Author: Matthew G. Saroff

Why We Need to Destroy Big Pharma

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Well, the first answer is a utilitarian answer, we do not need them.

If the government spends 5 out of every 6 dollars spent on medical research, then there is no reason to pay the excessive monopoly rents that they extract from out economy.

But there is also a moral argument, and it is that the large pharmaceutical firms are ineluctably evil.

We have yet another example of this when we discover that they colluded with the government of East Germany to turn their citizenry into unwilling Guinea Pigs:

Major Western pharmaceutical companies carried out tests of medications in the 1980s on patients in communist East Germany, in some cases without the subjects’ knowledge, a media report said Friday.

 “We have documents showing there were contracts between Western drug companies and East German institutions for medical tests,” a staff member at the German national archive told AFP, partially confirming a report in the daily Der Tagesspiegel.

 The newspaper, which examined the documents, reported that more than 50 Western firms had contracts with East Germany’s Health Ministry to carry out a total of 165 medical tests between 1983 and 1989.

 In exchange, the communist authorities were paid up to 860,000 deutschmarks (around 430,000 euros today or $567,000), according to the report, at a time when East Germany was desperate for hard currency.

 Der Tagesspiegel said the companies involved included Bayer, Schering, Hoechst (now Sanofi), Boehringer Ingelheim and Goedecke (today owned by Pfizer).

 It said the test subjects often were not informed, citing seven specific cases in which patients said later they had been unaware they were involved in testing. The national archive said it could not confirm this.

The taxpayers front ⅚ of the money to do the research, but out of some sort of need to “set the free market loose, we give away the property rights so that they can extract monopoly rents.

Enough.

This is an industry that exists only through the grant of exclusive rights by the government.  This is not free enterprise.

We need to make sure that if the taxpayers pay for the research, then the taxpayers own the research.

Jack Klugman Did the Wrong Thing for the Right Reasons

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When actor Jack Klugman died recently, much was said about his career, but special note was given to his role in the passage of the Orphan Drug Act of 1983.

There can be no doubt here that his motives were good.  He wanted to see that diseases for which there was a limited number of sufferers, and hence limited profit, had drugs developed and produced.

Unfortunately, what seemed like a wonderful idea, subsidies and exclusivity granted to pharma, which had the added allure of providing a free market aura, has made things worse.

About ⅚ of the money spent on medical research is government money.  When one considers the subsidies present under the Orphan Drug Act, that number undoubtedly tops ⁹⁄₁₀ of the funds being from the taxpayers.

BTW, some of the Orphan drugs in question are such “blockbusters” as, “Abilify, Provigil, Vioxx, Botox, and Cialis.”

You see a similar effect with the Drug Price Competition and Patent Term Restoration Act and Colcicine, where a drug that had been in use for 3500 years (no that number is not a typo, the first documented use of the drug is from ≈1500 BCE) went from 9¢ to $4.85 a pill, a 5200+% increase.

The underlying flaw here is the idea that private business is an unalloyed good, so if there is something it will not do, the solution is to subsidize private businesses to do it, even when all indications are that having the government provide this function would provide the most benefit.

This is wrong, and we have seen nearly 40 years of this philosophy, it really became mainstream during the Carter years, has harmed society as a whole.

Astronomical Headline of the Year

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Tell me that this was not the product of much giggles by the editorial staff:

Uranus takes a pounding more frequently than thought

 Uranus isn’t just gassy, it’s also tilted completely sideways, such that instead of rotating like a spinning top, it rolls around the plane of the solar system more like a giant ball. Now astronomers think they know how this happened, and it means that Uranus has been pounded really, really hard not once, but twice.

 Uranus’ axial tilt of 98 degrees means that it’s got one pole pointed almost directly at the sun, and one pole pointed out into space. As the planet revolves around the sun, these poles slowly switch places, meaning that if you lived there, you’d get 42 years of sunlight followed by 42 years of darkness, with a short time in between where things would seem almost normal.

