Innovation can have many forms, new ideas, theories, products, projects, etc. Having to get permission cannot help the process.

  excerpt from an article by Alex Taborrok

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“THE RED-TAPE MENACE

Regulation is another area in which we lack an innovation vision. There are good regulations and bad regulations and lots of debate over which is which. From an innovation perspective, however, this debate misses a key point. Let’s assume that all regulations are good. The problem is that even if each regulation is good, the net effect of all the regulations combined may be bad. A single pebble in a big stream doesn’t do much, but throw enough pebbles and the stream of innovation is dammed.

Building in the United States today, for example, requires navigating a thicket of environmental, zoning and aesthetic regulations that vary not only state by state but county by county. If building a house is difficult, try building an airport. Passenger travel has more than tripled since deregulation in 1978, but in that time only one major new airport has been built: Denver’s. That airport is now the fourth busiest in the world. Indeed the top seven busiest airports are all in the United States, not so much because we are big but because without new construction we are forced to overcrowd our existing infrastructure. The result is delays and inefficiency. Meanwhile, China is building 50 to 100 new airports over the next 10 years.

Regulatory thickets are also strangling energy innovation. The U.S. Department of Energy, for example, estimates that small and environmentally friendly hydro-electric projects could generate at least 30,000 MWs of power annually. That’s equivalent to the generating capacity of about 30 nuclear power plants. Moreover, since 97% of U.S. dams are generating zero power today, these projects would not require building any new dams. So what’s the problem? The problem is that building even a small hydro-electric project requires the approval of numerous agencies, including the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Army Corps of Engineers, State Environmental Departments and State Historic Preservation Departments. It’s simply too expensive, time-consuming and risky to build these projects when any of these agencies could veto it at any time. The net result is that we generate more electricity than necessary by leveling mountains, burning coal, and filling our air with dangerous particulates and climate-changing CO2.

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    Uncertainty, uncertain time frames, delays, impertinent obstructions by those whose salaries are guaranteed–all are guaranteed by regulation.

BUILDING THE NEXT HOOVER DAM

Our ancestors were bold and industrious. They built a significant portion of our energy and road infrastructure more than half a century ago. It would be almost impossible to build that system today. Could we build the Hoover Dam today? We have the technology. We seem to lack the will. Unfortunately, we cannot rely on the infrastructure of our past to travel to our future. Airports, an electricity smart grid that doesn’t throw millions into the dark every few years, and ubiquitous Wi-Fi are among the important infrastructures of the 21st century, and they are caught in the regulatory thicket.

Our economy is stagnant and for the first time in a long time, and the national mood is deeply pessimistic. To restore our economy and our spirits we need to become an innovation nation. An innovative nation would improve the prospects for economic growth but could do much more. The warfare-welfare state divides the pie and also divides Americans. Americans, however, are an innovative, forward-thinking people and the prospects are good for uniting them on a pro-growth, pro-innovation agenda.”

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     Giving people stuff without effort makes them lazy. You can look it up.  Probably also makes them complacent—to wit, non-innovative.

Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies

Battery maker Ener1—DOE recipient—Goes Bankrupt

By Steve Hargreaves @CNNMoneyTech January 26, 2012

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — Electric car battery maker Ener1 filed for bankruptcy Thursday, three years after receiving a $118.5 million grant from the U.S. government.

Ener1 (HEVV), which makes a variety of energy storage devices under different subsidiaries, is the parent company of EnerDel, the car battery division that received the government grant to help build a manufacturing plant in Indianapolis.

Unlike bankrupt Solyndra, the advanced solar panel maker that became a lightning rod for critics of Obama’s stimulus spending when it closed its factory and liquidated, Ener1 promised its business will proceed as usual.

The company said the "voluntarily initiated" bankruptcy filing won’t impact any of its subsidiaries, including EnerDel.

"The restructuring will not adversely impact their employees, customers and suppliers," the company said in a press release, noting there will be no layoffs as a result of the action.

The company blamed the bankruptcy on a slower than expected demand for electric vehicles.
Making a battery to replace oil

Analysts have also said any electric car battery maker faces stiff competition from Asian firms, which are largely considered to be well ahead of the curve due to their long experience making batteries for electronics. Ener1 was thought to offer one of the best chances for an American company to compete in this field.

The company said that’s still the case, and that the restructuring will allow it to reduce its debt and free up $81 million for capital spending.

