This explains it all

Study Finds That Milkshakes Can Trigger the Same Reaction as Drugs

More scary brown people, armed and dangerous!

OMG OMG!!1!

From an email making the rounds:

Subject: Invasion Character of Illegal Alien Flood Becomes Clearer

The real nature of the illegal immigrant flood across our southern border becomes clearer as armed insurgents take over Texas ranches. When is America going to wake up that this isn't an immigration issue. It is an invasion issue and we are at war with the insurgents. Take action and cast these rats back off the ship.

BREAKING: MULTIPLE RANCHES IN LAREDO, TX TAKEN OVER BY LOS ZETAS
Published 07/24/2010 - 2:30 p.m. CST
The bloodbath continues along our southern border and now word is coming in that Los Zetas, the highly trained killers formerly with the Gulf Cartel, have crossed into the United States and taken over at least two ranches in the Laredo, Texas area. I am receiving word that the owners of the ranches have evacuated without being harmed.
Founder of the San Diego Minutemen Jeff Schwilk tipped me off to this story and passes along the following information on the location. The ranches are said to be "near Mines Rd. and Minerales Annex Rd about 10 miles NW of I-35".

OMG .. a really really major international incident.... except .. oddly... it's being denied by everybody.

Right-wing blogs have been promoting a rumor that "highly trained killers" from a Mexican drug gang have "invade[d]" the United States, taking over two ranches near the Mexico-U.S. border in Laredo, Texas, but law enforcement agencies in the area have flatly denied the rumor.

The Laredo Morning Times reported that law enforcement officials had been "bombarded" with calls about the rumor but that "officials with the Laredo Police Department, Webb County Sheriff's Department and Border Patrol said they knew nothing about such an incident, while Erik Vasys, an FBI spokesman in San Antonio, said the agency does not comment on rumors."

Some conservative blogs have acknowledged that the story appears to be bogus, but others are standing by it.

Personally, I don't think invading Laredo Texas would be high on the list of things to do by the drug cartels, especially since the US military would be brought in very quickly. The drug cartels have enough Americans who want their products and will help them move it into the US. The ONLY reason the cartels are doing so well is that Americans are keeping them in business.

You want to put the Mexican drug cartels out of business?

Legalize drugs.

It took you guys long enough to figure out something

A lot of us knew from the beginning. You don't force impoverished farmers to dump a lucrative crop like opium poppies unless you offer something as good in return.

TRIESTE, Italy – The U.S. is shifting its strategy against Afghanistan's drug trade, phasing out funding for opium eradication while boosting efforts to fight trafficking and promote alternate crops, the U.S. envoy for Afghanistan said Saturday.

The aim of the new policy: to deprive the Taliban of the tens of millions of dollars in drug revenues that are fueling its insurgency.

The U.S. envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, told the Associated Press that poppy eradication — for years a cornerstone of U.S. and U.N. drug trafficking efforts in the country — was not working and was only driving Afghan farmers into the hands of the Taliban.

"Eradication is a waste of money," Holbrooke said on the sidelines of a Group of Eight foreign ministers' meeting on Afghanistan, during which he briefed regional representatives on the new policy.

"It might destroy some acreage, but it didn't reduce the amount of money the Taliban got by one dollar. It just helped the Taliban. So we're going to phase out eradication," he said. The Afghan foreign minister also attended the G-8 meeting.

Eradication efforts were seen as inefficient because too little was being destroyed at too high a cost, U.N. drug chief Antonio Maria Costa told the AP.

The old policy was also deeply unpopular among powerless small-scale farmers, who often were targeted in the eradication efforts.

No wonder fish are pissed at us

PATANCHERU, India – When researchers analyzed vials of treated wastewater taken from a plant where about 90 Indian drug factories dump their residues, they were shocked. Enough of a single, powerful antibiotic was being spewed into one stream each day to treat every person in a city of 90,000.

And it wasn't just ciprofloxacin being detected. The supposedly cleaned water was a floating medicine cabinet — a soup of 21 different active pharmaceutical ingredients, used in generics for treatment of hypertension, heart disease, chronic liver ailments, depression, gonorrhea, ulcers and other ailments. Half of the drugs measured at the highest levels of pharmaceuticals ever detected in the environment, researchers say.

Those Indian factories produce drugs for much of the world, including many Americans. The result: Some of India's poor are unwittingly consuming an array of chemicals that may be harmful, and could lead to the proliferation of drug-resistant bacteria.

Should I be worried?

Someone googled black raid bug spray meth recipe and got my blog...

Raid in your meth? Really? Would Raid add something extra to the usual twitchiness and paranoia? Like a fondness for cockroaches?

Well... they were going to die anyway...