 Needless to say, this sort of behavior is a bit strange for Uranus, although nobody’s quite been able to determine how it happened. New simulations from astronomers at the Observatory of Côte d’Azur in Nice, France may have just figured it out, and the answer seems to be that Uranus has suffered from not one but two giant impacts..

H/t LD at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

Turtle Power!

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They beat us to the moon:

You might say the answer is Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and that other guy Michael Collins, the crew of Apollo 11. Or you could represent for the crew of Apollo 10, which reached the moon in May 1969 and then headed back to Earth without landing.

But there is a much stranger answer to this question, depending on how much you care about humans and what your definition of reaching the moon might be. Before any people arrived at the moon, other animals got there first. And unlike the dogs and monkeys that were made famous in early space shots and Earth orbits, the first vertebrates to reach the moon were a pair of steppe tortoises, Discovery’s Amy Shira Teitel reminds us.

The Soviet Zond 5 sent the animals around the moon — although not into lunar orbit — during a mission in the middle of September, 1968. The unmanned craft then returned to Earth and splashed down in the Indian Ocean, after which the Russians recovered the craft.

A month later, Soviet scentists revealed that the Zond had been a tiny ark, carrying the tortoises, “wine flies, meal worms, plants, seeds, bacteria, and other living matter.” A small dummy packed with radiation sensors flew, too.

Later, the turtles took to living in sewers, fighting with Japanese weapons, and eating pizza.

Republicans Do Not Have a Monopoly On Stupid

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Case in point, Senator Barbara Boxer is proposing to deploy National Guard to public schools:

Federal funds would be made available to deploy National Guard troops at schools under legislation introduced Wednesday by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) in response to last week’s mass slaying at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn.

The Save Our Schools Act would leave it to governors to decide whether to call out the National Guard and how to use troops around schools.

“Is it not part of the national defense to make sure that your children are safe?” Boxer said at Capitol Hill press conference.

Yes, armed soldiers patrolling the corridors of our schools is such a good idea.

We really need to strengthen out Posse Comitatus law, not abolish it.

I Miss Madame La Guillotine

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Roll Stewart!

Jerry Della Femina, who made his fortune on Madison Avenue, is whining like a baby about taxes, and claims that he is selling his posh Hamptons estate as a result:

He got taxed out of town.

 Legendary advertising guru Jerry Della Femina is the latest Hamptons fat cat to unload his East End spread at the precipice of the dreaded fiscal cliff, The Post has learned.

 The flamboyant Madison Avenue guru has sold his 8,500-square-foot estate — the host of many legendary Hamptons bashes — for $25 million, and blames his flight squarely on President Obama’s fiscal policies.

 “I want the proceeds of this sale to go to my kids and my grandkids,” said the man behind iconic ad campaigns for Meow Mix and Absolut Vodka. “I don’t want my money going to Obama, and that’s what’s going to happen in the New Year. That’s why I sold right now, that’s why I wanted to get this done.”

Seriously.

This sort of sh%$ has me wishing for the return Maximilien de Robespierre.

I’ll leave it to Jon Stewart to express how I feel, though he was actually directing it to hack journo Bernie Goldberg.

Just When You Thought the NRA Could not be Any More Contemptible………

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While the NRA was condemning violent video games, it was also bankrolling the same games:

As Electronic Arts prepared to market Medal of Honor Warfighter, the latest version of its top-selling video game released in October, it created a Web site that promoted the manufacturers of the guns, knives and combat-style gear depicted in the game.

Among the video game giant’s marketing partners on the Web site were the McMillan Group, the maker of a high-powered sniper’s rifle, and Magpul, which sells high-capacity magazines and other accessories for assault-style weapons.

Links on the Medal of Honor site allowed visitors to click through on the Web sites of the game’s partners and peruse their catalogs.

