meehawl

The U.S. government has injected hundreds of foreigners it has deported with dangerous psychotropic drugs against their will to keep them sedated during the trip back to their home country … Internal government records show that most sedated deportees, such as Ade, received a cocktail of three drugs that included Haldol, also known as haloperidol, a medication normally used to treat schizophrenia and other acute psychotic states … They were also given Ativan, used to control anxiety, and … Cogentin, a medication that is supposed to lessen Haldol’s side effects of muscle spasms and rigidity … Haldol gained notoriety in the Soviet Union, where it was often given to political dissidents imprisoned in psychiatric hospitals.

Tags: Ativan, Cogentin, Haldol, immigration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, psychotropics, torture by mike
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From day one of the public hearings held in Derry’s ornate Victorian Guildhall, the Bloody Sunday inquiry has served as a cash cow for the army of solicitors and barristers involved. Official figures show that legal costs have swallowed more than half of the £181m spent up to the end of last year. The senior QCs alone have pocketed well over £20m, and the gravy train is still rolling. The final bill for Saville’s seemingly interminable investigation – which heard its last witness three years ago but continues to cost around £500,000 per month – seems certain to exceed £250m and could reach £400m

Tags: Bloody Sunday, Derry, Ireland, lawyers, Londonderry, Northern Ireland, The Troubles, Ulster by mike
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The New York Times has an article reviewing a book which basically worries that Silicon Valley “innovation” is hollowing, consisting mainly of me-too companies with low barriers to entry being funded by cautious, herd-chasing VC cash and bought by large technology companies flush with dumb public stock market funds that have lost the ability to generate internal innovation. The first irony is that the book is written by a person who profitted handsomely when her streaming video startup (“funded in 6 minutes“!) was bought by Cisco in the late 1990s using a no-money-down dilutive stock swap at the tail end of the streaming multimedia mini-bubble.

Part of the reason, she said, was that Cisco and other fast-growing big companies started acquiring start-ups with innovative technologies instead of developing new ideas internally.

The second irony? Right under the article, the first entry in the “Related” posts is Cisco Buys E-Mail and Calendaring Start-Up for $215 Million. Yes, in the middle of 2008, Cisco can still piss away $215m buying a three-year-old open-source, Linux-based email/calendar startup. In 2008, email/calendaring must be such a difficult, virtually intractable problem that it requires outside solutions.

Tags: capitalism, Cisco, innovation, PostPath, Silicon Valley, technology by mike
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