This will make it happen just a bit faster:

New York, NY (AHN) - The pill popping days of Americans will soon be over, another victim of the economic crisis. After a number of cancer patients in the U.S. have reported cutting back on medical treatments due to soaring costs, the next item in line for cost cutting are prescription drugs.

Dr. James King, chairman of the American Academy of Family Physicians confirmed seeing patients who no longer buy Lipitor, a cholesterol-lowering drug, due to its high cost. "People are choosing among gas, meals and medication," King told the New York Times.

Pfizer, which man manufactures Lipitor, confirmed the dip in the sale of the world's top-selling prescription drug in the U.S. by 13 percent for the third quarter of 2008. IMS Health, a research company that monitors prescriptions, added that for the first eight months of the year, number of all prescriptions filled out in the U.S. went down compared to last year.

All in a day's work for Blackwater

Four of the five government contractors in line for portions of a $15 billion Pentagon contract to counter "narco-terrorism" have operations in Arizona.

The Department of Defense program aims to develop new technologies and applications to combat international illegal drug trafficking and its ties to terrorism and anti-American groups

Lockheed Martin, ARINC Inc., Raytheon Co., Northrop Grumman Corp. and Blackwater USA are the private contractors lined up for the work, according to the Defense Department's contract announcement.

Blackwater USA is the only company of the five that does not have operations in Arizona.

ARINC is based in Annapolis, Md. and is part of the Carlyle Group private equity firm. ARINC has operations in Scottsdale, Phoenix, Tucson and the U.S. Army base at Fort Huachuca.

Los Angeles-based Northrop has various operations in Yuma, Tempe, Sierra Vista, Fort Huachuca and Phoenix.

Raytheon Co. has its missile division and 10,000 workers in Tucson. Lockheed Martin also has operations at Fort Huachuca as well as Prescott Valley.

But apparently the megamillion dollar companies that Prince runs are small businesses...
Think Progress:

An audit by the Inspector General of the Small Business Administration found that private security firm Blackwater “obtained dozens of small business contracts worth more than $110 million even though” the company “may have exceeded size limits for a small business”:

The Inspector General of the Small Business Administration said Blackwater, based in Moyock, N.C., obtained 39 contracts set aside for small businesses from 2005 through 2007. Of these, 32 contracts worth $2.1 million were set aside for companies with annual revenues of $6.5 million or less.

Blackwater’s revenues have exceeded $200 million each of those years, according to federal contracting data.

The report said that Blackwater “may have improperly classified Blackwater guards in Iraq and Afghanistan as independent contractors rather than employees.” It’s a tactic other private contractors have used to avoid paying taxes.

Irrefutable evidence that Cheney's fingerprints are all over this

What will Dick do if Georgie doesn't bomb Iran?

WASHINGTON - In a development that underlines the tensions between the anti-Iran agenda of the US administration and the preoccupation of its military command in Afghanistan with militant Sunni activism, a State Department official last week publicly accused Iran for the first time of arming Taliban forces, but the US commander of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces in Afghanistan rejected that charge for the second time in less than two weeks.

Under Secretary of State Nicholas Burns declared in Paris on June 12 that Iran is "transferring arms to the Taliban in Afghanistan", putting it in the context of a larger alleged Iranian role of funding "extremists" in the Palestinian territories, Lebanon and Iraq. The following day, he asserted that there was "irrefutable evidence" of such Iranian arms supply to the Taliban.

The use of the phrase "irrefutable evidence" suggested that the Burns statement was scripted by the office of Vice President Dick Cheney. The same phrase had been used by Cheney himself on September 20, 2002, in referring to the administration's accusation that then-Iraqi president Saddam Hussein had a program to enrich uranium as the basis for a nuclear weapon.

But the NATO commander in Afghanistan, General Dan McNeill, pointed to other possible explanations, particularly the link between drug and weapons smuggling between Iran and Afghanistan.

McNeill repeated in an interview with US News and World Report last week a previous statement to Reuters that he did not agree with the charge. McNeill minimized the scope of the arms coming from Iran, saying: "What we've found so far hasn't been militarily significant on the battlefield."

He speculated that the arms could have come from black-market dealers, drug traffickers, or al-Qaeda backers and could have been sold by low-level Iranian military personnel.

McNeill's remarks underlined the US command's knowledge of the link between the heroin trade and trafficking in arms between southeastern Iran and southern Afghanistan. The main entry point for opium and heroin smuggling between Afghanistan and Iran runs through the Iranian province of Sistan-Balochistan to its capital, Zahedan. The two convoys of arms that were intercepted by NATO forces last spring had evidently come through that Iranian province.

