Mikester’s blog

I can remember the days before the current flea treatments where it was not unusual to have a cat (or dog) completely infested with fleas.  I would discover that I was getting flea bites as well.  That's when you know it is bad.  I would take the pets in and get flea dips and flea bomb the house.  It was quite a bit of work so it is no wonder that something would get invented.

The "New" Treatments

I can remember when The Program got introduced in the mid 1990s. Here was a once-a-month treatment that you mixed in with some cat food and the animal ingested a substance that would enter the flea when they took a bite.  It would also render them unable to reproduce.  In this sense, it was like a flea birth control pill that relied on the pet to "administer" it.  It would not kill fleas on the animal, but it worked remarkably well as the pet no longer was a breeding ground for new generations of fleas.  It really was a remarkable improvement in ease of use for the pet owner.

WIthin a year or two, other products that were even more effective came on to the marketplace.  They were not copy cat products (no pun intended).  They operated on completely different principles and one of the things they did was kill existing fleas.  We tried Advantage.  The active ingredient in Advantage is imidacloprid which I discovered is an insecticide.  We are told by the manufacturer that this is perfectly safe for the pet.  This is based solely on studies done by Bayer (not a third party).  I disagree with the safety claims.  Let's look at this.

The warning label says this with regard to human contact with the substance:

If on skin or clothing: Take off contaminated clothing. Rinse skin immediately with plenty of water for 15 - 20 minutes. Call poison control center or doctor for treatment advice.

This is what I know for sure:  this subtance is a pesticide and insecticide, as statement by the manufacturers.  If you get it on your skin, you should call poison control and of course wash it for 15-20 minutes.  The method of application for cats is to put it on the skin.  If the cat was a human, it would require a call to poison control.

Our Experiences

One of our cats had a pretty serious skin reaction right where he was treated with Advantage.  This happened twice and we took him off of it for good.   The other cat, well, he didn't have a skin reaction and we kept him on it.  Well, we have taken him off of it after learning he developed thyroid problems and liver cancer.  According to one source, there is evidence of its carcinogenic effects manifesting as thyroid lesions in dogs,  As for organ damage: liver, kidney, thyroid, heart, lungs, spleen, adrenal, brain, gonads; liver toxicity,increased organ weights, thyroid lesions, increased cholesterol levels in dogs.  For its neurotoxicity effects:  incoordination and labored breathing, muscle weakness including muscles necessary for breathing.  I should add that our cat has exhibited many of these symptoms and while determining cause and effect can be difficult, I can't help but think that some of his problems are related to using Advantage.

Summary

I have lived long enough to realize that business decisions do not consider ethical factors enough.  Usually, ethical factors only enter in under legal or financial considerations, i.e., "we better not put this on the market because the harm it does will cause us to get sued."  Financial and profit considerations tend to dominate.  Purely ethical factors almost never considered.  Legal factors and financial factors are almost always considered. 

The timing of all these new flea "treatments" is very suspicious.  I believe some of these treatments emerged because the Program was such a success.  It became immediately apparent that quite a bit of money was up for grabs.  My opinion is we as pet owners need to take responsibility to learn about these treatments and not necessarily believe the drivel that comes out in the marketing and promotion literature which has the sole purpose of selling the product.  I'm sure time will tell the truth on these treatments.  The thing about drugs and treatments is that given enough time, enough harm is done to work out cause and effect.

I had nice chuckle the last couple of weeks.  Anyone who read my post about Tom Cruise and Sumner Redstone, I posited a theory that Mr. Redstone's behavior, i.e., "firing" Tom Cruise, was driven by the price of Viacom stock, or perhaps more directly, to the magnitude of his fortune.  Whenever a theory is put forth, it always is a good idea to revisit it later as more data becomes available to see if it still fits the circumstances.  Well I have to smugly say it does with an exclamation point!

One odd thing is this is very old news now.  The so-called firing took place in August and here we are in November and all of a sudden, Mr. Redstone has been at it again.  The time coincidental event is the release of the Mission Impossible III DVD (October 30th).  One theory that has many adherants is any publicity is better than none.  I suspect Mr. Redstone believes this.  He is interviewed in the December Vanity Fair, which appeared on October 31st (one day after the DVD release).  Among the comments he made was that "Paula, like women everywhere, had come to hate him."  This is of course a very suppressive comment and there certainly is no possible way he could know the viewpoint of all women.  But I digress.   The point is, this publication came out almost to the day with the release of the MI III DVD, which I noticed was being promoted heavily on television.

