thisisbabylon.net

Unprecedented authority is being given to the CIA under our current Emperor.

John Negroponte, Bush-appointed CIA director, was given the authority last week to

"...excuse publicly traded companies from their usual accounting and securities-disclosure obligations. Notice of the development came in a brief entry in the Federal Register, dated May 5, 2006, that was opaque to the untrained eye."

OK. While this may sound like just dispensing with a piece of "usual accounting procedure", what the memo actually said was:

"I hereby assign to you the function of the President under section 13(b)(3)(A) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended."

The amended version of the 1934 act states that "with respect to matters concerning the national security of the United States," the President or the head of an Executive Branch agency may exempt companies from certain critical legal obligations, including keeping accurate "books, records, and accounts" and maintaining "a system of internal accounting controls.”

This prevents future Enrons from happening. If they're your friend, you give them a defense contract, now it's a "national security" issue, and they don't have to keep records at all! It's a win-win situation for Bush cronies in an unprecedented display of the cover-your-behind game.

But it doesn't stop at stock filings.

The US moved in federal court to dismiss cases brought against domestic spying under Bush's homeland security anti-terrorism surveillance programs.

For decades, U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies have been required to seek court approval before using electronic surveillance on Americans. That was not done by the NSA in the program at issue, but President Bush has said the eavesdropping was made legal by a congressional resolution passed after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Justice Department attorneys said in their legal brief that the legality of the president’s actions could only be properly judged by understanding “the specific threat facing the nation and the particular actions taken by the president to meet that threat.”

That's the legal equivalent of saying "it's a govt thing, you wouldn't understand." Already the FCC backed off investigating the wiretapping.

It's quite disturbing knowing that the head of national intelligence controls everything from stock disclosures to judicial verdicts.

Posted by Y-Love at 01:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

On my MySpace blog I decried the new cervical cancer vaccine from Merck -- it could save up to 193,000 lives a year but is being offered at a cost prohibitive to many consumers. Some studies showed even 100 percent protection against the HPV virus which causes the cancer.

I thought I had seen "bad."

I had, to borrow a phrase made famous by The Matrix, no idea how deep the rabbit-hole went.

More than 30,000 men in America have late-stage prostate cancer. 27,350 men are projected to die of prostate cancer in 2006, with 234,000 cases projected to be diagnosed -- 9% of all cancer related deaths in men. Provenge is a promising vaccine which:

Provenge...has the potential to become the first cancer vaccine to get approval from the FDA. Two phase 3 trials have shown that 33% of patients taking it were alive after 36 months[.]

Total cost of Provenge treatment? $20,000.

Or HIV: Tenofovir, a groundbreaking HIV drug from Gilead Sciences, was shown as early as 1994 to act as an AIDS vaccine. When given to apes without HIV, the apes subsequently didn't catch HIV when exposed to the virus. This could save lives by the day. Total cost?

Gilead, based in Foster City, Calif., sells tenofovir under the brand name Viread. It also sells Truvada, a pill combining tenofovir with another AIDS medicine, emtricitabine or Emtriva. A year's supply of Viread costs about $5,300 and Truvada about $8,800.

Oh yeah, don't even think about trying to get this HIV vaccine in America, by the way.

The company insists it has no intention of adding to that bottom line by marketing Viread as a preventive drug. It says the ethical, legal and regulatory challenges in the U.S. would be too great.

One positive note, though, Gilead Sciences said it would sell the drug "at-cost" to poor and developing countries were it to be used as a preventive. Now, currently an AIDS vaccine from Targeted Genetics is being tested in a multinational trial. I hope Gilead sticks to their word.

And here's my personal favorite.

A new personalized treatment for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma is entering into Phase 3 clinical trials. FavId, an anti-cancer treatment and MyVax, a cancer regimen from Genitope, Inc., use patient-specific DNA signatures on the surfaces of tumors and other cancerous cells to create personalized drug treatments which have an astounding rate of success.

Lymphoma vaccine pioneer Ronald Levy of Stanford University began testing personalized vaccines in the late 1980s, and the work was taken up by Levy associates at the National Cancer Institute. Though those early clinical trials were small, the results were impressive: many patients treated in the late 1980s remain alive and have never relapsed.

Almost twenty years of life added. Major breakthrough.

Some Wall Street analysts estimate that FavId will be priced at between $40,000 to $60,000 a year.

Thousands of men will die. Thousands of women will die.

All because they can't afford to survive.

Survival of the richest. This is Babylon.

Posted by Y-Love at 01:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The Senate Intelligence Committee had the following on its website Tuesday:

General Hayden’s open confirmation hearing will take place as scheduled at 9:30 am EST on Thursday, May 18, 2006. The 15 members of the committee will receive their briefing on Wednesday, May 17, 2006 in preparation for the hearing.

Now these briefings originally weren't going to happen. Originally only seven of the Senate Intelligence Committee panel members were to receive full briefings as to the extent of the NSA's anti-terrorist civilian surveillance activities. The LA Daily News quoted the New York Times' statement of Senator Pat Roberts (R-KS):

The briefings [are] necessary to have a full and appropriate confirmation hearing for Gen. Hayden.

General Hayden still insists that the NSA Surveillance programs put into place post 9/11 were legal.

But the decorated general refused to answer some key questions during the hearing -- including responding to the charges of "big brother" style tactics brought up after Verizon's allegedly giving millions of Americans' phone records to the NSA was brought up in court.

This was a story originally posted in USA Today on May 11th, which stated that Verizon and other long-distance providers were giving over transcripts of conversations to the government. Verizon responded with a statement that they are not giving such data to the NSA. BellSouth responded in kind. Qwest Communications didn't even participate in the NSA program. AT&T refused to comment. Verizon was asked if their statement applied to their subsidiaries, namely MCI, who Verizon bought in January 2006. They gave the statements:

"One of the most glaring and repeated falsehoods in the media reporting," the statement said, "is the assertion that, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Verizon was approached by NSA and entered into an arrangement to provide the NSA with data from its customers' domestic calls. This is false."

Asked to elaborate on what role MCI had, or is having, in the NSA program, spokesman Peter Thonis said the statement was about Verizon, not MCI.

Asked whether Verizon's customer calling records are in the NSA database, Thonis said, "I just don't know the answer to that."

Well that's nice to know. This could just be a reaction to the calls for an FCC investigation into the matter. But these are just the things which reached the media.

Gen. Hayden responded to many questions by saying that he refused to answer them in an open-door session, but would answer them in a closed-door session, closed to the public, i.e. us.

Hayden declined to answer a string of questions by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., saying he would answer them later in a closed-door session.

They included whether he believed that "waterboarding," in which prisoners are strapped to a plank and dunked in water until nearly drowning, was an acceptable form of interrogation. He also declined to say publicly how long he believed the United States could hold terror suspects without a trial.

Wonder what she heard in the briefing.

Posted by Y-Love at 01:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)