Jacqueline Detwiler, - Popular Mechanics
Stephan: As anti-biotic medicine fails, this is one of the new directions medicine is taking; it is also the latest on the CRISPR Trend. What I found particularly interesting is that the Egyptians of antiquity believed the human gut held the key to health and their medical approach focused on that.
Microbe
It’s a weird time for microbes, a sort of interspecies interregnum in which humans have realized that microbes hold way more power than we previously thought but haven’t yet wrested any of it back for ourselves. Over the past several years, studies have implicated the community of bacteria in the human gut in pretty much every terrifying malady that cannot currently be reliably prevented or cured (see: autism, cancer, neurodegenerative disease). So far, it’s pretty clear that exterminating the entire internal rain forest with antibiotics is a poor choice, but what else are we supposed to do?
Eat kimchi and cross our fingers? For now, [checks notes] yes. But in a few years, everything is going to change. “There’s been a lot of interest in manipulating the microbiome to help with disease, and there are probably close to 100 biotech companies that have initiated programs to exploit this space,” says Ramnik Xavier, codirector of the Infectious Disease and Microbiome Program at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
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Philip Klein, - Washington Examiner
Stephan: Remember when Democrat Bill Clinton balanced the budget and the federal deficit was eliminated? In contrast, even rightwing journalists, like those with the Washington Examiner, are beginning to see the reality of Trump's lies about trade and the deficit.
The U.S. national debt as of April 4, 2019 was $22.03 trillion, a number so large most people could not write it as a number. Between the failed trade policies and climate disasters, American farmers have entered a period of massive crisis, and you and I are now subsidizing them because of Trump's incompetence in business, and unwillingness to accept that climate change is real.
Flooded silos spill the grain the contained
Credit: Reuters
The Trump administration on Thursday announced plans to offer $16 billionto farmers who were suffering losses as a result of President Trump’s failing trade war with China, which he once claimed was making the United States rich by bringing in tariff revenue.
Trump authorized the Department of Agriculture to spend up to $16 billion on “trade mitigation programs” to compensate farmers for losses stemming from China’s retaliatory tariffs.
Yet, Trump has consistently boasted about how successful his trade war would be in making the U.S. wealthier.
“Billions of Dollars are pouring into the coffers of the U.S.A. because of the Tariffs being charged to China, and there is a long way to go,” Trump wrote on Twitter last November. “If companies don’t want to pay Tariffs, build in the U.S.A. Otherwise, lets just make our Country richer than ever before!”
This is just one of many times in which he’s lied about the effects of tariffs, even arguing that […]
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Dan Cohen, Vice Provost for Information Collaboration, Dean of the Library, and Professor of History at Northeastern University - The Atlantic
Stephan: I am increasingly concerned by what might be called The Ignorance Trend. Indeed, I started writing novels -- have you read one of my novels? -- because I realized that there is a notable decline in reading non-fiction work; this article lays it out at the university level; and, I thought, I could put much the same material in novels as I do in my scientific writing.
But at the fundamental level what I am seeing is growing ignorance in any area not immediately linked to a person's money-making tasks. What do I mean? Super programmers I have met could not tell me how many justices there are on the Supreme Court, and their sense of American history is a mix of nonsense and propaganda they have encountered on the web.
Reuters/Juan Carlos
When Yale recently decided to relocate three-quarters of the books in its undergraduate library to create more study space, the students loudly protested. In a passionate op-ed in the Yale Daily News, one student accused the university librarian—who oversees 15 million books in Yale’s extensive library system—of failing to “understand the crucial relationship of books to education.” A sit-in, or rather a “browse-in,” was held in Bass Library to show the administration how college students still value the presence of books. Eventually the number of volumes that would remain was expanded, at the cost of reducing the number of proposed additional seats in a busy central location.
Little-noticed in this minor skirmish over the future of the library was a much bigger story about the changing relationship between college students and books. Buried in a slide deck about circulation statistics from Yale’s library was an unsettling fact: There has been a 64 percent decline in the number of books checked out by undergraduates from Bass Library over the past decade.
Yale’s experience is not at […]
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Michael Addonizio, Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, Wayne State University - The Conversation
Stephan: Minnesota wrote the first charter school law in the United States in 1991, and since the charter school movement began there has been a conscious dedicated effort to let public schools in America deteriorate so that primary and secondary education could be turned into a profit making industry to further enrich the already rich.
I think there has also been an undercurrent to this trend committed to turning the bulk of Americans into ignorant peasants easily manipulated by a small uber-rich class -- in essence the schools have been part of the Neo-feudalism Trend.
As this report makes clear I am not alone in seeing these trends in play.
Weeds and grass overtake the run-down Campbell Elementary School, one of the many closed schools in Detroit.
Credit: Nathan Weber / The New York Times
When I was asked to support a federal lawsuit that says Detroit’s deteriorating schools were having a negative impact on students’ ability to learn, the decision was a no-brainer.
Detroit’s schools are so old and raggedy that last year the city’s schools chief, Nikolai Vitti, ordered the water shut off across the district due to lead and copper risks from antiquated plumbing. By mid-September, elevated levels of copper and lead were confirmed in 57 of 86 schools tested.
Safe water isn’t the only problem in Detroit schools. A 2018 assessment found that it would cost about US$500 million to bring Detroit’s schools into a state of repair – a figure that could grow to $1.4 billion if the school district waits another five years to address the problems. A school board official concluded that the district would have to “pick and choose” which repairs to make because there isn’t enough money to make them all.
Even though […]
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May 24, 2019, 12:10 PM PDT, Director of the Center for Health Policy and Outcomes at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. - Bloomberg
Stephan: The pharmaceutical industry in the United States behaves exactly like every two-bit drug dealer standing on a street corner selling nickel bags. Get your users in a position where they have to have whatever drug you are selling then charge as much as you can. But even that vulgar image is not strong enough, evil enough.
Personally, I think a significant percentage of the executives in the drug business should be in prison, for crimes against humanity. And they should be joined by a number of politicians both Republicans and Democrats who, in truth, are little more corrupt street hustlers themselves.
Read this article and imagine how you would feel if you and your partner had a newborn who could only be kept alive by a $2.1 million a patient drug.
Zolgensma
Credit: Wall Street Journal
The day, long anticipated, when America’s system of voluntary drug pricing could break down has now arrived. Novartis has announced it will charge $2.1 million for Zolgensma, a gene therapy for infants with lethal spinal muscular atrophy. (emphasis added)
The seeds of this extraordinary price were sewn in 1983, when Congress passed the Orphan Drug Act, a well-meaning law designed to encourage research into rare diseases. It offered drug makers tax breaks and other incentives for such work, rapid review by the Food and Drug Administration, a lower bar for market approval, and longer protection from competition.
The law has worked so well that orphan drug research increasingly crowds out investigations into drugs for such common illnesses as heart disease and diabetes.
That’s not to say orphan drugs aren’t at times miraculous. Zolgensma, by augmenting defective DNA, changed the course of neuromuscular decline in 15 babies, enabling them to achieve developmental milestones. Nor is it to suggest that orphan diseases […]
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