I find it very peculiar (not really) that the leading DVD in sales this week is MI III, a showcase for an actor that Sumner Redstone believes half the population hates.  He expounded "his [Tom's] behavior was entirely unacceptable to [my wife,] Paula, and to the rest of the world. He didn't just turn one [woman] off. He turned off all women, and a lot of men.… He was embarrassing the studio.  The truth of the matter is Tom is a star, is very popular and the sales figures support this.  MI II came out in May 2000, was a huge blockbuster at the theatre, and this was before people had DVD player en masse and before the industry-wide slide in theatre attendance.  Sumner Redstone will still make some decent money off of this movie.

Meanwhile, Tom is now running United Artists with his producing partner Paula Wagner.  Not bad!

Who do you work for?

I had occasion to recently take on a contract position with a local company.  I wasn't particularly looking for anything, but the opportunity came to me and it looked like a nice way to pick up some extra spending money and we all can always use that.  Right?

So I reported to work and after three days of orientation and training, I received an assignment that I discovered was 180 degrees opposite of everything I believe in and I almost at once recognized that there was no way I could do this sort of work.  The work has to do with a website dealing with PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder).  It really behooves us to discover the source of these diseases and disorders as they sure didn't exist until that last decade or two.  This is how it works:

Behavior is observed that is deemed inappropriate in some way.  A person who manifests certain symptoms (such as fear, anxiety, stress, depression), gets labelled with the disorder that matches the symptoms.  The psychiatric profession, in particular a board of psychiatrists, literally votes these diseases into existance at a meeting and there you have a new disease or disorder.  A newly voted in disorder now has a name and drug companies develop medications to "treat" the disorder.  What they never mention is there is no way to diagnose such disorders; a psychiatrist simply says this is your disease, i.e., he slaps a label on you.  There is no blood test.  The claim is the blood chemistry is out of whack.  The reality, however, is there is no way to prove that.  Hence, no test.  This is perhaps the largest scam ever perpetrated on a population.  People are led to believe they have a disease and they will always have it and they need to be medicated indefinitely.

So what did I do?  I left the company on day four.  I never wrote a single line of production computer code for them and I am very, very relieved that I am not contributing to such an endeavor.  The reality is this company isn't a criminal company.  The people that run it are just myopic.  They look at how they can earn a very good living, in this case by developing websites for various branches of the US military.  I don't think it ever occurred to them that their work causes an impact on the society and that people's lives can be harmed.  This particular contract was for a part of a website and the amount of funding was just shy of a million dollars.  From what I can figure, I was the only developer that was going to be assigned.  The company has it's own home-grown CMS system that enables them to develop content websites quickly but I found it also had the audacity to pat itself on the back in its own promotional materials that it develops software at a fixed price and they are somehow fiscally responsible.  A million dollar website for the Army is way too much money, regardless of the content.  I believe the Terminator 3 website was around a million dollars as well, at least that's what I heard.  It was very Flash rich, high multimedia content and one can see how such a site would require several developers and artists.  In this case, it's very much like any government contract I've ever seen: cash cows for the company that provides the service and the rest of us taxpayers foot the bill.  It just bothers me more when it's in support a large scam with many vested interests.

I learned something.  One should never just do a job for money.  We should really look deeply at what it is we are asked to do and then make an intelligent decision on whether that work is worthwhile and should be supported or whether it really should be attacked.  If everyone took that viewpoint, missles would never get made, uranium would never be enriched, many newspaper stories would never be published and the world would be a much better place for all of us to live.  But to do that, one needs to look beyond their own life and see what effects they are creating on the planet.  That takes some responsibility.  Some day we will get there - that is my hope.

It's not personal, it's business - straight from the Godfather.  Except what happened with Sumner Redstone and Tom Cruise this past week was personal and business.  And Redstone made it very personal.

Now here is my theory:  Sumner Redstone did what he did in an effort to prevent Viacom stock from going down even more, which it most likely would, when word got out that Tom Cruise had left Paramount.  The key here is Tom left Paramount, not the other way around.  It just had not been announced, but Paula Wagner made that very clear and gave some specifics as to the future of Cruise / Wagner Productions. The media has completely missed this point.  They are so infatuated with anything related to Tom, and of course sensational news is what they think sells, so the story has to be that Tom was fired.