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    The future always looks good for government-supported enterprises until the really embarrassing final closing.

"Our business partners have an appreciation for our future business opportunities," CEO Alex Sorokin said in a statement. "We expect the new funding to provide ample liquidity for our subsidiaries to meet their ongoing obligations to employees, customers and suppliers."

The Department of Energy, which awarded the grant, agreed.

"While it’s unfortunate that Ener1, the parent company, has entered a restructuring process, the new infusion of $80 million in private capital demonstrates that the technology has merit," DOE said in a statement.

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    Government employees talking about enterprise is like cows mooing about making apple pies.

Ener1 received the grant in 2009 as part of a $2.4 billion stimulus effort to jump start the electric car industry.

The program was different from the Energy Department program that funded now-bankrupt solar panel maker Solyndra and Beacon Power, a maker of energy storage devices. Nonetheless, critics jumped at the chance to highlight another government grant gone bad.

"Sadly, the Department of Energy’s jobs record seems to grow worse by the day," Florida Representative Cliff Stearns, a Republican, said in a statement. "It is American taxpayers who are paying the price."

But during his State of the Union speech, President Obama struck a defiant tone, refusing to apologize for the decisions his administration has made, which includes the funding of hundreds of clean energy companies or companies engaged in clean technology research.

"Some technologies don’t pan out; some companies fail," said Obama. "But I will not walk away from the promise of clean energy."

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      The promise, always the promise. This circus will just continue. The only way to stop them wasting money is to give them less of it.

Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies

Psychiatry’s Grand Confession
Posted on January 23, 2012 by Jonathan Leo, Ph.D. / Jeffrey Lacasse, Ph.D. RSS

The psychiatry profession has finally come clean and confessed on a national media outlet that there is no evidence to support the Serotonin Theory of Depression. Today, on NPR’s Morning Edition there is a segment about the chemical imbalance theory, and virtually all the psychiatrists who are interviewed acknowledge that the there was never any evidence in support of the idea that low serotonin causes depression. But then, amazingly, they go on to say that it is perfectly fine to tell patients that serotonin imbalance causes depression even though they know this isn’t the case.

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   Since the “effectiveness” of anti-depressant drugs is limited and is not dependent of whether serotonin increases, decreases or stays the same, this theory never has had any explanatory power.

Several years ago in PLoS Medicine we wrote a long piece about the serotonin theory and the disconnect between what research psychiatrists say in professional journals and textbooks and what the advertisements say. While the advertisements presented the theory as scientific fact, the scientific sources clearly did not. Given the enormous marketing programs that pushed this theory combined with the media’s lack of skepticism, we were sympathetic to the general public who could hardly be faulted for thinking that theory had some foundation in fact. Following the publication of our piece a reporter contacted us and suggested that we were attacking a well accepted theory. We pointed out to the reporter that we weren’t attacking a sacred cow but that instead we were pointing out the mainstream psychiatry didn’t even accept this theory. We urged the reporter to contact the FDA, NIMH, APA, etc and ask them about the science behind the advertisements. He did, and as expected, an expert from the FDA explained that the theory was really just a metaphor. The problem is that patients who heard their physician explain the serotonin theory thought they were hearing real science. They weren’t told it was a metaphor and hence thought it was a fact. When a doctor talks about high cholesterol, diabetes, or hypothyroidism, they are talking about scientific measurement, not a metaphor. How is a patient with high cholesterol and depression who listens to their doctor’s explanation of their conditions supposed to know when the doctor has moved from science to metaphor?

Several months ago Ronald Pies published an interesting article in Psychiatric Times entitled, “Psychiatry’s New Brain-Mind and the Legend of the Chemical Imbalance.” Pies, just like the experts on NPR, acknowledges that the Chemical Imbalance theory is not true. However, according to Pies, it was the pharmaceutical companies who espoused the theory, and not well-informed, practicing clinicians, because the psychiatry community has known all along that the theory is not true.

But if the Psychiatry Community knew all along that the theory was not true, then why did they not clarify this issue for the general public? Shouldn’t they have pointed out to the general public and patients that what the pharmaceutical companies were saying about psychological stress was not true? Why did the professional societies not publicly set the record straight?

There are many angry comments on the NPR website. These comments are interesting, because apparently many patients who were told that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance never understood that were hearing a metaphor and not science. Since the chemical imbalance theory is often presented as a rationale for taking SSRIs, such patients now understandably feel lied to by their clinicians.

