Here, I'll highlight the relevant portion that you misses.
The President, it says, "shall be Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States". He's not my Commander-in-Chief, because I'm not in the military.
I'm not militia in the actual Service of the United States. I'm not taking military orders from anyone. I'm not in the military. How can there possibly be debate about this?
Well, Cass Ingram (or Cassim Igram) is famous enough to appear on QuackeryWatch, though not on Skepdic. I don't suppose he's come forth with any evidence for his claims in the last seven years or so?
Your jingoistic quotes are as hoary as the one I linked to above, if you'd bothered to read it. Here, I'll paste, because apparently you can't click a link.
It is the Soldier not the reporter, who has given us Freedom of the press. It is the Soldier not the poet, who has given us Freedom of speech. It is the Soldier not the campus organizer, who has given us the Freedom to demonstrate. It is the Soldier not the lawyer, who has given us the right to a fair trial. It is the soldier, who salutes the Flag, who serves beneath the Flag and whose coffin is draped by the Flag, who allows the protester to burn the Flag.
Did you think I was unfamiliar with this sort of militaristic chest-thumping? It's bullshit, designed to make soldiers proud of doing their governments' dirty work, and citizens happy to shut up and keep buying plastic crap.
I am reminded of people who were outraged at all the money which was spent on Y2K fixes, because, since the world didn't come to an end, it was obviously all just a hoax and scam.
May I interest you in this magical rock? It prevents tigers. Why, you don't see any tigers around, do you?
I didn't mean that you do it for the appreciation or remuneration; by intangible benefits, I meant your sense of satisfaction at doing something good for other people. (Same reason I donate blood, for instance.)
Are you kidding? You get to walk down the street without old, sick, disabled people heaped up on every corner. I think that's worth a few percent of my income. As for the programs not being around long enough for you to use them, whatever problems there are with Social Security and Medicare are eminently fixable; the manufactured panic of the last few years was yet another of those boneheaded drives for privatization.
Yeah, quoting a notorious Communist fellow traveler is really going to make you look respectable in a debate. There are plenty of legitimate, peer-reviewed political scientists you could quote, why you have to quoted a deranged vet with no appropriate qualifications is beyond me.
Ooh, poisoning the well! Dude may have won two Medals of Honor, but we like our military heroes without those inconvenient opinions. I picked the quote because it's catchy. By all means, go ahead and pick one of those peer-reviewed political scientists; I'm always on the lookout for good sources.
The title of "commander-in-chief" goes back to the early days of the United States. Even the most popular civilian usage of the term, the march "Hail to the Chief" was penned in the first half of the 19th century.
The title of "Commander-in-Chief" is in the actual Constitution, in fact. The President, it says, "shall be Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States". He's not my Commander-in-Chief, because I'm not in the military. He's not Congress's Commander-in-Chief, he's not the Executive Branch's, he's not the Supreme Court's, he's not Dick Cheney's. We're not a military dictatorship, and it's mightily unnerving when people pretend that we are.
It was precisely because of the FDA's rigorous approval requirements, pitted against the profit motives of the drug industry, that kept thalidomide from gaining FDA approval in the United States. You think that was a bad move?
It looks like the GP is referring to a vague sense of satisfaction he gets from his altruism. But if he gets intangible satisfaction from it, then it's not really altruistic. But by this definition, anything anyone ever does by their own will is self-interested. Unless you narrow "altruism" to refer only to an increased likeliness of material benefit, the word becomes meaningless.
It's a near-universal human impulse, closely related to the Golden Rule. To mangle some philosophy, which may or may not have been Kant: A stable morality is one that, when one person does something different, they can't do better. (Consider the Prisoner's Dilemma as a sample world-of-choices.) One stable morality is everyone being evil all the time. The other stable strategy is, "give the other person the benefit of the doubt, but if they are evil, then you be evil too to protect yourself". A lot of hand-waving aside, the latter strategy earns a higher total score (add both players' scores) than the former.
