Jim

Not to be too stoopid but this is the place on Roosevelt in the U- correct?

Good thing we have a sound fiscal policy to pay for Iraq.

All that glitters....

Actually in the middle of planning 5 months off. Spreadsheets and logistics. Likely plan is one month in Bolivia then 6 wks in Chile/Argentina. Back home to check on the cat and house then load up the car and meet friends in New Mexico for a climb/hike/ski thru NM, CA, OR, WA.

BD Crossbows, though the Havocs seem a great choice as well.

FYI Subgroup Therapy "This rigorous, large-scale study showed that the combination of glucosamine and chondroitin sulfate1. a glycosaminoglycan that predominates in connective tissue, particularly cartilage, bone, and blood vessels, and in the cornea. 2. a preparation of chondroitin sulfate from bovine tracheal cartilage, administered orally for the treatment of osteoarthritis and joint pain. ..... Click the link for more information. appeared to help people with moderate to severe pain from knee osteoarthritis, but not those with mild pain," says Stephen Straus, director of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. (NCCAM NCCAM - National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NIH) NCCAM - National Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month helped organize and fund the GAIT trial.) How did he reach that conclusion? A quarter of the GAIT participants started the study with moderate to severe pain in their knees, pain that "generally worsens a person's quality of life," explains the study leader, Daniel Clegg of the University of Utah School of Medicine in Salt Lake City. When the GAIT researchers looked only at those 354 people, they found that 79 percent reported at least some relief with the glucosamine-chondroitin combination, more than those taking Celebrex (69 percent) or the placebo (54 percent). "I think the finding in those with moderate to severe pain is important," says Clegg. "But it should be interpreted cautiously." Others aren't so cautious. "People who experience moderate to severe joint discomfort are the ones most in need of treatment," Jason Theodosakis told Business Week magazine in February. Theodosakis, who was a member of GAIT's oversight committee, is the author of The Arthritis Cure, a 1997 bestseller that introduced the public to glucosamine and chondroitin. "For this group, the combination of glucosamine and chondroitin resulted in significant pain and function improvement," he says. Boston University's David Felson is buying none of it. "If you mess around with data long enough, you'll find something," he says. But that doesn't mean the results are valid. "If you do 100 studies of a treatment that show no effect, in 90 of them you can find some subgroup where the treatment had an effect just by chance," he explains. To keep from being swayed by those chance (but tempting) findings, researchers try to look only at what the study was designed to look at. And the GAIT study wasn't designed to look separately at people with moderate to severe pain. "There's no data from previous studies that suggests that this particular subgroup would be more or less likely to respond to glucosamine or chondroitin," notes Felson. "The GAIT researchers pre-defined a primary outcome and seven secondary outcomes they would measure to see if the two supplements worked," he explains. Glucosamine and chondroitin had no impact on the primary outcome (at least a 20 percent decrease in pain) or any of the secondary outcomes (like reduced stiffness). "None of the outcomes targeted the subgroup of subjects suffering moderate to severe pain," he adds. Tempting Sulfate? Why did the GAIT study contradict some earlier studies? One possibility is that the glucosamine hydrochloride used in GAIT doesn't work as well as the glucosamine sulfate used in most earlier studies (and found in most supplements). GAIT's lead investigator explains why the study used glucosamine hydrochloride. "The National Institutes of Health required us to test glucosamine like a drug," says Daniel Clegg. "At the time, only glucosamine hydrochloride was manufactured to pharmaceutical specifications." But the GAIT researchers concluded that people could absorb glucosamine hydrochloride as well as they could absorb glucosamine sulfate. "We did solubility trials that indicated that glucosamine was readily available in either form," says Clegg. If the GAIT planners had thought the form would matter, they could have had glucosamine sulfate made just for the trial. That's what they did for chondroitin, because "there were no commercial chondroitin products available that were manufactured to drug standards," explains Clegg. Boston University's David Felson has another explanation for why glucosamine and chondroitin seemed to work in some earlier studies but flopped in the GAIT trial. "Meta-analyses have shown that industry sponsorship of drug trials produces biased results," he says. Indeed, most of the earlier trials were underwritten by supplement manufacturers. In contrast, "all of the four publicly funded studies have found no effect." It's not necessarily that industry-funded researchers are fabricating results, but that publicly funded trials are larger and more careful to ensure that when something works, it's not due to chance. Where does that leave arthritis sufferers? "Because of the small size of the GAIT's moderate-to-severe-pain subgroup," says Clegg, the findings "need to be confirmed in a study designed for that purpose." While Felson doesn't advise his patients to stop taking the supplements, he thinks that further studies would be a waste. "If my patients think glucosamine and chondroitin are helping them, who am I to tell them to stop?" he asks. "It doesn't cause any harm and it's not that expensive. But I think there's convincing evidence now that this is not an effective therapy for osteoarthritis and that no further research needs to be done. "We have many other investments we need to make in arthritis research, especially treatment, since there are few effective treatments." The Bottom Line * Glucosamine alone and chondroitin alone don't relieve pain from osteoarthritis of the knees any better than a placebo. * The combination of glucosamine and chondroitin doesn't help people with mild arthritis pain. * Glucosamine plus chondroitin seems to help people with moderate to severe arthritis pain, but those results may have been due to chance. * There's no evidence that taking glucosamine and/or chondroitin is harmful.

I know one commercial bee operator and let me tell you, they are very worried. They can't sustain losses of 75% of their hives more than a couple years. They will go out of business. Commercial scale agriculture would be impossible without them. There's a few places in China where honeybees were depleted because of industrial pollution and the fruit growers acutually pollenate BY HAND. Now that would be fun to do to 300 arces of vegetables. Maybe they will figure out the issue soon enough.