Perhaps the most interesting part about the NPR piece is that the reporter seems to not understand that the idea of telling a falsehood to patients because you think it is good for them is a serious violation of informed consent. Shouldn’t the reporter have asked the obvious questions, such as:

1) Do you feel it is acceptable to present a scientific theory as fact even though you know it is false?
2) Is it okay for psychiatrists to tell patients stories about their conditions that psychiatrists know are false?
3) Is there not an ethical issue when a psychiatrist informs their patient that they have a serotonin imbalance, when the medical textbooks on the shelf clearly say this is a falsified theory?

In general, we are fans of NPR, but hopefully the next news outlet that covers this topic will be more investigative in their approach.

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      Psychopharmaceuticals are like political programs, the product is shoddy, but the marketing  world-class.

Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies

    The State of the Union emphasized, not spending cuts, but ways to get the government more money. This is not a good sign.

Schools of Education

Walter E. Williams

Larry Sand’s article "No Wonder Johnny (Still) Can’t Read" — written for The John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, based in Raleigh, N.C. — blames schools of education for the decline in America’s education. Education professors drum into students that they should not "drill and kill" or be the "sage on the stage" but instead be the "guide on the side" who "facilitates student discovery." This kind of harebrained thinking, coupled with multicultural nonsense, explains today’s education. During his teacher education, Sand says, "teachers-to-be were forced to learn about this ethnic group, that impoverished group, this sexually anomalous group, that under-represented group, etc. — all under the rubric of ‘Culturally Responsive Education.’"

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    The shibboleths guiding schools of education are so strange that the opposites are correct.

Education majors are woefully lacking in academic skills. Here are some sample test questions for you to answer. Question 1: Which of the following is equal to a quarter-million? a) 40,000, b) 250,000, c) 2,500,000, d) 1/4,000,000 or e) 4/1,000,000. Question 2: Martin Luther King Jr. (insert the correct choice) for the poor of all races. a) spoke out passionately, b) spoke out passionate, c) did spoke out passionately, d) has spoke out passionately or e) had spoken out passionate. Question 3: What would you do if your student sprained an ankle? a) Put a Band-Aid on it, b) Ice it or c) Rinse it with water.

Guess whether these questions were on a sixth-grade, ninth-grade or 12th-grade test. I bet the average reader would guess that it’s a sixth-grade test. Wrong. How about ninth-grade? Wrong again. You say, "OK, Williams, so they’re 12th-grade test questions!" Still wrong. According to a Heartland Institute-published School Reform News (September 2001) article titled "Who Tells Teachers They Can Teach?", those test questions came from prospective teacher tests. The first two questions are samples from the Praxis I test for teachers, and the third is from the 1999 teacher certification test in Illinois. According to the Chicago Sun-Times (9/6/01), 5,243 Illinois teachers failed their teacher certification tests. The Chicago Sun-Times also reported, "One teacher failed 24 of 25 teacher tests — including 11 of 12 Basic Skills tests and all 12 tests on teaching learning-disabled children." Yet that teacher was assigned to teach learning-disabled children in Chicago. Departments of education have solved the problem of teacher test failure. According to a New York Post story (11/14/11) titled "City teacher tests turn into E-ZPass," more than 99 percent of teachers pass.

Textbooks used in schools of education advocate sheer nonsense. A passage in Enid Lee et al.’s "Beyond Heroes and Holidays" reads: "We cannot afford to become so bogged down in grammar and spelling that we forget the whole story. … The onslaught of antihuman practices that this nation and other nations are facing today: racism, and sexism, and the greed for money and human labor that disguises itself as ‘globalization.’" Marilyn Burns’ text "About Teaching Mathematics" reads, "There is no place for requiring students to practice tedious calculations that are more efficiently and accurately done by using calculators." "New Designs for Teaching and Learning," by Dennis Adams and Mary Hamm, says: "Content knowledge is not seen to be as important as possessing teaching skills and knowledge about the students being taught. … Successful teachers understand the outside context of community, personal abilities, and feelings, while they establish an inside context or environment conducive to learning." That means it’s no problem if a teacher can’t figure out that a quarter-million is the same as 250,000. Harvey Daniels and Marilyn Bizar’s text "Methods that Matter" reads, "Students can no longer be viewed as cognitive living rooms into which the furniture of knowledge is moved in and arranged by teachers, and teachers cannot invariably act as subject-matter experts." The authors add, "The main use of standardized tests in America is to justify the distribution of certain goodies to certain people."

