb, let me just pull out my…. phone, so it can tell me what to do to you”
“Oooh… caress your legs for 60 seconds – get the stopwatch ready – HERE I GO!”
“oooooooooooooooooooo HERBERT!!!!! DO ME NOW!!!”
Listen, I’m all for apps that help people in their lives. I’d just like to think that people about to make love are able to do so without their phone telling them how to do it. If you need help in foreplay odds are its in your execution, not actually coming up with what to do.
Until next week.
Written by: Patrick Galvin 
President Obama and counterparts in the White House have seemed to concede that a government – run, public option for healthcare is not considered essential in their overall reform: Story from Yahoo! News:
WASHINGTON – Bowing to Republican pressure and an uneasy public, President Barack Obama‘s administration signaled Sunday it is ready to abandon the idea of giving Americans the option of government-run insurance as part of a new health care system.
…
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said that government alternative to private health insurance is “not the essential element” of the administration’s health care overhaul. The White House would be open to co-ops, she said, a sign that Democrats want a compromise so they can declare a victory.
Under a proposal by Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., consumer-owned nonprofit cooperatives would sell insurance in competition with private industry, not unlike the way electric and agriculture co-ops operate, especially in rural states such as his own.
…
“All I’m saying is, though, that the public option, whether we have it or we don’t have it, is not the entirety of health care reform,” Obama said at a town hall meeting in Grand Junction, Colo. “This is just one sliver of it, one aspect of it.”
It’s hardly the same rhetoric Obama employed during a constant, personal campaign for legislation.
“I am pleased by the progress we’re making on health care reform and still believe, as I’ve said before, that one of the best ways to bring down costs, provide more choices and assure quality is a public option that will force the insurance companies to compete and keep them honest,” Obama said in July.
No matter how this is spun, this is a defeat for the Democratic party. Yes, healthcare reform will be passed this year, and if passed in it’s current state, it will have the “bipartisan” touch that makes the swing voters’ crotches tingle. But it will be a defeat for liberal Democrats, end of story. Obama wanted this public option, Pelosi certainly did. Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) guranteed a public option in some form a little while ago. The core power of the Democratic Party wanted a government run public option, and saw it as the best way to reform healthcare. To them it was essential, not expendible. The only good news for them is that by hanging a public option over everyone’s heads, they may have convinced large insuruers to concede on private reforms, out of fear that otherwise they’d face more stalwart competition to their profits.
So what does this mean exactly? One of the biggest attention-grabbers during August recess’ healthcare-reform debate was the viability and effectiveness of the public option. In fact, I realized I didn’t know what else “healthcare reform” meant specifically. I’d only heard it discussed in aphoristic terms, with catch phrases like “bringing costs down,” and “keeping insurers honest,” and “updating infrastructure.” So I looked to the Obama-Biden plan courtesy of barackobama.com to figure out what tangible things I could attach to their private insurance reform, especially now that the public option may be nixed in favor of co-ops, or potentially nothing at all.
Below are the tangible private insurance reforms I could find, to the best of my ability, from the above linked plan courtesy of Obama-Biden. I looked for speific laws being removed, added and specific amounts of money or pieces of legislation while trying to shed as much ambiguity as possible. Hopefully this helps:
1) COVERAGE FOR ALL: No one would be able to be denied coverage due to pre-existing medical conditions.
2) GETTING RID OF PAPER: The Obama-Biden plan does beleive that money can be saved in the long term by using computers instead of paper, you know, like people under 75 do. They want to indeed spend $10billion/year for 5 years to help make this transition happen. They claim that this could save up to 77 billion dollars a year if adopted ubiqutiously.
3) COST TRANSPARENCY: Obama-Biden plan to make care providers give data regarding staffing rations, number of hospital-acquired infections, and portions of premiums spent on patient care as opposed to administrative costs, among other things. They beleive this will help improve effiiency of the care being provided .
4) EFFECTIVENESS RESEARCH: Obama-Biden want to establish an independent institute to compare effectiveness of different care plans, hopefully to help pinpoint which treatements work the best, the most often.
5) IMPORTING: The plan given wants to allow drugs to be imported from other nations, provided they are screened for safety. Currently most drugs cannot be imported, and as a result can demand higher prices. According to Obama-Biden, drugs sold in Europe and Canada can be sold here for as much as 67% more.
6) REPEALING THE NEGOTIATION BAN: The 2003 Medicare Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act prohibits the government from negotiating down the cost of prescription drugs. Obama-Biden want to repeal this ban and hope to save as much as 30 billion dollars, according to the plan.