In actual fact, the truth is this simple:  Sumner Redstone decides to deflect attention from Viacom stock, which has been steadily declining, is off roughly 18% since its December 2005 high.  By "firing" Tom, it looks like Paramount is in control and taking measures to cut costs.  So what Mr. Redstone has done is to publicly tell a lie (he fired Tom rather than Tom quitting) solely in an effort to influence his stock price.  This is not unlike what the Enron executives did, though in their case, the lies were very deep indeed and the effects were tragic.

Why would the head of a parent company make such an announcement in the Wall Street Journal?  It only makes sense if he is trying to prevent his stock from declining.  He didn't tell it to Premiere or Variety!  And he didn't have Paramount announce it.  The message had to come from the top of the corporation.  It is even more apparent that his own attention is very much on his stock - he mentions, gloatingly, that Viacom stock went up the day of the announcement (a whopping 19 cents).  This is tantamount to saying - see, I made my own stock go up!  Of course when your holdings of stock are 12% of the company or nearly 50 million shares, a 19 cent uptick represents nearly 10 million dollars.  But when you look at the performance since January, where the stock price has dropped nearly $10/share, Sumner Redstone Viacom stock is worth about a half billion less now than last December. That's quite a hit, even for a billionaire.

Generalities and Specifics

Sumner Redstone never mentioned what behavior of Tom's was unacceptable to Paramount.  Presumably he was referring to the Oprah couch jumping and the Matt Lauer Today Show interview as these have gotten the most media attention.

Meanwhile, Paula Wagner was probably about as specific as she could be.  She mentioned there were two hedge funds that will furnish 100 million with options to go up to 300 million.  She mentions one is on the east coast and the other on the west coast.  The only thing we don't know yet are the names of the funds.  As anyone is business knows, agreements are usually in place that govern things like when information is released to the press and so forth.  I'm sure the names to these two hedge funds will become known when the time is right.

Unfounded criticism

I have long known that Tom Cruise is an exceptional human being and any negative treatment is unfair and simply not based on anything of substance.  Let's take a look.

Paxil and Brooke Shields

This is the long and short of the Brooke Shields story:

• The FDA issues black box warnings for ALL antidepressants, Paxil included. Black box warnings are the most serious and the last step before removal from the market. Reason for the warnings: they can cause a user to commit suicide. The UK bans Paxil completely for those under 18 years for the same reason (risk of suicide).

• Tom criticizes Brooke Shields for promoting the use of Paxil. She made money by writing a book that advocates the use of Paxil, a drug that the FDA says can cause suicide.
  

What Brooke did earned her money - she had a vested interest in promoting the use of a drug known and stated by the FDA to have as a side effect of suicide.

What Tom did was call her on it, saying this isn't cool and you should show a bit more responsiblity.  He happens to be right.  And you can't spin this any other way.  He knows based on scientific measurement that these drugs are very dangerous and at best only mask symptoms.  If you know this and do nothing, well that is irresponsible.  If you promote the use of these drugs while making money from it, well that is even more irresponsible.

Katie and Couch Jumping

I am amazed that this story is even a story.  Tom loves Katie - good for him.  He professes publicly how much he loves her.  Even better.  Most women would love to hear their man say they love them.  Many would  probably be very touched when their man does so publicly.   The Oprah crowd that witnessed it absolutely loved it!  For some reason, the media's message is suppress your emotions and if you show the least bit of enthusiasm, you must be nuts!

Redstone errors

When you look at the facts of this story, it's difficult to conclude that Tom was fired the way Redstone wants you to believe.  Tom quit, Redstone is doing damage control by a preemptive strike.  I imagine he holds a grudge against Tom for leaving Paramount, so why not make it public and personal.

There is a real problem when your basis of operation is to publicly slam people.  That is what Mr. Redstone did and it is a bad business practice.  Kharma is certainly one aspect to it; what goes around, comes around.  Redstone made this very personal, he bypassed his executives at Paramount, he was discourteous to another Paramount money maker by the name of Steven Spielberg, he underestimated the number of people that really love Tom (many very influential in the industry), and he alientated the Creative Arts Agency, the hand that feeds the studios some of the best talent around.  Tom will make money, a lot of it, and it will be for the competitors of Sumner Redstone.  Now matter how that is spun, it still boils down to very bad business for Paramount and Viacom.