“It was almost like a virtual showroom for guns,” said Ryan Smith, who contributes to the Gameological Society, an online gaming magazine. After Mr. Smith and other gaming enthusiasts criticized the site, Electronic Arts disabled the links, saying it had been unaware of them.

The video game industry was drawn into the national debate about gun violence last week when the National Rifle Association accused producers of violent games and movies of helping to incite the type of mass shooting that recently left 20 children and six adults dead at a school in Newtown, Conn.

While studies have found no connection between video games and gun violence, the case of Medal of Honor Warfighter illustrates how the firearms and video game industries have quietly forged a mutually beneficial marketing relationship.

Many of the same producers of firearms and related equipment are also financial backers of the N.R.A. McMillan, for example, is a corporate donor to the group, and Magpul recently joined forces with it in a product giveaway featured on Facebook. The gun group also lists Glock, Browning and Remington as corporate sponsors.

Seriously, these f%$#s make Dick Cheney look like Mother Theresa.*

*FWIW, I’m not a big fan of Mother Theresa, though I am not has extreme about this as Christopher Hitchens was.

It;s the Hypocrisy, Stupid

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Me Like Republican Mug Shots

Senator Mike Crapo was just busted for drunk driving:

Senator Michael D. Crapo of Idaho was arrested early Sunday and charged with driving under the influence in a suburb of Washington, D.C., the authorities said.

Mr. Crapo, a Republican, was pulled over after his vehicle ran a red light, the police in Alexandria said. He failed field sobriety tests and was arrested about 12:45 a.m., said a police spokesman, Jody Donaldson, and then was taken to the Alexandria jail and released on an unsecured $1,000 bond about 5 a.m.

“There was no refusal” to take sobriety tests, Mr. Donaldson said, and “no accident, no injuries.”

“Just a traffic stop that resulted in a D.U.I.,” he said.

The police said Mr. Crapo, who was alone in his vehicle, had registered a blood alcohol content of 0.11 percent. The legal limit in Virginia is 0.08 percent.

Mr. Crapo, 61, has a Jan. 4 court date.

“I am deeply sorry for the actions that resulted in this circumstance,” he said in a statement on Sunday night. “I made a mistake for which I apologize to my family, my Idaho constituents and any others who have put their trust in me. I accept total responsibility and will deal with whatever penalty comes my way in this matter. I will also undertake measures to ensure that this circumstance is never repeated.”

So, why is hypocrisy an issue?

It’s not because he’s a Mormon. There is no reason to expect anyone to observe all the manners of observance of their religions, bur rather it is because he describes described himself as a Mormon who abstains from drinking alcohol.

It was a politically expedient lie about a moral position, and as such it is appropriate to invoke the “H-word”.

Talk About Irony

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Over at the Stellar Parthenon BBS, JR was discussing banging his head against a wall a discussion with his right-wing father over gun control.

In describing the discussion, he wrote the following:

I do think its a complicated question and gun control is only part of it. We have other nations with high gun ownership and not as many rampages. I do think that we need to approach the mental health angle, the question of how our society makes people crazy in the first place, etc.

It’s kind of like fire-fighting. Having firemen is a good thing but building places like tinderboxes is also a big problem. Having no building codes is a problem. There are a lot of ways to mitigate against fire before it ever happens. But the f%$#ing NRA is like any other industry advocacy group trying to prevent reform because it costs money. The f%$#ing car companies said we couldn’t afford safety equipment in cars. Manufacturers said OSHA standards would be too expensive to comply with. Maimed workers are the cost of doing business.

(%$# mine)

It’s a valid point.

Today though, it’s fraught with irony, because earlier today, some whack-job set a fire in Webster, NY and ambushed the firefighters who responded, shooting two of them dead.

Seriously, f%$# the NRA.

Better yet, don’t f%$# the NRA, or more specifically don’t f%$# NRA members.  Take the example of Lysistrata.

Hunting for a Cat With a Chain Saw.