7) CATASTROPHIC HELP: The Obama-Biden plan would give tax benefits to small business who purchase insurance for their employees, in the case of catastrophic illness that could have a disproprotaionate effect on a small business’ profits. They would re-imburse small business for such events after a certain threshold, so long as the saved money was used to lower employees’ premiums.
8) SMALL BUSINESS TAX CREDIT: For small business providing insurance to employees, they would be given a tax credit so long as they are covering a reasonable amount of potential healthcare cost.
9) SAVE THE CHILDREN: It would be required for children to have health insurance. Kids could stay on parents’ plans up to age 25 under the new reform.
10) MALPRACTICE: The Obama-Biden plan would try to more fairly negotiatie malpractice legislation, so that doctors aren’t paying such high premiums to provide care. The language in this section is brief and vague, however.
Hmm, this all doesn’t sound too bad looking through it. Whether you’re opposed to or approve of the public option, this at least looks like a step in the right diretion for the private industry. However, there are several chunks of the private reform plan that are now in question with the potential dropping of a public option, and these chunks looked good from the outside:
1) DISEASE MANAGEMENT: The Obama-Biden draft would mandate any new plans in the new public exchange would have to invest in preventative measures to help curb diseases before they start. Without a public option, where does this proactive disease care mandate necessarily go?
2) OUTCOME MEASURES: Again, the new Public Healthcare Exchange (the government-run public plan partially composed of competing private insurers) would mandate that providers under the exchange would be rewarded based on Physician – validated outcome measures. Without an exchange, what body of government or industry will reward good care, and how will they do it?
3) GENERIC DRUGS: According to the Obama-Biden plan, private drug companies will pay generic drugmakers not to enter a market, thus perverting the supposed captialistic competition within the industry. They planned to use the public plan as a gateway for generic drug makers to enter the market more easily, and wanted to use generic drugs more regularly in the public plan. Without a public plan, what new replacement reform will ensure that generics are given their fair shot?
It’s not 100% clear how these last 3 questions will be answered. It’s not even entirely certain that liberal Democrats will approve of a measure that doesn’t include a public option, inciting a political civil war of sorts. It seems that for the President, August is proving to be a hot month, indeed.
Written by: Patrick Galvin NEW YORK –
Twitter has suffered from another attack following one that left the site down for several hours last week.
Tuesday’s outage was brief. The online messaging site said in its status blog Tuesday afternoon that it is analyzing its traffic data to determine the nature of the latest attack. No other details were given.
Last Thursday, Twitter was inaccessible for several hours following hacker attacks targeted at a Georgian blogger who uses the site. Fake traffic flooded Twitter, making it inaccessible for millions of legitimate users. While the blogger’s accounts on Facebook and LiveJournal were also hit, only Twitter suffered an extended shutdown.
Is this big news? Probably not. It’s recently been tradition that booming websites don’t initially keep up with their popularity until a crisis happens. Myspace had the shenanigans with sexual predators, Facebook was susceptible to hackers taking information, and now Twitter is being downed every now and then by people with nothing better to do. It should blow over in a few days, and in the long term the appeal of mainstream, easy access to peers won’t be trumped by a few hackers. However, Twitter needs to be careful because the service it offers isn’t exactly something another group can’t replicate. Recently the Dallas Police started using Nixle, a similar service to Twitter, to help attract citizens to anonymously give tips. They would’ve gone with Twitter, but were afraid due to the number of fake-posters. If a company is able to beat Twitter to the punch, or Facebook/Myspace for that matter, they will do so by offering basically the same service only with much better safety measures, something that is not implausible.
It’s nothing to sweat bullets about, but it seems as networking hits its tipping point, these sites had better start investing more in protecting the users.
Written by: Patrick Galvin 
Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz were among the 104 major league players listed as having tested positive for performance-enhancing substances in 2003, lawyers with knowledge of the results told The New York Times.
The two were key members of the Boston Red Sox World Series championship teams in 2004 and 2007.
It’s over. As a Boston sports fan I can’t begin to elucidate how shitty this is. Think about what it was like when the Red Sox won back in 2004. Boston was the city of the underdog. The Patriots were yet to be outed for their creative use of a videocamera, and the most famed and notorious championship-drought, tethered to the ghosts of dead baseball players past and years of agonizingly close encounters with greatness, had finally been brought to an end with the ALCS comeback against the Yankees and the World Series win against the Cardinals. The whole country was rooting for Boston. Call it a bandwagon, but it was better than a bandwagon. It was authentic. America always has loved underdogs, and the Red Sox were the quintessential underdog for the better part of a century. There was something ephemerally satisfying about seeing them finally come out on top, even for sports fans from different areas. But it wasn’t just the underdog status that attracted non-residents to the Sox. It was the way they won. It was their “idiots” mentality, they personified a group of people playing the game the right way, for the right reasons. Ortiz and his infectiously happy demeanor was one of the faces of this organization’s newfound bonhomie. Until now.
