Sirius: Not just another App for Apple
Posted on June 17, 2009 by Jonathan Carr, MIS | 4 Comments
On June 18, 2009, Sirius XM satellite radio will be available on the Apple Itouch and Iphone as an application. Sirius XM has had a rocky market history ever since the beginning of satellite radio. Before Sirius and XM joined forces, XM made many people rich in the early part of this decade (whatever this decade is called anyway – the 0’s???). I personally know people who capitalized on the +400% XM profits in 2003-2004. Then there was the 300% market climb seen during the Howard Stern era of Sirius. Since then, the stock (NASDAQ:SIRI) has whithered away to practically nothing(as seen in February of 2009). Then something happened, the .05 stock became .50 in just 3 months. What is that 1000%? Needless to say, this stock has a solid history of both making and loosing people money.
That being said, in the near future I believe we are on the verge of another skyrocket SIRI climb like we have never seen before. Why? Because this is not just another app for Apple, this is a paradigm shift of mobile electronics. Very rarely, in the short history of digital technology, does does a mobile electronics innovation successfully combine two entities into one (like the Iphone seamlessly combined the cell phone and Ipod into one). Cell phones have been trying to integrate cameras but we all know a standalone digital camera is much better than a camera phone with regard to picture quality. This is one of those moments, folks. The Iphone will now feature the best of both worlds…satellite radio and digital media. Its like having all the channels available from digital cable/FIOS plus your library of VHS/DVDs in one unit. It is pure convenience.
I still get peeved that I have to carry around a smart phone (Blackberry Storm), ipod (32GB Touch), portable satellite radio receiver, and a portable GPS (Nuvi) just to satisfy my technology addiction. This simplifies things for me. This is one step closer to the the perfect all-in-one. Consumers are going to gobble this up and anything that stands to profit from it shall.
Apple image from Apple
Sirius XM image from Sirius XM
Possible reasons why the FDA is taking so long to approve the drug Ampligen from Hemispherx BioPharma, Inc.
Posted on June 11, 2009 by Jonathan Carr, MIS | 1 Comment
Back in February of this ultra-quick moving year of 2009, Hemispherx BioPharma, Inc. was seeking FDA approval of a drug named Ampligen for the possible treatment of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS). Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) is a widely talked-about syndrome where some people even question whether or not such a syndrome exists. Well anyway, Hemispherx BioPharma, Inc. submitted more testing data to the FDA in February causing a 3 month delay ending on May 25, 2009.
Just a day after, on May 26, 2009, the FDA and Hemispherx BioPharma announced another delay for the approval of Ampligen, only this time it would be for 1-2 additional weeks to deal with “staff scheduling changes.” In a blog titled Mymarketspy & JinandJuice, author of the article, Why is FDA Delaying Approval of Ampligen? writes:
“If you do research on the Dr. Margaret Hamburg who is the director of the FDA, you will discover that she is the wife of Peter Fitzhugh Brown who according to a recent report works with Renaissance Technologies who owns 34,500 shares in HEB and recently added 23,000 more shares according to the latest Mutual Fund Facts report.”
Here are a few article links which also support these possible reasons why the FDA is taking so long to approve the drug Ampligen from Hemispherx BioPharma, Inc…
New FDA Chief Must Divest Several Stock, Fund Holdings
How Long Will FDA Keep Hemispherx Biopharma (Amex: HEB)) On Hold?
Places you can look for Ampligen approval information:
NASDAQ after hours price quotes
FDA Pending Drug Approval Reports
So what do you guys think? Care to share your suspicions as to why the FDA is taking so long to approve the CFS drug Ampligen from Hemispherx BioPharma?
All We Have To Fear
Posted on May 6, 2009 by Michael Paskel | 3 Comments
Shortly after a series of articles I wrote in the fall of 2007 on the subject of Nuclear Weapons and their potential use by terrorists appeared in my local newspaper, The Oak Ridge Observer, Mr. Jim Kolb wrote a letter to the editor in response. I had never met Mr. Kolb prior to that time; but I was fortunate enough to meet and talk with him some months later. I found him to be intelligent and extremely well informed on the subject; having lived and worked in Oak Ridge both during and after the Manhattan Project. In those years, Kolb played an important roll in the evolution of the Manhattan Engineering District into the nuclear weapons facility that is the economic life’s-blood of this small East Tennessee community.
