I just realized ...

... This whole SciFi rebranding thing, and the comment about wanting to "distance the SciFi Channel from science fiction".

Well — maybe they were inspired by Fox and news.

Failure analysis

strega42's analysis of, and response to, Sci-Fi's next brilliant move ... er ... make that godawful trainwreck.

There's stuff in this I'd actually missed on previous readings.  It was so stupid my brain optimized the worst of the bullshit out altogether.

"Only anti-gun extremists and terrorist recruits are worried about armed pilots."

From the Washington Times:

Only anti-gun extremists and terrorist recruits are worried about armed pilots.  So why is the Obama administration catering to this tiny lobby at the expense of public safety?

It could be just me, but I believe the writer just answered his own question.

(Via a pointer from lonewolf545)

"over his head and sinking fast"

Kevin McCullough on Townhall.com, by way of writerspleasure:

[...] President Obama's most pressing problem with the public is the fact that now 83% of the American people say they are worried that the steps he has taken to fix the economy will have the opposite effect and make things worse.  82% of the American people say they are worried about the monstrous rise in the national debt.  78% of the American people believe inflation will come quickly.  And 69% do not have any confidence in the role of government mandated solutions to the economy.  There is also now no sense in the American people that the stimulus will have any positive effect any time soon.  Only 60% hold out hope that it will have any impact realized four years from now.

Most importantly by a margin of 12% the American people believe the stimulus will only help and unfairly benefit those who have already been irresponsible.

On a related subject, this WorldNetDaily article from October — yes, just after the first most-of-a-trillion-dollars bailout bill — reported on another poll:

If given the choice, a new poll reveals, 59 percent of Americans would sweep Capitol Hill clean of the current batch of senators and representatives to elect an entirely new Congress.

Only 17 percent of voters polled said they would be willing to keep the current legislature.

[...]

The polling firm records a mere 30 percent of voters approved of the bailout, while 45 percent were opposed, and yet Congress passed it, leaving behind some highly critical voters.

The new poll shows only 23 percent of Americans have even a little confidence in the ability of Congress to address the nation's economic problems, and 76 percent doubt that most federal legislators even understand bills before they vote on them.

Further, less than half (49 percent) believe the current Congress is any more capable than a group of people plucked from the phone book, and nearly a third (33 percent) think the phone book Congress would do a better job.

Despite the lawmakers' dismal 11 percent approval rating, Rasmussen Reports pointed out that 90 percent of Congress is likely to remain following this November's election.

Why you won't see phage therapy in the US any time soon

Phage therapy, in brief, is the therapeutic use of virus phages (aka bacteriophages), instead of antibiotics, to treat pathogenic bacterial infections.  Phage therapy has a number of advantages over antibiotics, among which are:

• Virus phage strains are specific to just a handful of bacterial strains, so they don't also wipe out beneficial bacteria as antibiotics often do;
• Bacteria do not develop resistance to virus phages, because the phages evolve right along with them;
• Virus phages attack only their bacterial targets, and do not damage human cells;
• Phage therapy typically has few or no undesirable side effects, unlike antibiotics which often have severe side effects.

There's some further information in a USAToday article from 2006.  But what neither of these sources really point out is that you won't be seeing phage therapy in the US any time soon, unless FDA rules are changed.

Virus phages are already used in supermarkets — sprayed on meat to kill listeria, for example, to prevent food poisoning and extend freshness.  But when sprayed on foodstuffs, phages are considered a food additive.  Under FDA rules for food additives, that basically means that it's easy to gain approval and the approval only needs to be done once.  Once approved, one phage-spray food additive is considered much like another.

But the moment you use it therapeutically on a human, that means the phage becomes a drug.  And that entails a whole different approval process.  Every new drug must be separately approved, with clinical trials that may take years and can easily cost millions of dollars per trial.  If you plan on using multiple drugs in combination, each planned combination must be separately tested and separately approved.

There are hundreds of pathogenic bacterial species and strains, and hundreds of phage strains specific to them, which must be blended into a specific mixture to combat the bacterial strains present in any given infection.  Under FDA rules, every individual mixture must be tested.  You do the math.

...OK, I'll help you out a little with the math.  Let's simplify the math, a lot, and pretend there are only 50 phage strains (there aren't; there are hundreds) and that no therapeutic mixture will ever contain more than five strains (in reality it may contain less than five, or it may contain dozens).

There are 2,118,760 unique ways of selecting five phage strains out of fifty.  FDA rules say each one of these combinations must be separately tested for safety and efficacy.  With real-world numbers, the total is many times higher ... and I don't mean fifteen or twenty times higher, I mean fifteen or twenty orders of magnitude higher.

Do you begin to see the problem?

Phage therapy could get us out of the hole we're in now, with ever-dwindling numbers of antibiotics still effective against ever-increasing numbers of multi-resistant "superbug" strains.  Many doctors and bacteriologists agree it's only a matter of time before an infectious pathogenic bacterial strain arises that is resistant to all known antibiotics.

But under current FDA rules, phage therapy in humans will never be approved, because under current FDA testing rules, the test regimen required is quite simply impossible.  There literally are not enough people on the planet to conduct clinical trials of every therapeutic phage combination, even if we could test a million combinations per person.

This isn't the only problem with FDA drug testing rules.  Many experimental therapies for hard-to-treat medical conditions are unavailable in the US because, outside of a clinical trial environment, you cannot use an experimental treatment on a human that has not been proven safe in clinical trials, even if their condition is otherwise terminal and it's their only chance.  (Some limited exceptions to this rule have been allowed in recent years.)

When FDA rules and policies are blocking even testing valuable treatments, the FDA needs to change.

Pissed off

Polypropylene microfiber tablecloths are very good. They feel much like linen, and water-based spills just roll off them.  Within reason.

However, that only counts for just so much when a six-year-old knocks over her lidless water bottle and dumps something in the vicinity of a quart of water in a rolling wave across the table.  There was enough standing water on the table that after mopping it up with paper shop towels failed, we vacuumed it up with the carpet steam-vac.

Yes, my pants are wet.  And the magazine I was reading is soaked.  I didn't even get to finish my supper.