Schools of education represent the academic slums of most any college. American education can benefit from slum removal.

<end>

    This has been true for decades. The only way to stop them wasting money is to give them less. The only way to stop them abusing power is to give them less. The cult only stops when the money stops.

Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies

Winning Goalie Refuses To Go To White House Reception

Thomas gives Obama the brush-off
Turns down White House invitation
By QMI Agency
   

Tim Thomas isn’t just a good goalie, he’s a rather feisty right winger, too.

The Boston Bruins were honoured Monday at the White House for capturing the Stanley Cup last spring, and virtually everyone showed up — even the usually invisible Tomas Kaberle.

But the star of the 2010-11 Bruins stayed away. Thomas — the lone American on the team to get his name on the trophy — opted to snub U.S. President Barack Obama.

Apparently there is no "Tim" in "team."

Even the Bruins brass couldn’t convince the goalie to attend … heck, he could have put on his mask and gone incognito.

"Everybody has their own opinions and political beliefs and he chose not to join us," Bruins president Cam Neely told Comcast Sportsnet New England. "We certainly would have liked to have him come and join us, but that’s his choice."

General manager Peter Chiarelli said he had discussed the issue with Thomas for several months. Chiarelli said he could suspend the 38-year-old goalie for skipping a team event but that he wouldn’t.

Thomas is known for having strong conservative leanings and has been called a "Tea Party patriot."

He released a statement on his Facebook page Monday evening.

"I believe the Federal government has grown out of control, threatening the Rights, Liberties, and Property of the People," Thomas wrote.

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     Aside from distorting the economy, degrading the standard of living, passing the Patriot Act, confiscating wealth and dealing out massive gobs of Federal money to moribund industries, everything is OK.

"This is being done at the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial level. This is in direct opposition to the Constitution and the Founding Fathers vision for the Federal government.

"Because I believe this, today I exercised my right as a Free Citizen, and did not visit the White House. This was not about politics or party, as in my opinion both parties are responsible for the situation we are in as a country. This was about a choice I had to make as an INDIVIDUAL."

Thomas won the Vezina Trophy last season as the NHL’s top goalie and the Conn Smythe Trophy as the MVP of the playoffs.

Reaction was mixed, with some media members criticizing Thomas of political opportunism, with others respecting his willingness to take a stand.

<end>

    Good for him. These people have to understand that they can have respect or a government job.

Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies

   Do not think about, write about or deal with  human behavior without determining the effects of incentives.

    The incentive for making humans patients with treatable “diseases” is the incredible amount of money made by the purveyors of these toxic treatments.

The Cure for Mood Disorders Is Dementia?

Posted on January 22, 2012 by Jill Littrell, Ph.D. RSS

Perhaps the most alarming current trend in psychiatry, documented by Domino and Schwartz (2008), is the rise in prescriptions for the class of drug called “atypical antipsychotics”, which include seroquel/quetiapine, abilify/aripiprazole, clozaril/clozapine, geodon/ziprasidone, invega/paliperidone, risperdal/risperidone, zyprexa/olanzapine. Initially, these drugs were introduced for the treatment of psychosis. They were touted as being superior to earlier antipsychotics because the belief was that they would not induce the very uncomfortable Parkinson’s type motor symptoms associated with the older typical antipsychotics, and the long term motor problems called tardive dyskinesia. Unfortunately, the large government-funded CATIE study found that movement disorders are associated with the atypicals as well, although perhaps to a lesser extent than the older anti-psychotics.

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     Although the usefulness of anti-psychotics for psychoses is questionable, their use for other things is madness.

In psychiatry, the pattern is always the same. An initial treatment is found either to be ineffective or associated with serious side effects. Then a new drug is introduced which is supposed to be more effective or avoid the problems of the earlier treatment. Presently, the new class of drug for anxiety, sleep disorders, Major Depression, and Bipolar Disorder appears to be atypical antipsychotics (documented by Comer, Mojtabai, and Olfson, 2011, Crystal, Olfson, Huang, Pincus, Gerhard, 2009, and Fullerton et al.,2011). Atypicals are even being given to children for a wide range of problems. DosReis et al. (2011) examined the use of atypical antipsychotics in foster children. Among the children receiving antipsychotic medications, 53% had a diagnosis of ADHD, 34% had a diagnosis of depression, 21% had a diagnosis of bipolar, while only 5% had a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Apparently, psychiatrists are using atypical antipsychotics as general panaceas.