The point of all this? There's a good reason for people to have an innate tit-for-tat morality. It's in our interest to act in a way that we'd like everyone else to act. Of course, we don't do this consciously; people in different cultures justify it in different ways.
It's better than the way the government spends my taxes.
It is the way the government spends your taxes. Look at who funded the Canadian study. Look at the early FDA Orphan Products trials on DCA performed in the United States.
BY the way, there is an ancient market-based solution to this conundrum where a socially good activity is not perused because of insufficient profit margin. Rather than revert to socialized, state sponsorship which is paid from the people's existing wealth, the state can instead create new wealth by granting a monopoly on the activity. In this case, granting a limited term monopoly, perhaps with second source requirements, to the high bidder drug company, will ensure that the drug is studied sufficiently and brought to market.
Whew! For a minute there I thought that there was no way we could funnel money to pharma companies from this discovery. Now that you're proved me wrong, we can all hold hands, jump up and down and shout "The Magic of the Market! The Magic of the Market!" I think I feel the Imaginary Hand fondling my giblets right now.
But more seriously, this is the central problem of capitalism. It's very, very good at optimizing corporate profits. Unfortunately, there's a circular-definition problem where "good" is defined as "corporate profits" and vice versa. In many cases, they coincide--if you consider cheap consumer goods to be a social good, then capitalism happens to be working well. On the other hand, when you find yourself making ridiculous contortions in order to pretend that corporate profit is equivalent to social good, you might want to consider that this is why we have regulation; this is why we have what you feh-feh as "socialized state sponsorship." Note that one of these "socialized state sponsorship" programs originally developed DCA, the FDA's Office of Orphan Products Development.
You get yourself into the most ridiculous twists. Are you seriously claiming that handing money to a state employee is simply "paid from peoples' existing wealth", but handing twice as much money to a corporate employee is "creating wealth"?
1. Merck and GlaxoSmithKline are right now lobbying for laws to _FORCE_ innoculation of girls in school from 6-11 mandatory with their vaccine against a sexually transmitted disease virus.
You know, you have a legitimate axe to grind, about big pharma being set up to maximize profits, which doesn't always maximize social good. That's a problem in any capitalist system, and it's why we have regulation, and publically-funded research to fill in the gaps. (Like the FDA's Office of Orphan Products Development, where much of the initial DCA research was performed.)
However, your kvetching about the HPV vaccine (I see you're referring to a "sexually transmitted disease virus" instead of a "cancer virus" there) shows an ignorance of the concept of herd immunity. The point of mandatory vaccinations is that they can't reach everyone, but if they reach a critical mass of people, the disease can be eradicated, like smallpox or polio have been eradicated. Vaccines don't do their public-health work unless nearly everyone gets them; if not, the disease hangs around in unvaccinated people.
Did you think it was a mistake for the government to FORCE people to be vaccinated against polio? Against smallpox? Against measles? Mumps? Rubella? Meningococcal disease (for college students)? Diphtheria? Plenty of these other vaccines make money for pharmaceutical companies; why aren't you complaining that we're FORCEd to take them? Except we're not actually forced, because parents who want their kids to get cervical cancer when they grow up can leave them vulnerable to it, which I suppose is their own business.
I appreciate that things must have sucked for you, being shouted at and running in circles for three years. (Also, being shot at, if you were deployed.) But honestly, you were "protecting" me only in the vaguest and hand-waviest of senses. (Here's a good article about what I mean.) American soldiers are, at best, fighting to protect George Bush's fragile ego and assure that his failures can be blamed on whatever grownup has to extricate us from his mess, and at worst, are simply "gangsters for capitalism", as Smedley Butler put it.
But no, I'm not going to tell you how much I admire you because you fell for the propaganda, or because you were forced into a dirty, dangerous job. Plenty of people work dirty, dangerous jobs, and yet we're not exhorted to run around thanking our timber cutters, fishers, pilots and structural steel workers. It's jingoism, it's militarism, and it carries with it some disturbing baggage, such as the recent habit of calling the President "the Commander in Chief".