His letter took issue with my critical narrative of the use, by allied bombers, of incendiary devices against civilian populations in Germany and later over Japan. Mr. Kolb was particularly concerned that I had misunderstood or perhaps even misrepresented what he called the fundamental, underlying rationale for the use of these weapons against civilian targets; the fact that the fire bombings of Dresden and Tokyo by the U.S were retaliatory in nature and therefore justifiable. In his view, it was as though that detail somehow vindicated the act of industrial scale murder being committed by one civilized society upon the innocent war ravaged civilian population of another. He also opined that the U.S. was not the first nation to use weapons of mass destruction, pointing to the use of V-2 rockets by Germany against Great Brittan during the closing months of the war in Europe.
I spent some time listening to him and deeply regarding his courage and his passion. Like many in this tight-knit community, he is unapologetic about his involvement in and support of the development of nuclear weapons and the use of these weapons in the final assault on Japan. But his passion belies a tragically flawed logic; V-2 rockets weren’t nuclear bombs.
That act of war by Germany, while appalling, hardly constituted the same degree of technological over-kill one would assign to the introduction by the U.S. of nuclear arms against an enemy that had been largely ground down to a near indefensible state. The whine of an incoming V-2 was spine chilling, no question. It was in fact, the introduction of a tactic that would come to be known decades later as an act of state-sponsored Terrorism. However, a V-2 couldn’t take out a city block much less a city.
A German V-2 rocket carried a 1.1-ton warhead of TNT and ammonium nitrate. The total deaths caused by the 3,000 or so V-2s launched by Germany against Great Britain amounted to 7,250. That’s 2.4 casualties per rocket on average; hardly a weapon of mass destruction. By contrast, it is estimated that some 20,000 German technicians, civilians and prisoners of war who were conscripted as slave labor by German scientists in the V-2 program, were killed in accidents involving it’s development and construction. Clearly the V weapons were far more deadly to those who built them than they were to any of those who were targeted by them. You stood a much greater chance of surviving while listening to the in-coming whine of its rocket motor than you did of bolting the beast together.
By comparison, the total explosive power of the two atomic bombs placed on Japan exceeded 40 kilotons and killed close to a quarter of a million people.
While Jim Kolb’s opinion on the subject may be at variance with the facts, his view is not unique. Many in this community and the country as a whole, feel likewise. In fact, you would be hard pressed to find more than a handful of people each August 6th, the anniversary date of the bombing of Hiroshima, gathered outside the main gate of the National Security Complex in Oak Ridge protesting the use of nuclear weapons by the U.S against Japan. Over the years those numbers have steadily declined. In a post-9/11 world there is a deep abiding sense in this country and in others, that in times of war, a determined and capable enemy must be confronted and overwhelmed with swift and devastating dispatch; using any and every weapon available.
I would point out that Saudi Sheikh Hamid Al Fahad used a similar rationale against the West in 2003. Al Fahad, one of the Royal Saudi kingdoms most prominent clerics and close associate of Al Quida, provided to his followers and the world at large, a very comprehensive religious opinion called a Fatwa. In it he justified the use of nuclear weapons against the United States. Under the pretext that the U.S. is responsible for the deaths of up to 10 million Muslims, the Fatwa calls on pious Muslims around the world to strive for the means to use nuclear weapons against the United States; an attack in which a similar number of U.S. casualties could be expected.
In this respect at least, Mr. Kolb has much more in common with Mr. Al Fahad than either might care to acknowledge.
Their points are understandable and valid. Which American, having learned of the surprise attack and subsequent deaths of 2,403 civilian and military personnel at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, did not cheer the hundreds of thousands killed at Nagasaki and Hiroshima 42 long months later? Likewise, hundreds of thousands of Palestinian and ethnic Arab deaths at the hands of Western occupiers and the puppet governments they have supported for centuries, can scarcely have gone unnoticed by Sheik Al Fahad who no doubt cheered in the streets along with millions of other Muslims, at the news of the 2,833 killed by Al Quieda on September 11, 2001.
The Bush Administration, early in 2008, announced that it was reducing U.S nuclear arsenals in compliance with arms reduction policy. The government would not release any information as to the exact number of nuclear weapons currently held by the U.S, but it is believed that there are some 6,000 warheads either deployed or held in reserve. The nations, which make up the former Soviet Union, are believed to have a similar number under their control. These totals are far and away lower than the levels held at the close of the cold war when many believe both countries possessed more than 70,000 such weapons. (According to Pulitzer Prize winning author Richard Rhodes, the nuclear and thermonuclear arsenals held by the two Cold War combatants reached an astounding 22,500 million tons explosive equivalent or 1.5 million Hiroshimas).