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     The general panacea is up there with turning lead into gold. The problem with that would be that gold would soon to worth little more than lead, but that’s for another day.

In moving from the older drug to a newer drug, psychiatrists are well intentioned. Everyone knows that antidepressants don’t work very well and some (see Irving Kirsch) argue that they don’t work period. Antidepressants can induce mania, so they are contraindicated for anyone with Bipolar Disorder. Lithium, a medication for Bipolar, destroys kidneys. Anti-epileptics are also used for Bipolar, but they have a warning from the government for inducing suicidal ideation. Thus, one can see why psychiatrists were searching for a better option for treating major depression or Bipolar Disorder. With regard to anxiety and insomnia, drugs of the valium class, prescribed for sleep and anxiety, are fairly rapidly addicting. If people discontinue use of valium-type-drugs abruptly, they risk life threatening seizures. Thus, the older drugs for Major Depression, Bipolar Disorder, Anxiety Disorder, and insomnia are bad news. The motivation for something better is understandable. But, the new panacea, the atypicals, is effectively jumping from one bad remedy to an even worse one.

<insert>

    What Kirsch found was, that the more side effects a placebo has, the more highly it would be rated, with the really active placebos being rated as good as the best antidepressive.

In February 2011, Ho, Andreasen, Ziebell, Pierson, and Magnotta documented the brain volume reduction among their patients taking drugs that block dopamine, which includes the older antipsychotics and the newer atypicals. To prove causation, subjects have to be randomly assigned to a particular treatment or a control group. Fulfilling that requirement can be difficult with human subjects. So for proof of the causal connection, Ho et al., cited animal studies which observed the necessary random assignment. Researchers randomly assigned monkeys, none of whom were suffering from psychosis, to receive or not receive anti-dopamine drugs for two years. The animal researchers found that the antipsychotics do result in brain volume shrinkage. These results are consistent with what is known about brain health generally. Dopamine is a trigger for the release of growth factors in brain. If you block the dopamine message with a drug that sits on the receptor, there will be less release of growth factors, and poorer brain health.

Of course, brain volume reduction is only the latest, most awesome problem with the atypical antipsychotic drugs. From the outset, it has been known that the atypicals are associated with significant weight gain, diabetes, and high levels of fat in the blood. Moreover, atypicals are associated with QT wave prolongation (capable of inducing a heart attack). So if you take seroquel for sleep, you might be sleeping for longer than intended.

When drugs are approved by the FDA, they are evaluated for damage to major organ systems. Unfortunately, the drugs given to change mood and behavior are not evaluated for damage to structures in the brain. Perhaps tests of changes in cognitive capacity should be added to the check-list for evaluating pharmaceuticals. If a drug, taken over years, is shown to impair ability to learn in an animal, then the psychiatrists won’t be able to blame cognitive deterioration, widely acknowledged in the journals regarding patients with schizophrenia and bipolar, on the underlying condition of the patient. If impairments in ability to reason and process information are clearly acknowledged as side effects, then patients can evaluate whether the small possibility to escaping distress by taking the drug is worth the risk of long term brain damage.

<end>

    Brain damage and ineffectiveness, what’s not to like?

Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies

     This could be subtitled: Regardless of reality, we’re entitled or The rhetoric should match the decade.

Caterpillar Rally

By Hank Daniszewski, Scott Taylor and Greg Colgan, QMI Agency

LONDON, Ont. – Prime Minister Stephen Harper and U.S. heavy equipment giant Caterpillar Inc. came under fire at a massive rally Saturday for locked-out locomotive workers.

Thousands of labour supporters from as far as the U.S. and northern Ontario filled downtown Victoria Park for a massive show of support for the nearly 500 unionized workers at locomotive-builder Electro-Motive Diesel, now three weeks into a lockout.

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    As the United Auto Workers are finding out, strikes don’t  really work in the face of economic reality. Only government unions have power and the handwriting is on the wall for them.

With London hobbled by the nation’s second-highest metro jobless rate, and fears the EMD jobs could be transferred to a low-cost plant in Indiana, emotions ran high at the rally organized by the Ontario Federation of Labour.

