Thursday, September 13th, 2018
BETH MOLE , - ars technica
Stephan: The scumbaggery of the American pharmaceutical industry cannot be exaggerated. Welcome to America's illness profit system where your health is secondary to profit, in fact, illness is more profitable to them than wellbeing. Let greed prevail.
The chief executive of a small pharmaceutical company defended hiking the price of an essential antibiotic by more than 400 percent and told the Financial Times that he thinks “it is a moral requirement to make money when you can.”
Nirmal Mulye, CEO of the small Missouri-based drug company Nostrum Laboratories, raised the price of bottle of nitrofurantoin from $474.75 to $2,392 last month. The drug is a decades-old antibiotic used to treat urinary-tract infections caused by Escherichia coli and certain other Gram-negative bacteria. The World Health Organization lists nitrofurantoin as an essential medicine.
In an interview with the FT, Mulye went on to say it was also a “moral requirement” to “sell the product for the highest price,” and he explained that he was in “this business to make money.”
In line with this perspective, Mulye took a moment to defend Martin Shkreli, who gained notoriety for buying exclusive rights to another decades-old drug and ruthlessly raised its price by more than 5,000 percent virtually overnight. (Shkreli was sentenced to seven years in prison in March on unrelated fraud charges.)
Mulye explained:
I agree with Martin Shkreli that when he […]
2 Comments
Thursday, September 13th, 2018
Patrick Malone, - Scientific American
Stephan: Remember the START Treaty signed 31 July 1991 by U.S. President George H.W. Bush and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev? Well, it's about to go by the board. The Trump administration has found yet another way to damage the country. They are at one and the same time building more nuclear bombs, just what we don't need, and eliminating safety procedures to protect the workers who build them. But for a few Trump friends, there is a lot of profit to be made.
We are such a sick country at this point that November cannot come soon enough. The question is are Americans ready to take back their country, or are we going to surrender to christofascism? Your call.
Operators maintain a nuclear test reactor at Idaho National Laboratory. Worker safety has been monitored by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board. Credit: Idaho National Laboratory Flickr
A small government safety organization tasked with protecting the workers who construct America’s nuclear arsenal and with preventing radioactive disasters in the communities where they live is under new siege in Washington.
The Trump administration, acting in an open partnership with the profit-making contractors that control the industrial sites where U.S. nuclear bombs are made and stored, has enacted new rules that limit the authority and reach of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, created by Congress in 1988 amid broad public concerns over civil and military nuclear safety lapses.
The administration’s new rules eliminate the board’s authority to oversee workplace protections for roughly 39,000 nuclear workers and also block its unfettered access to nearly three-quarters of the nuclear weapons-related sites that it can now inspect.
In a separate move, the board’s new acting Republican chairman has proposed to put more inspectors in the field but to cut its […]
4 Comments
Thursday, September 13th, 2018
Stephan: There doesn't ever seem to be an end to the Roman church's sexual abuse of children; it just rolls on year after year, country after country. I hate these stories because in every case my mind fills with the images of those molestations and the lifelong effects such experiences have on those boys and girls. The very sad truth is if Ronlyn and I had a young child we would not let him or her be alone with a priest, or monk, or nun, come to that. If I were a Catholic I'm not sure how I could continue to be a faithful communicant.
Roman Catholic cardinals
From Australia to Chile to the US, the Catholic Church’s child sex abuse scandals keep piling up, stoking outrage not just about the crimes, but also about the extent of the coverups by church officials.
Today, the same grim patterns and depressing details uncovered elsewhere emerged in Germany. According to a confidential study commissioned by the German Bishops conference, seen by Der Spiegel news magazine, German priests sexually abused 3,677 minors between 1946 and 2014. The study, carried out by three German universities, is due to be presented by Cardinal Reinhard Marx, chairman of German Bishops’ Conference, later this month.
It found that 1,670 clerics and priests from 27 German dioceses were involved in the abuse, that the victims were mostly young males, and that the majority were under the age of 13 when they were abused.
According to the report, half of the cases in the German study would not have come to light had the victim not made a claim for compensation, […]
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Wednesday, September 12th, 2018
STEPHEN MARCHE, - Foreign Policy
Stephan: On this day, of all days, it seemed to me a good idea to look back over the past 17 years and assess what the effect of 9/11 has been. In my view, 19 Muslim terrorists changed the United States, and not for the better. They altered the nature of warfare in ways I don't think many in America fully understand even now. This essay parallels my own thinking.
The second hijacked plane is seen as it hits the second tower of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.
Credit: Masatomo Kuriya/Corbis/Getty
This year marks the 17th anniversary of 9/11, an awkward number offering an awkward amount of hindsight. The day is not quite memory, not yet history. Subsequent events during those 17 years—not only the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq but also the arrival of the smartphone and social media—have transformed its significance. 9/11 was a defining moment in the history of war and terrorism, but it was also the first attack conceived for and executed through the means of digital connection. It was to the internet what the Challenger explosion was to cable television, an event defined by the arrival of the way it was related, an act of war suited to technologically enabled mass storytelling and media saturation. The Canadian scholar Marshall McLuhan once predicted that World War III would be a “guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.” 9/11 was the beginning of that […]
3 Comments
Wednesday, September 12th, 2018
, - The Guardian (U.K.)/Associated Press
Stephan: The other nations of the developed world, and many developing nations, all understand that climate change is going to profoundly change the world. Only the Trump administration, which I picture as a collection of zombies, still puts the greed of the few over the wellbeing of the many.
UN secretary-general António Guterres delivers a speech on climate change at the UN headquarters in New York, 10 September.
Credit: Li Muzi/Barcroft
United Nations secretary general António Guterres has warned that the world is facing “a direct existential threat” and must rapidly shift from dependence on fossil fuels by 2020 to prevent “runaway climate change”.
Guterres called the crisis urgent and decried the lack of global leadership to address global warming.
“Climate change is moving faster than we are,” Guterres said on Monday. “We need to put the brake on deadly greenhouse gas emissions and drive climate action.”
He said people everywhere are experiencing record-breaking temperatures and extreme heatwaves, wildfires, storms and floods “are leaving a trail of death and devastation”.
As examples, Guterres pointed to Kerala, India’s worst monsoon flooding in recent history, almost 3,000 deaths from Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico last year, disappearing Arctic sea ice, some wildfires so big that they send ash around the world, oceans becoming […]
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