Drugs found in pet food

Apparently they just sweep the floors and bag it:

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is investigating a Texas laboratory's finding of acetaminophen in dog and cat food, an agency spokesman said Monday.

"We're very interested in being able to test these samples ourselves to determine the levels of those contaminants," said FDA spokesman Doug Arbesfeld. "What's significant is these things are there. They don't belong there."

The pain medication is the fifth contaminant found in pet foods during the past 2 1/2 months and can be toxic or lethal to pets, especially cats. It is not known if any animals became sick with acetaminophen poisoning, or died from it.

"We were looking for cyanuric acid and melamine, and the acetaminophen just popped up," Donna Coneley, lab operations manager for ExperTox Inc. in Deer Park, Texas, told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review yesterday. "It definitely was a surprise to find that in several samples."

So, what has the food industry been feeding us?

From melamine to meth

Are you sure China is our friend?

MEXICO CITY - Until recently, Zhenli Ye Gon was an unknown Chinese-born businessman who lived quietly in one of Mexico City's most exclusive neighborhoods.

Today, he's an international fugitive, accused of supplying Mexican drug cartels with tons of chemicals used to flood the United States with methamphetamine.

When Mexican agents raided his Mediterranean-style mansion in the posh Las Lomas de Chapultepec neighborhood in March, they discovered $205 million in U.S. currency.

All cash. Mostly $100 bills.

We need to start checking the rest of the alphabet to see what else China is doing.....

The enemy that had done us harm would be embolden.-- George Bush

More proof that drugs rot the brain.

New cancer drug?

Washington - Her carefully cultured cells were dead and Katherine Schaefer was annoyed, but just a few minutes later, the researcher realised she had stumbled onto a potential new cancer treatment.

Schaefer and colleagues at the University of Rochester Medical Centre in New York believe they have discovered a new way to attack tumours that have learned how to evade existing drugs.

Tests in mice suggest the compound helps break down the cell walls of tumours, almost like destroying a tumour cell's "skeleton".

The researchers will test the new compound for safety and hope they can develop it to treat cancers such as colon cancer, oesophageal cancer, liver and skin cancers.

"I was using these cancer cells as models of the normal intestine," Schaefer said.

Normal human cells are difficult to grow and study in the lab, because they tend to die. But cancer cells live much longer and are harder to kill, so scientists often use them.

Schaefer was looking for drugs to treat the inflammation seen in Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis, both of which cause pain and diarrhoea.

She was testing a compound called a PPAR-gamma modulator. It would never normally have been thought of as a cancer drug, or in fact a drug of any kind.

[snip]

The compound works in much the same way as the taxane drugs, including Taxol, which were originally derived from Pacific yew trees.

"It targets part of the cell cytoskeleton called tubulin," Schaefer said. Tubulin is used to build microtubules, which in turn make up the cell's structure.

Destroying it kills the cell, but cancer cells eventually evolve mechanisms to pump out the drugs that do this, a problem called resistance.

"Resistance to anti-tubulin therapies is a huge problem in many cancers. We see this as another way to get to the tubulin," Schaefer said.

The PPAR-gamma compound does this in a different way from the taxanes, which might mean it could overcome the resistance that tumour cells often develop to chemotherapy.

"Most of the drugs like Taxol affect the ability of tubulin to forms into microtubules. This doesn't do that - it causes the tubulin itself to disappear. We do not know why."

So...will the pharmaceutical companies let this drug exist? Or will they shut it down because it threatens their cancer medicines?

Maybe Rehnquist thought he was hallucinating when he selected Bush to be president?

Chief Justice William Rehnquist was on drugs:

"....Rehnquist checked himself into George Washington University Hospital, where he tried to escape in his pajamas and imagined that the CIA was plotting against him, the records indicate.

[snip]

An attending physician at the U.S. Capitol detailed Rehnquist's problems with Placidyl for the FBI, saying that prior to his seeing the justice in 1972, Rehnquist was prescribed the drug by another doctor for relief from insomnia. The attending physician told the FBI he continued to prescribe Placidyl for the entire 10-year period that he treated Rehnquist.

The physician said that Rehnquist had been prescribed 500 milligrams of Placidyl per evening, but that Rehnquist was actually taking 1,500 milligrams each night. The doctor said this increased consumption may have coincided with Mrs. Rehnquist's illness and treatment for cancer.

[snip]

The hospital doctor who successfully weaned Rehnquist from the drug told the FBI that the toxicity of Placidyl causes blurred vision, slurred speech and difficulty in making physical movements. Once a patient stops taking the drug, the withdrawal symptoms of delirium begin, which is what happened to Rehnquist at the hospital."

They don't say if the drug makes people want to decorate their robe sleeves with gold bars though.....