- The season has become a complete waste for the Houston
Texans and the team’s most reliable offensive weapon has had enough. Andre
Johnson, a first-round pick in 2003, has racked up 12,220
yards and 61 touchdowns in 11 seasons with the Texans and yet, his tenure with
the team has perhaps no lower point than the one that happened Sunday in a 28-23
loss to the Oakland Raiders. Losing to the Raiders is embarrassing in its own right,
but Johnson left the field after being pushed away from quarterback Matt Schaub
during a sideline dispute near the end of the game. The argument stemmed from
Schaub's incompletion in the end zone to Johnson on the final play of the game.
"You can see the frustration on
his face, frustration on my face," Johnson said. "I'm not worried
about that. I think you all are making a big deal about it. We talked
about it -- it's over with. I mean, me and Matt are fine. I have no problems
with Matt. We played a lot of football together. Me and Matt have a good relationship."
Suggesting there is no problem is one thing, but storming off to the locker
room before the clock even hit 0:00 is another one entirely. Schaub entered
Sunday's game late in the third quarter, replacing a healthy Case Keenum. Poor
quarterback play has been one of the many problems that has dragged the
defending AFC South champions down to last place. They have lost a
single-season franchise-record eight games in a row and last week, Johnson
called it his most frustrating season. This week, he was asked if he was happy
playing for the Texans moving forward. "I'm under contract, so, I have to
play my contract out," Johnson said. "I can't do anything about that.
I still have an ongoing contract." That is one of the least-enthusiastic
endorsement in recent memory by an athlete and for a receiver in the tail end
of his prime, seeing his last great years wasted have to be a bitter pill…….
- Ruh-roh. Don’t look now, sick people of the world, but a Lancet
Infectious Diseases Commission report published this week suggests that the entire
structure of healthcare delivery for effective antibiotics, including research
and development, distribution, and rational use, must be reengineered to avert
the looming global threat of antibiotic resistance. Yes, diseases are about to
outsmart humanity, according to this report authored by 26 experts from around
the world. It offers a comprehensive global overview of the growing problem of
antibiotic resistance, including its leading causes and repercussions. "The
causes of antibiotic resistance are complex and include human behavior at many
levels of society; the consequences affect everybody in the world," said
lead author Professor Dr. Otto Cars (real name) from Uppsala University in
Sweden and ReAct Action on Antibiotic Resistance. "Within just a few
years, we might be faced with unimaginable setbacks, medically, socially, and
economically, unless real and unprecedented global coordinated actions to
improve surveillance and transform the way antibiotics are regulated and
developed are taken immediately." Mr. Cars pointed to the reasons for the
rising development of antibiotic resistance as: surges in antibiotic use in
agriculture as well as in medicine; lack of adequate regulatory controls,
treatment guidelines, and patient awareness; and a dire shortage of new
antibiotics that could treat multidrug-resistant bacterial infections. "Only
now has the awareness and urgency of the problem of antibiotic resistance
reached a level that a new sustainable global system to counteract these
problems can be built," Cars added. "Addressing these problems will
require nothing less than a fundamental shift in how antibiotics are developed,
financed, and prescribed." The World Health Organization, Centers for
Disease Control and other such organizations have been promoting this issue as
well, with all of them seeming to agree that the primary hindrances are scientific
challenges, low financial returns compared with many other medicines such as
those used to treat chronic disease and the regulatory environment. Give it up
for capitalism and bureaucratic red tape………
- Thanks for nothing, U.S. Supreme Court. The nine overly serious,
stern-looking old people in black robes who decide a few cases of great import
every year and spend the rest of their time working on their motion offense on
the Supreme Court’s super-secret 3-on-3 basketball team have once again failed
the people of the United States. This time, they did so by rejecting a petition
by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) to prevent the National Security
Agency (NSA) from collecting call records. All the epically named folks of EPIC
wanted the court to do was perform a direct review of a Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court (FISC) order authorizing the collection of metadata and
other business records by the NSA, but that was clearly too much to ask. The request
came in the form of a petition for a writ of mandamus, which may be a rare
request that is even more rarely granted by the court, but should have been
granted in this case. The case was noteworthy because it was the first to reach
the Court since former NSA analyst Edward Snowden leaked classified documents
that exposed the details of surveillance programs. All EPIC wanted was for
the justices to direct the FISC to vacate an order issued in April that
required Verizon to turn over to the government records about telephone calls
and Internet exchanges. Its attorneys made a solid argument that a writ of
mandamus was appropriate because no other court was open to hear a challenge to
orders of the FISA Court, yet the court caved to the Justice Department’s
claims that EPIC could attempt to pursue its case in lower courts first instead
of asking the one court with the power to overrule them all to handle the
matter…….
- You cannot kill the spirit of a popular sitcom that still
pulls solid ratings but may have told all the stories it has left to tell. When
a network has a popular series that has run its course but still has a loyal
following, what is that network to do? Create a spinoff, duh. CBS doesn’t need
anyone to remind it of this fact and that’s why the network has
given a pilot commitment order to a spinoff of its über-popular sitcom “How I
Met Your Mother,” which is quickly winding down its final season. After nine
successful campaigns, the Neil Patrick Harris-led show will come to an end in
the spring and when it does, it will give way to a show with a similar name and
strikingly similar sense of humor. ““How I Met Your Dad” is the brainchild of HIMYM
creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas, as well as “Up All Night” creator Emily
Spivey. It will have ties to the series that spawned it, as the new characters
for “How I Met Your Dad” will reportedly be introduced in the upcoming series
finale of “How I Met Your Mother.” However, the new comedy will diverge from
its predecessor by telling a brand new story from a female character's point of
view as opposed to that of Harris’ Barney character. Additionally, the pilot
episode of “How I Met Your Dad” will be shot as a standalone. From there, the
road is wide open, although it would seem foolish to imagine that there will
never be any tie-ins or connections to “How I Met Your Mother.” After all, it
has a developed fan base that will presumably yield most of the viewers for
this new half-hour piece of formulaic comedy drivel, so failing to point back
to the reason everyone is there would be a bit absurd……..
- Africa knows how to git r’ done…with bribes, of course. According
to a new survey conducted by a group called Afrobarometer (no longer just a way to measure
the awesomeness of your ‘fro), nearly one in five Africans were forced to pay a
bribe in the past year just to get basic public services. Afrobarometer surveyed
51,000 Africans across 34 countries and not surprisingly, the institution rated
most corrupt across the whole continent was the police. Sierra Leone was rated
as the most corrupt country, with nearly two-thirds of the people claiming to
have given money to public officials for permits, access to health care and
school. The "Let the People Have Their Say" report lays out
the corruption, showing Morocco, Guinea and Kenya to be nearly as corrupt as Sierra Leone. Nigeria,
Kenya and Sierra Leone rated the worst for police corruption and in these
countries, tales of police officers abusing their power and committing crimes
on duty are rampant. In such nations, vigilante justice takes the place of
police doing their jobs. Government was close behind in the race for the most
corrupt entity in the survey, with the Nigerian and Egyptian governments faring
worst in the survey. A whopping 82 percent of respondents said their government
was doing a "fairly bad, or very bad" job tackling the problem of
corruption. A few nations fared well in the survey, with Namibia, Mauritius,
Cape Verde and Botswana ranking as countries where between 4 and 6 percent of
people reported paying a bribe in the past year. "The research suggests
African governments need to step up their efforts to curb corruption, in
the interests of both reducing poverty and advancing democracy," the
report said. That would seem to be a drastic understatement……..
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