I understand your sacrifice, but you didn't do it for my freedom. I'm sorry if you thought it was all for a good reason, I really am.
The drug can be ingested through drinking a water solution. In the study with rats, the rats drank the drug in their water supply. No injections required.
So, we've gone from government can do no right, while corporations can do no wrong, to "companies are quite efficient at many things". I left that out? Absolutely not--I practically said that explicitly when I said "If your goal is to maximize BMS's profit, [the free market is] an excellent method." Corporations are very efficient at growth and profit. There are, however, situations in which we don't want to optimize for maximum corporate profits. There are situations, and I submit to you that the subject of this article is one, where a corporation in the free market isn't the best tool, because maximum corporate profits don't correlate well with the good we seek.
Think of it this way. You have two hands. In your left hand, you have collective, top-down action: government-funded basic research, the GI bill, Mac OSX. In your right hand, you have individual, competitive action: industry, the marketplace of ideas, peer-reviewed science, Debian Linux. Ayn Rand wants me to amputate my left hand; Karl Marx wants me to amputate my right hand. Is it so radical, so unthinkable to ask that we use different tools to solve different problems?
Indeed, this looks to be a potentially exciting area. The next stage would likely be efficacy trials on actual people, as safety trials have already been performed. So you'd want to look into contacting people like the NIH, OneWorld Health, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Canadian equivalent of the NIH, and nudging them about clinical studies of this drug in people with cancer. On a more local level, if you're near a medical research facility, especially part of a university, go and half a talk with whoever does oncology research, and ask what they think, and what you can do to drum up interest in a human clinical study.
Wait, we're counting anecdotal evidence now? Well, I cured my cancer by drinking magic homeopathic Asahara bathwater!
Look, Laetrile is quackery. There's no evidence that it works. Anecdotal evidence simply isn't reliable in this regard. It is completely unrelated to the present case. Laetrile wasn't shown to affect human tumors in vitro; it wasn't shown to affect rodent tumors in vivo. DCA was. There's reason to think DCA may be effective against some cancers in humans; there's no reason to think Laetrile is.
What are some of the drugs that the Cuban research program has developed? What common diseases have cured that were previously too expensive to treat in vast numbers of people?
Ah, so you wish to live free of governmental interference, without its baleful boot on your neck? Perhaps you'd enjoy a brief jaunt to Somalia, where there is effectively no government. Sure, there are bands of armed thugs roaming the streets, but I'm sure you can think of a free market solution to that, as you'll be freer than any American, being that the existence of government programs of any sort is tantamount to totalitarianism.
But more than that, companies have significant incentives not to waste money. Government has no such motivation, as history has shown. Too much spending will kill a company, while too much government spending will keep a segment of the government alive.
What was the overhead of private insurance, compared to the overhead of Medicare? Ah, yes, it was between six and ten times as much. Lovely free-market efficiency, there. I'll run right out and privatize Medicare.
Drugs are one of those products that are priced on what will be most profitable for the drug companies. Even if they take more losses that year, they can't just raise their prices, or they will end up losing money.
Oh, that's rich. Please do some reading about Bristol Myers Squibb's pricing of Taxol, where they essentially made up a price. You've got cancer, you want to be not dead, you'll pay them whatever they ask. This, despite that the research on the drug was largely performed by the NIH.
So your Wonderful! Free! Market! Solution! to this problem is if people don't want to pay the extortionate rates that BMS was charging, they should just not take the drugs, and die. Then, BMS will realize that they want to lower their prices a bit, until they hit their sweet spot of maximum profit. And all you have is a stack of corpses to show for it, which, really, is a small sacrifice to make on the altar of the Wonderful! Free! Market!, right?
What free-marketeers like yourself conveniently leave out is that free markets maximize one thing--profit. If your goal is to maximize BMS's profit, it's an excellent method. On the other hand, if your goal is the well-being of cancer patients, the free market can and does fail. While in many instances the well-being of cancer patients is highly correlated with BMS's fortunes, they are by no means synonymous. To pretend they are is naivete at best, outright lying at worst.