“Get your ass down here, Prime Minister Harper,” Mayor Joe Fontana, a former federal Liberal labour minister, told the whipped-up crowd.

He said the EMD workers, their lockout triggered by a wage-slashing contract offer, “have given their blood, sweat and tears for this plant and built the best locomotives in the world . . . You can’t buy their skills for $15 an hour.”

Labour organizers estimated the crowd at 15,000, but police said the number was more like 5,000.

The rally became a national focal point for many in organized labour, fearful a move by a big multi-national like Caterpillar to reduce wages could set a precedent.

Ken Lewenza, national president of the Canadian Auto Workers union, which represents the EMD employees, blames the Harper government for the loss of 450,000 manufacturing jobs.

He said the federal government should have blocked the sale two years ago of Electro-Motive to Caterpillar, which bought it from a U.S. equity firm that had picked it up from General Motors a few years earlier.

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    Getting the government to intervene would not have changed the international marketplace.

A $58-billion company, with plants and workers worldwide, Caterpillar owns EMD through its Progress Rail Services subsidiary. Caterpillar is a known hardnose in union bargaining, having wrestled wage and other concessions from unions in the U.S.

“Here is a corporation that wants to take $20 an hour from the workers and put it into the pockets of executives and shareholders,” Lewenza said.

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     This is known as argument by envy, one of the highest forms of logic.

The contract offer that triggered the lockout would dramatically cut wages and benefits for EMD workers, many of whom are paid double what Progress Rail pays workers at its locomotive plant in Muncie, Ind.

Lewenza said Harper — he visited the London plant in 2008 — assured EMD workers their jobs are more secure because of corporate tax cuts.

“PM Harper, you can make something that is morally wrong legally wrong,” said Lewenza, pointing out the absence of any Conservative MPs at the rally in a city represented by three Tory backbenchers.

Federal New Democrat leader Nycole Turmel denounced Harper for “hiding” on the lockout issue and urged the EMD workers not to give up.

The rally attracted a who’s who of big labour, including Sid Ryan of the Ontario Federation of Labour that organized the event and Ken Georgetti of the Canadian Labour Congress, who also slammed Caterpillar.

“They want to take away what we have struggled to build for decades,” Georgetti said, saying the EMD lockout has become the focus of labour across Canada.

Caterpillar and its operating divisions, Progress Rail and EMD, have remained silent during the three-week lockout, consistently declining interview requests.

On its website, Electro-Motive Canada has said the London factory “is not sufficiently flexible and cost competitive in the global marketplace. These factors put EMC’s London plant at a competitive disadvantage.”

Wages at the plant, which exports locomotives around the world, range as high as $35 an hour. The union says the offer would cut wages in all job classifications, with the deepest cut about $18.50 an hour for half of the workforce.

Bob Scott, the CAW plant chair at the London factory, said Caterpillar is tangling with the wrong workforce.

“Caterpillar, you want a fight? You got one. You pissed off the wrong membership here.”

<insert>

    The 50′s called, they want their rhetoric back.

While the rally attracted many from private and public-sector labour unions, it also drew non-labour supporters. One, a nun, said the lockout is a justice issue.

“Too many people are being excluded from the benefits of the economy and it is tearing at the fabric of society,” said Sister Sue Walker of the Sisters of St. Joseph in London. “Now is the time for the 99% to stand together.”

<end>

    Social justice–that’s the ticket.

Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies

Direct Energy cuts 500 jobs as it moves headquarters from Toronto

The Canadian Press By Craig Wong

Direct Energy is cutting 500 jobs in Canada as the company shifts its headquarters from Toronto to Houston in order to concentrate on key growth markets in the northeastern United States and Texas.

Direct Energy spokeswoman Hillary Marshall said Friday the regulatory environment in Ontario was too restrictive and the company’s opportunity to grow in the province too limited.

"We are a business that needs further deregulation in the energy markets — more competition if you will — in order to keep growing and we’re just not seeing it here," Marshall said.

"We are however seeing it in the United States."

A subsidiary of British company Centrica, Direct Energy has been growing its retail business in the U.S., especially Texas and the U.S.

"We have been focusing our growth on those markets and that’s where we are going to continue to focus it," Marshall said.

The company’s Canadian headquarters will be closed over the next 12 to 18 months while the company completes the move to Texas, where Direct Energy plans to add about 300 people.