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Ambiguity, the Devil’s Vollyball

No, I have the chain saw, not the cat.

As you are probably aware, one of our cats, Hummus, has gone missing.

We believe that she is hanging with the local feral cats, who use a heavily overgrown area that sits on a space between our back yard, and that of our back yard neighbor. It was created by an easement for phone lines.

So, at a minimum, I needed to clear the heavy growth on the slope leading to our fence, the unused area acts as a sort of a reservoir, hence the use of a chain saw.

It’s so much fun starting a small two stroke motor, let me tell you.

Thank You CIA, for Preserving Polio

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You see, the Taliban is targeting workers on the UN Polio eradication program, because they claim that they are CIA spies.

The problem here is that the CIA has, and has probably continued, to use vaccination programs as a part of the intelligence gathering process:

Back in 2000 I shared a train cabin from Amsterdam to Munich with an Afghan man who, when he learned I was a journalist, pleaded with me to communicate to the American public that the CIA had to stop destroying his country and rebuild it instead. “They have so much power,” I recall him saying. I reacted with the tolerant and condescending attitude of the Western liberal. The real sources of Afghan misery, obviously, were tribal, political and religious rivalry, and while it was tempting for people with lower levels of political understanding to blame a foreign mastermind for their troubles, such conspiratorial thinking was actually part of the problem in the Mideast, as in Eastern Europe. Right?

Afghanistan and Pakistan are where liberalism goes to die. In the years since, it’s become increasingly clear that my traveling companion was at least partially right: when trying to explain a social or political event in Afghanistan or Pakistan, it’s entirely rational to assume that it stems from a plot by an intelligence agency, quite likely the CIA. The sickest confirmation of this point was the recent revelation that the CIA ran an operation to verify Osama bin Laden’s location by gathering DNA samples through a false-flag hepatitis B vaccination programme. As James Fallows notes, American officials are defending this operation, not denying it.

This is despicable and stupid.

I would use the term evil, a term that I have increasingly applied to various actors in the United States state security apparatus, though one could also use the quote from (probably) Tallyrand, “It was worse than a crime; it was a mistake.”

Worst………Speaker………Ever

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You cannot negotiate with him, because, when push comes to shove, he is completely incapable of delivering the votes, even on a meaningless vote that was intended to call out a President that his caucus hates:

I just finished laughing from this spectacle on the House floor today. The House leadership tried desperately to pass “Plan B,” the main part of which was an extension of the Bush tax cuts on the first $1 million of income. In truth, all of the other giveaways in it would actually result in lower taxes for many wealthy earners, but tax rates have this weird power, especially within the Republican caucus. And you could just feel today that conservatives weren’t willing to pass the bill, even at that ridiculously high level. John Boehner and the leadership added a sweetener in the form of a package that eliminated the sequester on defense spending and applied it to more discretionary spending cuts, and even that barely passed, tainted by the association to Plan B.

We waited for a vote. And waited. Then the House Republicans held a closed caucus. And then Boehner had to come out and call the whole thing off.

The House did not take up the tax measure today because it did not have sufficient support from our members to pass. Now it is up to the president to work with Senator Reid on legislation to avert the fiscal cliff. The House has already passed legislation to stop all of the January 1 tax rate increases and replace the sequester with responsible spending cuts that will begin to address our nation’s crippling debt. The Senate must now act.

This is astonishing. Boehner spent three days talking up Plan B, which you just don’t do without the votes in hand. But conservative groups rule the House, and they turned against a bill that gives tax breaks to everyone making up to $1 million, along with enough reductions in other taxes to soften the blow for those poor millionaires. But House Republicans just aren’t going to do it, on this or any tax increase.

Seriously, negotiating with John Boehner is over the budget like negotiating with the Tatyana Egorova, coach of FC Rossiyanka, the leading Russian women’s soccer team over nuclear arms reductions.

Even if you assume good faith negotiations, they simply cannot deliver on their promises.