That's the Food and Drug Administration, and if you want to know why that barrier to entry is in place, please read The Jungle and look up "thalidomide".
Yes, because porky boondoggles in construction have sweet fuck-all do with government-funded research.
Please consider that government-funded research has given us the atomic bomb (not saying it's good, but it was certainly a breakthrough), Taxol, most AIDS drugs, a staggering amount of agricultural research through the USDA, the goddamned internet, the World Wide Web (Tim Berners-Lee worked for CERN, which is government-run) and innumerable other benefits. To claim that you can't think of anything public-funded research has led to shows a stunning lack of knowledge or curiosity on your part.
Well, then, it should be easy for you to provide a list of drug discoveries that came from government funding. But even if you could (and you can't b/c it's not true) that's not due to socialism.
Oh, lawdy.
The drug in question was originally developed and tested on an FDA orphan products grant. Anticancer drug Taxol was brought to market as a result of a 1958 National Cancer Institute study which (via the USDA) tested 30,000 plants for possible anticancer properties. AZT, ddI, ddC, d4T, Ziagen and Norvir (AIDS drugs) were developed on government money. Avastin (anticancer drug) was developed on an NIH grant. The list goes on.
How did you get the idea that government-funded science never produces anything of value? Haven't you even heard of the Manhattan Project?
That's correct. The free market *HAS* failed -- the government is interfering by their over-regulation. Thank the FDA and trial attorneys for making new drug development so cost-prohibitive.
So, you think that the FDA was over-regulating when it refused to approve thalidomide?
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Here, I'll highlight the relevant portion that you misses.
The President, it says, "shall be Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States". He's not my Commander-in-Chief, because I'm not in the military.
I'm not militia in the actual Service of the United States. I'm not taking military orders from anyone. I'm not in the military. How can there possibly be debate about this?
Well, Cass Ingram (or Cassim Igram) is famous enough to appear on QuackeryWatch, though not on Skepdic. I don't suppose he's come forth with any evidence for his claims in the last seven years or so?
I didn't mean that you do it for the appreciation or remuneration; by intangible benefits, I meant your sense of satisfaction at doing something good for other people. (Same reason I donate blood, for instance.)
Are you kidding? You get to walk down the street without old, sick, disabled people heaped up on every corner. I think that's worth a few percent of my income. As for the programs not being around long enough for you to use them, whatever problems there are with Social Security and Medicare are eminently fixable; the manufactured panic of the last few years was yet another of those boneheaded drives for privatization.
It was precisely because of the FDA's rigorous approval requirements, pitted against the profit motives of the drug industry, that kept thalidomide from gaining FDA approval in the United States. You think that was a bad move?
It looks like the GP is referring to a vague sense of satisfaction he gets from his altruism. But if he gets intangible satisfaction from it, then it's not really altruistic. But by this definition, anything anyone ever does by their own will is self-interested. Unless you narrow "altruism" to refer only to an increased likeliness of material benefit, the word becomes meaningless.
It's a near-universal human impulse, closely related to the Golden Rule. To mangle some philosophy, which may or may not have been Kant: A stable morality is one that, when one person does something different, they can't do better. (Consider the Prisoner's Dilemma as a sample world-of-choices.) One stable morality is everyone being evil all the time. The other stable strategy is, "give the other person the benefit of the doubt, but if they are evil, then you be evil too to protect yourself". A lot of hand-waving aside, the latter strategy earns a higher total score (add both players' scores) than the former.
The point of all this? There's a good reason for people to have an innate tit-for-tat morality. It's in our interest to act in a way that we'd like everyone else to act. Of course, we don't do this consciously; people in different cultures justify it in different ways.
But more seriously, this is the central problem of capitalism. It's very, very good at optimizing corporate profits. Unfortunately, there's a circular-definition problem where "good" is defined as "corporate profits" and vice versa. In many cases, they coincide--if you consider cheap consumer goods to be a social good, then capitalism happens to be working well. On the other hand, when you find yourself making ridiculous contortions in order to pretend that corporate profit is equivalent to social good, you might want to consider that this is why we have regulation; this is why we have what you feh-feh as "socialized state sponsorship." Note that one of these "socialized state sponsorship" programs originally developed DCA, the FDA's Office of Orphan Products Development.