In total, Direct Energy, one of North America’s largest energy and energy-related services providers, will still have about 2,000 employees in Ontario and roughly 6,000 across North America.

The company, which has operations across Canada, also operates approximately 4,600 producing gas wells in Alberta as well as three natural gas fired power plants in Texas.

"Direct Energy has a growth strategy that is largely built on expansion of our residential business, our commodity sales business and also in our upstream business where we produce natural gas and generate electricity," Marshall said.

"We’ve done just over a $1 billion in acquisitions over the last 18 months and there is a stated strategy to invest billions more in North America, but we want to do it in markets where there is healthy competition, where it is open to competition, and not utility dominated and we just don’t see that in Ontario."

Earlier this month, the company announced the acquisition of Indiana-based natural gas retailer Vectren Source, a wholly owned subsidiary of Vectren Corp. (NYSE:VVC), for US$39 million.

Vectren Source supplies natural gas to about 280,000 residential and small business customers in Ohio, Indiana and New York.

Last year, Direct Energy entered 22 new residential markets in the northeastern United States.

The company also recently acquired First Choice Power in Texas and Gateway Energy Services in the U.S. Northeast.

<end>

   There are many different ways to kill real enterprise and Ontario uses all of them. Generate electricity via official agencies which pay incredibly high salaries and benefits and increase the cost of electricity. This drives away industries because of a), high taxes, and b), high cost of electricity, and c), in this case, drives away companies which want to generate electricity cheaper–the trifecta of public utilities.

Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies

     Two judgments, totaling 1.158 B$ have been made against Johnson and Johnson, the maker of risperdal, for urging off-label usage. This is a report of one study. This study is different from others in that it counted aggressive behavior rather than using indirect methods of measuring aggression. A placebo had the same effect on aggression.

Drugs Offer No Benefit in Curbing
Aggression, Study Finds

By BENEDICT CAREY
The drugs most widely used to manage aggressive outbursts in intellectually disabled people are no more effective than placebos for most patients and may be less so, researchers report.

The finding, being published Friday, sharply challenges
standard medical practice in mental health clinics and nursing homes in the United States and around the world. In recent years, many doctors have begun to use the so-called antipsychotic drugs, which were developed to treat schizophrenia, as all-purpose tranquilizers to settle threatening behavior — in children with attention-deficit problems, college students with depression, older people with Alzheimer’s disease and intellectually handicapped people.

The new study tracked 86 adults with low I.Q.’s in community housing in England, Wales and Australia over more than a month of treatment. It found a 79 percent reduction in aggressive behavior among those taking dummy pills, compared with a reduction of 65 percent or less in those taking antipsychotic drugs.

The researchers focused on two drugs, Risperdal by Janssen, and an older drug, Haldol, but said the findings almost certainly applied to all similar medications. Such drugs account for more than $10 billion in annual sales, and research suggests that at least half of all prescriptions are for unapproved “off label” uses — often to treat aggression or irritation. 

The authors said the results were quite likely to intensify calls for a government review of British treatment standards for such patients, and perhaps to prompt more careful study of treatment for aggressive behavior in patients with a wide variety of diagnoses.

Other experts said the findings were also almost certain to inflame a continuing debate over the widening use of
antipsychotic drugs. Patient advocates and some psychiatrists say the medications are overused.

Previous studies of the drugs’ effect on aggressive outbursts have been mixed, with some showing little benefit and others a strong calming influence. But the drugs have serious side effects, including rapid weight gain and tremors, and doctors have had little rigorous evidence to guide practice.

“This is a very significant finding by some very prominent psychiatrists” — one that directly challenges the status quo, said Johnny L. Matson, a professor of psychology at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, co-author of an editorial with the study in the journal Lancet.

While it is unclear how much the study by itself will alter
prescribing habits, “the message to doctors should be, think twice about prescribing, go with lower doses and monitor side effects very carefully,” Dr. Matson continued, adding: “Or just don’t do it. We know that behavioral treatments can work very well with many patients.”