Yet even given those reduced numbers, with nations such as The United Kingdom, France, Germany, China, Israel, Pakistan, India and ominously North Korea and Iran, holding or potentially gaining membership in the exclusive nuclear club, the world is still awash in weapons of mass destruction. But these nuclear arsenals are dwarfed by the known stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. There are thousands of tons of ricin, VX nerve gas, and anthrax scattered throughout the globe. Lethality in some cases is attained by grams or even trace amounts of these substances; some as small as a grain of salt. They can kill entire cities; and render uninhabitable, hundreds of millions of square miles. And they can do so in a few brief seconds on any tranquil summer afternoon.
It’s all but inevitable that some of these weapons could someday fall into the hands of terrorists. In fact, it may have already occurred. But that is not the extent of the threat. Bellicosity is not the exclusive attribute of third world tyrants or cave-dwelling extremists. It is entirely possible that nations such as India or Pakistan could find their hatred and distrust of each other becoming more virulent and stronger even than the bonds of caution that hold in check their willingness to destroy each other. The same could be said of each and every country now in possession of nuclear arms.
In such a maelstrom of passion and distrust, hatred and violence, the stakes are too high for this hand to ever be played.
In the harrowing event that those who share the view of Mr.’s Kolb and Al Fahad, ever acquire the authority to initiate the thermonuclear judgment day, which cooler heads have held in check for more than half a century, where does the rest of the world go to escape? When nation states or rogue elements unleash the full measure of their retaliatory appetites, who challenges the steeply fronted, luminous shock wave that would emanate from each nuclear explosion with a central core temperature estimated at 200 million degrees? How do we explain to the children who weren’t incinerated in the first wave, or the first hour, or the first week, that the world we once knew is gone and if any of them survive to adulthood, along the way they may well come to wish that they too were enveloped in the first fires of mankind’s self- immolation?
How can anyone who has ever seen the highly contrasted images of the vertical expanse of fire and smoke rising above the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, destroyed by devices darkly, amusingly dubbed” Fat Man” and” Little Boy”, ever contemplate setting in motion the utter destruction that would surely follow? The all out exchange of the sum of all the nuclear and thermonuclear weapons held in the arsenals of each of the nuclear powers on this planet would rival the cataclysm which brought on the end of the Jurassic 65 million years ago. Only roaches and rats would be left to clean up the mess.
The responsibility for managing the containment of the passions and ferocious potential of the human hearts and the weapons they have created is transitioning now to a new generation. We have provided them with great skills but also a great potential for apathy. Frankly, at times we have given them leadership that has been suspect, though to our credit we have also set them the example of a people who mostly tried not to follow their impulsive, reptilian brain stems into the dark. Little wonder that at times they seem so immersed in self-indulgence and accepting of raw authority.
But, sharing ownership in our common humanity and holding an investment in a common fate, they are just like us. Should they fail to realize the sobering imperative of their cautionary potential, there will be nowhere to hide from the resultant consequences. Still, they are capable, fully capable of maneuvering the hazardous shoals that surround us in this world and of avoiding the roaring falls that would forever extinguish the lights of the progeny of Adam and Eve.
For all his mercy, God has not circumscribed our survival against our willingness to destroy his world along with ourselves. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil he placed in the Garden of Eden was not walled off. There were no armed guards. There was only a warning.
The rest, he left up to us.
Lessons in Government and Economics from a Gristmill in the Tennessee Hills
Posted on April 2, 2009 by Michael Paskel | 2 Comments
My late Grandfather Marion Lewis Ridenour, once intuitively observed, “Stupidity is self-correcting”. I had not a hint of it’s meaning as a young stupid cub myself growing up around his table and soaking up his wizened and sometimes painfully frank dialectic. Years of practice would clarify it to me in spades.
Grandpa never finished grammar school. He never traveled more than a few hundred miles from the small cabin outside Clinton Tennessee where he was born and raised among the hickory and tulip poplars of the Eastern hardwood forests. He worked the mines of Jellico, a rugged mountainous region just north of Knoxville and earned enough to help support his family during some very hard times; times far worse than today’s.