Don’t let anyone tell you differently. New England sports fans deserve the shit they’ll eventually get from the rest of the U.S. First we gloated about the Patriots. Much like the Red Sox, they were a free-spirited bunch with team spirit and a little extra brains and an unusually cleft-chinned quarterback on their side. We rubbed it in hard. Three championships in four years and we made sure you knew it. Then the videotaping scandal occured, and the Patriots still went 18-0 with no unfair help, and we fans said “Ha! They won because they’re great, not because they cheated!” We exuded headstrong confidence, only to see the Pats produce what is now the “EPIC FAIL” moment of the NFL this decade. They choked hard. And you, the rest of the U.S, reveled in it the way you reveled in Sadaam Hussein’s hanging. But the Sox were still clean, and they were the loveable underdogs. Until the signs started coming…
1) When the Mitchell report first came out, it was for one reason or another swept under the rug that Mitchell himself had ties to the Red Sox. He was a director for the Red Sox at one time, and has regained that title since. But a few names from the Red Sox showed up on the list, so people weren’t too upset. None of them famous, though. Mo Vaughn 10 years after his prime? Jason Giambi’s brother Jeremy? Yawn. I ignored this. Ortiz and Varitek were supposed to be on that list, but if they weren’t, they weren’t. After all, Mitchell was a senator. When it comes to the truth, senators are always an absolute entity.
2) Then came speculation regarding Ortiz’s home-run surge. When he was in Minnesota, he never reached reached 30 homers. Then he came to Boston and was a HR/RBI machine. Boston fans like myself rationalized it accordingly: Boston had better hitting coaches. Ortiz was a natural pull-hitter, and Minnesota tried to make him a contact hitter. Boston let his true form reign. It had nothing to do with his ballooned physique.
3) I still ignored the signs. We all did. But then the last one came, the precipitous fall in power numbers. We’ve seen it in the steroid-era players all the time. Normally a player’s numbers should drop off at a much more gradual pace, as their body slowly deteriorates. Instead Ortiz’s numbers dropped in almost immediate conjunction with increased scrutiny over steroid use: Here are the HR and RBI numbers over the last decade (Minnesota numbers added for emphasis)…
2000 (MIN) – 10/63
2001 (MIN) – 18/48
2002 (MIN)- 20/75
2003 (BOS) – 31/101
2004 (BOS) – 41/139
2005 (BOS) – 47/148
2006 (BOS) – 54/137
2007 (BOS) – 35/117
2008 (BOS) – 23/89
And now in 2009 it’s taken him 93 games to crack 13 HR and 55 RBI. We all knew what was coming. Then additional evidence poured in anyway, just for good measure.
4) Amidst comments from Lou Merloni, it was rumored Red Sox doctors tacitly approved steroid-use by trying to educate their players on how not to abuse them. Sox fans started shivering in their sleep.
5) Ortiz’s friend Manny Ramirez was linked to steroid use and suspended 50 games. At this point we were all practically sobbing, forlornly playing “Sweet Caroline” on our speakers alone in the dark while reminiscing of the naive and innocent past. We knew it was coming.
Finally, it did. Ortiz, our beloved and always-smiling hero, was a steroid-user. All the clutch homeruns, all the chest bumps, the shots of Jack with his fellow “idiots” before games, all of it had become hollowed out. The Yankees were supposed to be the “Evil Empire,” but the Red Sox were no better. They just hid it slightly better.
The only team I really have left right now is the Celtics. So help me God, I think they might be a team that without sneaky videotaping or HGH or steroids, might have actually bonded together and won a real championship the right way. I swear, if it turns up Kevin Garnett was on performance – enhancers I’m giving up following all sports except golf and billiards for the rest of my blonde days.
R.I.P. Boston-mania. R.I.P. Red Sox Nation. R.I.P. all of the excitement and Stephen King books and “I can die happy now” plastered on the grandfathers’ graves. R.I.P. to being “idiots,” the rare whiskey-drinking, fun-loving cavaliers who remembered that sports were supposed to be fun. R.I.P… Boston’s heroes.