Other experts disagreed, saying the new study was not in line with previous research or their own experience. Janssen, a Johnson & Johnson subsidiary, said that Risperdal only promotes approved uses, which in this country include the treatment of irritability associated with autism in children. In the study, Dr. Peter J. Tyrer, a professor of psychiatry at Imperial College London, led a research team who assigned 86 people from ages 18 to 65 to one of three groups: one that received Risperdal; one that received another antipsychotic, the
generic form of Haldol; and one that was given a placebo pill. Caregivers tracked the participants’ behavior. Many people with very low I.Q.’s are quick to anger and lash out at others, bang their heads or fists into the wall in frustration, or singe the air with obscenities when annoyed.

After a month, people in all three groups had settled down, losing their temper less often and causing less damage when they did. Yet unexpectedly, those in the placebo group improved the most, significantly more so than those on medication. In an interview, Dr. Tyrer said there was no reason to believe that any other antipsychotic drug used for aggression, like Zyprexa from Eli Lilly or Seroquel from AstraZeneca, would be
more effective. Being in the study, with all the extra attention it brought, was itself what apparently made the difference, he said.

“These people tend to get so little company normally,” Dr. Tyrer said. “They’re neglected, they tend to be pushed into the background, and this extra attention has a much bigger effect on them that it would on a person of more normal intelligence level.”

The study authors, who included researchers from the
University of Wales and the University of Birmingham in
Britain and the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, wrote that their results “should not be interpreted as an indication that antipsychotic drugs have no place in the treatment of some aspects of behavior disturbance.” But the routine prescription of the drugs for aggression, they concluded, “should no longer be regarded as a satisfactory form of care.

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    Aside from the cost, the side effects and the non-working, these drugs do a great job.

Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies

    When you’re up to your ass in alligators, your choice of breakfast cereal is less important than you might imagine.

Brown Asks California to Cheer Rail Project
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
Published: January 18, 2012

SACRAMENTO — Gov. Jerry Brown on Wednesday threw his unequivocal support behind a $100 billion high-speed rail line that has come under fire here in California and across the country, embracing it in a strikingly optimistic State of the State speech in which he asserted that government should pursue ambitious ventures even during times of economic strife.

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      This is not a “time” of economic strife, it’s a fundamental change.

With his speech, Mr. Brown firmly linked his political fortunes to the proposed 520-mile bullet train connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles as he urged lawmakers to release the $9 billion in state bonds needed to begin the project this year. His focus on the train line, along with a new emphasis on dealing with the state’s water problems, suggested that Mr. Brown was trying to turn the page after a year in which the legacy of his second turn as governor seemed in danger of being defined by a series of budget battles and spending cuts.

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    Nine billion out of 100. Everyone should already be feeling better.

He made clear that the state’s fiscal problems were hardly behind it: Mr. Brown, a Democrat, formally called for putting before voters in November an initiative that would temporarily increase income taxes on the wealthy and sales taxes. And signaling a potential point of conflict with Democratic lawmakers, the governor said he would insist on further cuts to balance the budget if the tax initiative failed.

Still, Mr. Brown’s speech, coming after five economically tumultuous years here, was notable for its optimism.

“Every decade since the ’60s, dystopian journalists write stories on the impending decline of our economy, our culture and our politics,” he said, adding: “California has problems, but rumors of its demise are greatly exaggerated.”

Mr. Brown championed the rail project at a time when it has seemed increasingly endangered. The cost has doubled to $98.5 billion. The notion of starting the work in a sparsely populated section of the state has been ridiculed. And support for rail projects in Congress has all but died.

This month, an independent review panel created under state law raised questions about the financial feasibility of the plan and urged lawmakers to delay it. Within days, Mr. Brown pushed through a shake-up at the California High-Speed Rail Authority, the agency overseeing the project.

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    If this project is like other government rail lines, it will be cheaper to provide taxis.

“Critics of the high-speed rail project abound, as they often do when something of this magnitude is proposed,” he said in his speech, adding: “The Panama Canal was for years thought to be impractical, and Benjamin Disraeli himself said of the Suez Canal, ‘Totally impossible to be carried out.’ The critics were wrong then, and they’re wrong now.”

State Senator Ted W. Lieu, a Democrat, called the train “a symbol of what California can do,” but suggested that the project was as much about Mr. Brown as anything else.

“He is a much more practical governor now than maybe 30 years ago,” Mr. Lieu said. “But he is still a dreamer. High-speed rail is very evocative and is one of those things that I think he would like to be part of his legacy.”

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    More symbols of “what California can do” will be forthcoming–destroy a once thriving economy–look ridiculous–borrow far beyond the means to repay would be some of them.

Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies