Happy 6000th birthday, Universe!

Via The Guardian:

At 6pm tonight at the Geological Society of London, scientists will raise their glasses to James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh (below), who in 1650 used the chronology of the Bible to calculate the precise date and moment of creation.

Working from the book of Genesis, and risking some speculation on the Hebrew calendar, he calculated that it began at 6pm on Saturday October 22, 4004 BC. [How scientific!]
[...]
The geologists selected the anniversary for a day-long conference on some of the fakes, frauds and hoaxes that have plagued geological and palaeontological research for centuries. “It’s not that we think Archbishop Ussher’s date was a fraud,” said Ted Nield, the society’s communications officer. “It’s just that it was spectacularly wrong.”

Protecting civil liberties is way too controversial you guys

http://www.bend.com/news/ar_view^3Far_id^3D18712.htm

The AP reported:

Three Medford school teachers were threatened with arrest and escorted from the event after they showed up wearing T-shirts with the slogan “Protect our civil liberties.” All three said they applied for and received valid tickets from Republican headquarters in Medford.

The women said they did not intend to protest. “I wanted to see if I would be able to make a statement that I feel is important, but not offensive, in a rally for my president,” said Janet Voorhies, 48, a teacher in training.

“We chose this phrase specifically because we didn’t think it would be offensive or degrading or obscene,” said Tania Tong, 34, a special education teacher.

Thursday’s event in Oregon sets a new bar for a Bush/Cheney campaign that has taken extraordinary measures to screen the opinions of those who attend Bush and Cheney speeches.

Public Service Announcement: You can’t sell babies door-to-door

http://www.jsonline.com/news/metro/oct04/266489.asp

A Milwaukee woman was arrested early Wednesday for trying to sell her 6-day-old baby girl to a neighbor for $10, Milwaukee police said.
[...]
Officers found the suspect, the newborn and a 1-year-old daughter, living in an apartment strewn with spoiled food and no refrigerator or stove, he said.

Denise Revels Robinson, director of the Bureau of Milwaukee Child Welfare, said Wednesday the children were being given a health screening. She said it’s believed the baby was born Oct. 7. The other child was born Jan, 24, 2003, she said. There were no visible signs of abuse on the children, she said. They were placed in foster homes.

This morning, a social worker will go to Children’s Court to seek a petition declaring the children in need of protection, she said.

Although information was still being compiled on the case, Revels Robinson said she understands the woman has three other children who are living outside the state with relatives.
[...]
The suspect, who was extremely intoxicated, knocked on her neighbor’s door shortly after midnight and asked if “she wanted to buy some property for $10,” Henning said. The neighbor asked what she was talking about and the woman offered her baby for sale.

Minutes later, the woman showed up again, this time with the baby.

Why the hell wasn’t this heifer offered a free hysterectomy after the first of the five kids she couldn’t take care of were born?

Prescription Drug Reimportation

A couple of things about reimportation:

Firstly, another country’s drugs may (and often do) have a different bioavailability or quality than the ones used here, so it makes sense that the FDA would have to investigate and Congress would have to deliberate before giving the go ahead. I wouldn’t want to give an old lady reimported heart pills, only to find out they absorb into the body 10% faster or slower. I’m not going to give the woman a heart attack to save her seven dollars. I’m not giving a medication to anyone without hearing the bioavailability rating from a source I trust.

Another thing, several of the brand name drugs being used as talking points already have a generic available. In Illinois, for example, there’s a bill pending to reimport 90 brand name drugs. 12 of the 90 drugs already have a generic equivalent available in the U.S., and the generic equivalent is cheaper than the reimported brand name would be. The people could already be taking the generic with the same bioavailability instead of lobbying for a reimport that may have a questionable bioavailability. [Yes, I know rumor has it that some reimports are made in the same American factories, hence the italicized "may". Let's not pick nits here.]

When customers come in here with money concerns about one of their brand name prescriptions that doesn’t have a generic available, we write down for them a short list of drugs in the same family that do have a generic available. They can take the list to the doctor and discuss if a change is feasible for them. Often, it is.

I cannot stress enough, take the generic. Take the generic. Take the generic. Take the generic. Some people are allergic to a binding agent in their brand name drug’s generic (just as some people are allergic to a binding agent in the brand name and not in the generic). And some drugs should be obtained from the same manufacturer after you’ve started taking them (Digoxin, Levothyroxine, and Warfarin Sodium, for example), so if you get the brand name the first time you’re stuck with it. Those are the only good reasons I can think of to not take one of the high-quality generics we have available to us in this country. I can’t frickin stress it enough. Don’t pay extra for years-old research, neat-shaped stock bottles with pretty labels, armies of drug reps marketing to frazzled doctors, and advertisements of questionable morality. Let someone else be the gullible one.

The truth about Medicare discount cards

I just about fell out of my chair laughing when Cheney said those new drug cards are saving seniors 30% on their prescription drugs. Where the heck did he pull that from? I’m a pharmacy technician. The huge majority of our medicare-aged patients don’t qualify for the $600 per year. In order to get the $600, your income from all sources (including SS) must be no more than $12,569 if single and $16,862 for a married couple. If covered, the patient must pay either 5 or 10% of the cost up front and the rest is deducted from their $600. The discount cards for everybody else don’t provide a better discount than the cards our store was giving out for free (and the medicare-approved cards usually cost $30 per year to boot).

Of the few people we serve that did qualify, all of them are barely-scraping-by widows, and the $600 is probably not even going to cover 30% of the drugs they use this year. Some of them ran through the $600 in the first two months, paying $30 or $60 out of pocket those two months and now paying everything out of pocket just as they did before this plan.

I’d really like to know what numbers Cheney was looking at when he claimed the new drug cards are saving seniors 30%. Was he meaning to say the new drug cards are saving the slim minority of seniors who qualify 30% and saving the rest exactly what they would have been saving beforehand if they enrolled for a free discount card? I think most of the pharmacists and techs who were watching that debate reflexively yelled “BULLSHIT” when he said that.