Actually, after more intestive studies glucosamine has shown to be benificial only to those suffering from severe arthritis. It has no proven effects for minor aches and pains. For participants in the mild pain subset, glucosamine and chondroitin sulfate together or alone did not provide statistically significant pain relief. http://nccam.nih.gov/research/results/gait/qa.htm#c1

No kidding. I read an article yesterday on how several towns in Norway took on some investments heavy into sub-primes. They were talked into it by an investment group they had worked with for years, and trusted. Now that group is belly up and the towns are up to their eyeballs in debt to the tune of a third of their operating budget for the forseeable future. Really kinda grim. Buyer beware but also is illegal to pitch these as risk-free investments.

The rate freeze is yet another example of how the "free" market operates to benefit a select group. Rather than institute some reasonable control of the sub-prime resell market, the Feds turned a blind eye with the idea that "the market will prevail" and not want to interfere. Great. So now that the repackaging of subprimes was so fricking complicated that they could be rated AAA investments, folks bought in over their heads, and the finance industry is screaming for relief - well then NOW is the time for federal intrusion. What a joke. Keep an eye on this one - this is only the first round of defaults. This will be with us for a couple of years.

Very interesting. Thanks

Sally Quinn and her son, Quinn Bradlee, buy food and wine at the Pentagon City Costco in Arlington, Va Who names their kid with a first name that is really a last name?

The sites I saw were listing the Smart for 2 as 47 for combined city/hwy and near 70 mpg for the hwy. http://www.dicomwg12.org/mpg/SMART/fortwo-coup-/50-bhp-175-rear-tyres/

I have a 6 yr old pair of T2s. The shells still have some life in them but the liners are packed out and I've been extending their life with duct tape and some pads taped to my toe. The old style liners are not available so where should I go for some new liners?

Turtles and tortises can live a long time. As an ecologist I'm not crazy for these critters as pets, but I think the tortise thing is likely a bit easy to care for. Check out some animal rescue groups. People often get these and then tire of them. See below. http://www.pnhs.net/index.php?page=foradoption

Using the word mob is over the top. These were peaceful protestors (minus the several assholes). In the past if folks blocked traffic they were simply hauled off and arrested, which is the risk you take for any civil disobedience. Fair enough. But now there seems to be an increase in mace first ask questions later. Why mace a 20-year-old who is just sitting in the street, then chase after them with batons once they do start fleeing the mace? Maybe the cops are getting less training on how to deal with protestors, or they see it as easier to mace folks that are peacefully protestors. Don't know. But it's an apparant trend.

Yea. And he refused to be interviewed by NOVA. They even pulled out of being a witness in the court case because they knew they were going to get stompled big time. During the court case strategy documents of the Discovery Institute were placed into the record that showed how they want creationism taught in school under guise of ID, despite their protests that it ain't so. The best one I personally heard from a IDer was that "...what if God created the earth with the illusion of age" Well - I didn't know he was such a jokester.

I bet you got the "earth is 4K years old thing" as some of the folks in the show stated. Shoot - there's trees older than that.

Anyone catch this last evening? It was on the Intelligent Design trial in PA. The ID folks got their head handed to them on a platter in court. The best was the research into the drafts of the ID biology book. After a court case thoroughly denied the teaching of creationism the ID authors went on a find and replace mission - replacing "creationism" with "ID" throughout the book. In a couple places forming the word "creationtelligent designism" - named the missing link by the defense. All the time trying to deny that ID is a code word for creationism.

Blue Cross in Massachusetts employs more people to administer coverage for about 2.5 million New Englanders than are employed in all of Canada to administer single payer coverage for 27 million Canadians. In Massachusetts, hospitals spend 25.5% of their revenues on billing and administration. The average Canadian hospital spends less than half as much, because the single payer system obviates the need to determine patient eligibility for services, obtain prior approval, attribute costs and charges to individual patients, and battle with insurers over care and payment. Physicians in the U.S. face massive bureaucratic costs. The average office-based American doctor employs 1.5 clerical and managerial staff, spends 44% of gross income on overhead, and devotes 134 hours of his/her own time annually to billing2. Canadian physicians employ 0.7 clerical/administrative staff, spend 34% of their gross income for overhead, and trivial amounts of time on billing2 (there’s a single half page form for all patients, or a simple electronic system). According to U.S. Congress’ General Accounting Office, administrative savings from a single payer reform would total about 10% of overall health spending. These administrative savings, about $100 billion annually, are enough to cover all of the uninsured, and virtually eliminate co-payments, deductibles and exclusions for those who now have inadequate plans - without any increase in total health spending. Don't see how anyone can argue the current system as cost effective, fair, or an efficient deliverer of health care.

And how much will oil cost if the progress in Iraq is reversed and al Qaeda shuts down the oil deliveries? What will that do to the markets?" Stewart asked. Is this fellow not aware that curent production of oil is nowhere near pre-invasion levels? http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0507/p01s02-wome.html?page=3

I have better things to do with my time than spend a whole morning with that asshole. But you've been wrestling for days already.

My only contribution to this spat is this: KK - you'd be spitting from a higher perch if you weren't a chickenshit and took up Mr. T's previous offer of a jaunt up Tiger. Who know's? You might win and he would have to buy

This would make for a more challenging bike commute.

It's also pretty hard to defend having hundreds of insurance companies with their various forms and procedures duplicating efforts, administration, overhead, and advertising. Certainly with a single payer system that would be consolidated. Lack of competition you say? Pftttt. The current program has worked well eh?