George Rebane

Here is something for the data archeologists and anthropologists of the distant future – three disparate areas that share in the wholesale insanity that is ending America as we have known it.  But more important to note is that not many care about these issues.

Gilead Sciences’ Sovaldi is a stupendously successful drug to not only treat Hepatitis C, but also cure it.  Moreover, it has no bad side effects and in price it competes well with established but much less effective drugs.  Sovaldi costs about $84,000 for it to do its magic.  Goaded by the insurance lobby, the socialists and double dummies in Congress are questioning the drug’s price point – according to their lights it’s too expensive.  Not only that, but Sovaldi is calling to question “the institutions and patent certainty that make America the one market in the world that rewards medical progress as a sustainable financial enterprise.”

In short, this Congress, with both parties participating, is toying with establishing price controls for pharmaceuticals.  This even though there are other pharmas in hot pursuit of Gilead, and patent protection lasts only ten years before the generics come on line, and price controls guarantee that you get less of a product at a higher price, the blithering idiots are listening to big pharma lobbyists and the polled opinions of information-less sheeple asked whether $84K is too much.  How about including the question, ‘How’d you like to die of Hep C after paying even more to unsuccessfully fight it with bad side effects until you croak?’  (more here)

SBC announces an 8-10oct14 conference of “leading thinkers to come up with solutions to water scarcity”.  We already know what their solutions will entail – more public monies for outfits like SBC, Climate Resolve, Capital for Public Good,… to continue studying the problem and then recommend additional regulations throughout the Sierra to deprive its residents of using their ground water.  Oh yes, the conference’s keynote speaker is no other than Van Jones, former Obama green jobs czar, former (current?) communist, and an excellent orator for the new socialist America.  Excellent, that is, if you’re a bit addled or slow on the uptake in the listening department.  (Hat tip to reader with more here and here)

Low congressional productivity is blamed on the Republican House by the Democrats and their lamestream lackeys.  The facts speak otherwise (here).  Of the hundreds of House passed bills that have died on Harry Reed’s desk, no one makes a peep.  Or if they do, then they disparage the legislation as being some kind of political grandstanding that serves a narrow agenda, and has no chance of passing.  Of course, if the Republicans oppose legislation written by the Democrats (including Team Obama), then they are pilloried for being “obstructionists” and the cause of our “do nothing Congress”.  And the sheeple just bleet in concurrence.  Such is the state of our republic.

High wages and full employment first, then growth will follow.  That is the prescription promoted by socialist pundits like William Galston (here).  Arbitrarily raising wages and creating make-work jobs will allow us to pull our economy up by its bootstraps.  Progressives never tire telling us that this is the way to achieve the “moral imperative” of “shared prosperity”.  Never mind that history overflows with examples of exactly the opposite result when governments have tried wage/price controls and mandated jobs.  The picture of dams being built in the Urals by thousands of men pushing wheelbarrows comes to mind.  Now we see what kinds of ‘truths’ can be resurrected after a nation’s educational system becomes a propaganda outlet for state central planning.

[22aug14 update]  California’s universities are again becoming race-based deeply leftwing institutions.  Prop 209 (“… banning discrimination against or preferences for any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education , or public contracting.”) is coming under intense attack from the anti-American Left.  We recall that Prop 187, providing multifarious welfare and other government benefits to illegal aliens, has already been gutted.  The growing ethnic strife is the state is reviewed in this short piece by John Seiler Jr of CalWatchdog.com.

And for those liberals who still don’t acknowledge that the country’s higher educational system has become the repository and transmitting institution of collectivist thought and propaganda, please read ‘The Left’s Long March’ by Professor Frank Brownlow of Mount Holyoke College.  The history of how the humanities were turned into hotbeds of Marxist thought is an interesting read, and one I can attest to from my long relationship with universities ranging from student to professor.  Brownlow’s piece was motivated by recent leftwing pundits (even on Fox News) ruminating that a lack of intellectual acumen is what has kept more conservative academics out of the nation’s professorial ranks.

Unfortunately the above two links are paywalled at Chronicles – a magazine of American culture, a publication I heartily recommend to readers interested in a no-holds-barred view of America from the unabashed perspective of western culture that takes on the foibles from both sides of the political aisle.