People trying to stave off heart disease spent $5.2 billion (that’s with a B) on Vytorin and Zetia, two drugs which trials have now shown, don’t really work:

Leading doctors urged a return to older, tried-and-true treatments for high cholesterol after hearing full results Sunday of a failed trial of Vytorin. Millions of Americans already take the drug or one of its components, Zetia. But doctors were stunned to learn that Vytorin failed to improve heart disease even though it worked as intended to reduce three key risk factors.

Shockingly <<SARCASM ALERT>> the makers of these drugs, Merck and Schering-Plough, dragged their feet for nearly two years before releasing the results of this study. They are now being investigated by a Congressional Probe as well as New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo:

“While these corporations profited, Americans were left in the dark,” Cuomo said in a written statement Sunday. “The millions who take this drug, taxpayers who subsidize its use through the Medicaid and Medicare programs, and Merck and Schering-Plough’s investors deserve to know why it took so long for the results to be made public. This new information underscores our concerns and advances our investigation, which we will pursue aggressively.”

Wow, drug companies aggressively marketing a drug that they know really doesn’t work in order to continue making billions for their shareholders? WHY DOES THAT SOUND SO FAMILIAR?????

Call ‘em a sell out but Vice just got paid either way. How so? Check the cover, son!

Like one-hit-wonder Five said 10 years ago, “Baby when the lights go out, I’ll show you what it’s all about…” BMW glow in the dark ad on the FRONT COVER! EFF WIT IT!!!!!!!

I like this lil feature much better than the fake pubes they put in one of the last issues. Those ended up on my favorite bar of triple milled Australian soap, thanks to my roommate. Hit him up on MySpace and tell him he’s a jerk! Here’s a trip down memory lane for you bubblegum lovahs: REAL TIMEEEE!

Interesting article from the Sunday Herald about the massive debt write-downs and ensuing goverment bailouts of private banks currently happening throughout Europe and the US, a scenario predicted rather aptly by our old friend Karl Marx:

The quaint idea that loss-making companies should fail, to ensure the health and vitality of the capitalist system, has quietly been discarded. The banks, we are told, are “too big to fail”, which means that they have to be taken into public ownership - like Northern Rock - or have their debts underwritten by government, like Bear Stearns, which comes to much the same thing. The central banks are also cutting interest rates to try to boost banking profits, and this is making currencies such as the dollar increasingly unstable.

Which takes us back to Marx. The crisis that is rocking the world is a classic example of the kind of shocks and dislocations that Marx said were an essential feature of a competitive capitalist economy. The falling rate of profit that results from too much investment piling into new technologies and commodities forces capital to engage in a constant search for profit.

Athough the US government has long had an unspoken policy regarding commerical banks that were T.B.T.F. (too big to fail),  the recent bailout of Bear Stearns marked a new broadening in scope of this failsafe, one the New Yorker deems “Too Dumb to Fail“:

T.B.T.F. has become a generally accepted, if unwritten, rule in the financial world. Two weeks ago, though, it was given a new twist when the Federal Reserve acted to save the investment bank Bear Stearns, orchestrating the company’s sale to J. P. Morgan Chase by providing Morgan with up to thirty billion dollars in financing to cover Bear Stearns’s portfolio of risky assets. Previously, the government had intervened to protect only commercial banks—which take deposits and issue traditional loans, and which are heavily regulated. (Another first: the Fed is now allowing investment banks to borrow from it directly.) The Bear Stearns deal means that the T.B.T.F. rule now applies to investment banks as well. Suddenly, the federal government is committed to saving a whole lot more companies than it was a couple of weeks ago.

And though the New Yorker story quoted above goes on to praise the bailout of Bear Stearns as being an altogether positive for the long term health of the world financial markets, it does make an especially salient point about the precedent being set:

Rescuing failing companies obviously runs the risk of creating moral hazard—if we insulate people from the consequences of their irresponsibility, they’re more likely to be irresponsible in the future.

Stay tuned…

According to a piece in USA Today a 78 year old woman who went to a hospital in Germany last month for a little surgery on her leg ended up leaving the hospital with - get this - an artificial anus. Opps. What this woman do with her shiny new artificial anus besides maybe buy it some nice, soft, triple-ply TP from some of the funds in her forthcoming settlement is yet to be seen.

German newspaper Frankenpost says some members of the surgical team have been punished in connection with the series of mistakes that led them to operate on the wrong patient.

Prosecutors are said to be looking into the incident. As for the unidentified patient, she still needs knee surgery and plans to file a lawsuit.

Lyor Cohen gets paid. Lyor, who is responsible for developing artists ranging from the Beastie Boys to Ryan Adams just re-signed his deal with Warner Music Group for a 5 year deal and doubled his base salary to $3 million per year. Nice work. Plus, he gets bonuses if people actually buy music too that range from $1.5 million all the way up to $5 million. Cohen also will receive 1,500,000 stock options. I’m sure his expense account will also be somewhat huge - nice play, especially considering the sorry current state of the music industry as well as WMG stock being at it’s all time low.