Not known for his intellectual agility, he never the less proved smarter than some gave him credit for. He was smart enough in the sweltering heat of August of 1917 to put a ring on Mamie Bright’s finger and consummate an enduring love affair that would be put on hold with his death in October of 1985, and reignited with Mamie’s passing 4 years later.
Whether he ever aspired to do anything other than raise his 4 kids, smoke his Dr. Garaybow pipe, hang out with his favorite Uncle ( a sprightly leather-faced German known to us kids simply as “Unc”) and brawl with him on weekends, or just sit for hours reading the newspaper to his many grand children, was buried with him at Farmers Grove Cemetery in South Clinton, Tennessee. I’m not aware of any writing he did so other than an immense oral history little remains of his minds work. But snippets of what he said and more importantly what he believed to be of value, have made their way into my life and I find myself often using them to take the measure of men more or less prominently positioned in life than myself. Grandpa did after all, see such likes as Roosevelt, whom he credited with saving the country during the great depression, and Hoover whom he blamed for damned near ruining it. He kept two pictures hanging on the wall of his tiny bedroom; his parents only known photograph taken just after the turn of the 20th century and a 9” by 12” picture of FDR cut from the front page of the Knoxville News Sentinel that ran that awful April morning in 1945 announcing the Presidents death in Warm Springs Ga.
He never learned anything about government except what he observed from the business end of a plow or a pick ax in some God forsaken coal mine, and what he learned about economics he drew from that same prospective.
I learned everything I need to know about business, government, taxes and social responsibilities from him. Not directly you understand. His lessons were much too obtuse. He once schooled me on measures and weights and on doing the right thing. During summers as a child, he helped his father and uncle take corn and wheat to a nearby gristmill to be ground into meal and wheat flower. It took all day to reach the mill and while the processing was done, they’d camp in an open field not far away along with others who’d made the trip for the same reason. Given the technological constraints of mule and wagon it made no sense to leave and then come back a day or two later; it was just as easy to wait nearby and complete the task in a single round trip.
During these “business trip” he’d play with other boys and girls who’d accompanied their fathers and in this great communal gathering much news of the world was disseminated and a great time was shared by these people who’s common link to the land and it’s rules for commerce and survival trumped any differences that might otherwise have been significant enough to segregate them.
Here, for example, grandpa learned that the miller would keep a measure of the meal and flower that was ground as payment for his service. The miller had invested heavily in the cost of constructing and maintaining the mill and in order to sustain himself and his family he needed the “trade” with the local farmers and they needed him. The usual payment for grinding wheat and corn, an amount that was known as a “toll”, came to about a quart per bushel; not too much taken from a hard working farmer but a fair amount that kept the millers family well fed and rosy of check. The farmers of the upper East Tennessee Valley paid many a toll to the miller and many a ton of flower and corn meal was given back in turn.
Again, because of the time and distances involved, it made sense to maximize the load that went to mill so you’d bring all you had in as few a number of trips as possible. As a result, everybody pretty much knew how things were going at every other farm based on the amount they had to be milled. Some drove wagons groaning under the weight of their crops. Others, not so much. Grandpa said some people showed up with a few bushels and some poor souls even a few pecks. They were the ones who were having it the hardest and who’s families and farms were in the most dyer of peril.
He said to me that the miller would grind the smallest amounts first so poor farmers could get back to what must have been very hungry families. Winters would be bleak if neighbors didn’t help the poorest and none were poorer than the ones who showed up at the mill with only a few pecks of wheat and corn and empty eyes and stomachs.
Grandpa said the miller would sometimes add a little of his toll to the baskets of the poorest just to help out. And he said with gun-barrel blue eyes wet from the pain of such little remembered hurts, that the miller hadn’t taken any toll from them either.
“You don’t toll a peck,” he’d say.” Them that has, helps them that don’t.”
Obviously Wall Street Bankers and AIG executives, never studied economics, government, or doing the right thing around the fields and farms or the Gristmills of the Upper East Tennessee Valley.
Miles from the ordinary…
Posted on March 29, 2009 by Jonathan Carr, MIS | Leave a Comment
One of the coolest places I have ever been to. It took a few hours on a quad, riding through ancient Mayan ruins and Cozumel jungle to find this little place…only to find some great Mexican food and a couple of cold ones waiting for me…absolute paradise!
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