You get yourself into the most ridiculous twists. Are you seriously claiming that handing money to a state employee is simply "paid from peoples' existing wealth", but handing twice as much money to a corporate employee is "creating wealth"?
However, your kvetching about the HPV vaccine (I see you're referring to a "sexually transmitted disease virus" instead of a "cancer virus" there) shows an ignorance of the concept of herd immunity. The point of mandatory vaccinations is that they can't reach everyone, but if they reach a critical mass of people, the disease can be eradicated, like smallpox or polio have been eradicated. Vaccines don't do their public-health work unless nearly everyone gets them; if not, the disease hangs around in unvaccinated people.
Did you think it was a mistake for the government to FORCE people to be vaccinated against polio? Against smallpox? Against measles? Mumps? Rubella? Meningococcal disease (for college students)? Diphtheria? Plenty of these other vaccines make money for pharmaceutical companies; why aren't you complaining that we're FORCEd to take them? Except we're not actually forced, because parents who want their kids to get cervical cancer when they grow up can leave them vulnerable to it, which I suppose is their own business.
Psst. You already pay 1.5% of your income in Medicare taxes. Also, a goodly portion of your state taxes goes to Medicaid.
I appreciate that things must have sucked for you, being shouted at and running in circles for three years. (Also, being shot at, if you were deployed.) But honestly, you were "protecting" me only in the vaguest and hand-waviest of senses. (Here's a good article about what I mean.) American soldiers are, at best, fighting to protect George Bush's fragile ego and assure that his failures can be blamed on whatever grownup has to extricate us from his mess, and at worst, are simply "gangsters for capitalism", as Smedley Butler put it.
But no, I'm not going to tell you how much I admire you because you fell for the propaganda, or because you were forced into a dirty, dangerous job. Plenty of people work dirty, dangerous jobs, and yet we're not exhorted to run around thanking our timber cutters, fishers, pilots and structural steel workers. It's jingoism, it's militarism, and it carries with it some disturbing baggage, such as the recent habit of calling the President "the Commander in Chief".
I understand your sacrifice, but you didn't do it for my freedom. I'm sorry if you thought it was all for a good reason, I really am.
No Hubble thread would be complete without the Hubble Deep Field, the Hubble Deep Field South and the Hubble Ultra Deep Field.
The drug can be ingested through drinking a water solution. In the study with rats, the rats drank the drug in their water supply. No injections required.
So, we've gone from government can do no right, while corporations can do no wrong, to "companies are quite efficient at many things". I left that out? Absolutely not--I practically said that explicitly when I said "If your goal is to maximize BMS's profit, [the free market is] an excellent method." Corporations are very efficient at growth and profit. There are, however, situations in which we don't want to optimize for maximum corporate profits. There are situations, and I submit to you that the subject of this article is one, where a corporation in the free market isn't the best tool, because maximum corporate profits don't correlate well with the good we seek.
Think of it this way. You have two hands. In your left hand, you have collective, top-down action: government-funded basic research, the GI bill, Mac OSX. In your right hand, you have individual, competitive action: industry, the marketplace of ideas, peer-reviewed science, Debian Linux. Ayn Rand wants me to amputate my left hand; Karl Marx wants me to amputate my right hand. Is it so radical, so unthinkable to ask that we use different tools to solve different problems?
Indeed, this looks to be a potentially exciting area. The next stage would likely be efficacy trials on actual people, as safety trials have already been performed. So you'd want to look into contacting people like the NIH, OneWorld Health, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Canadian equivalent of the NIH, and nudging them about clinical studies of this drug in people with cancer. On a more local level, if you're near a medical research facility, especially part of a university, go and half a talk with whoever does oncology research, and ask what they think, and what you can do to drum up interest in a human clinical study.
Wait, we're counting anecdotal evidence now? Well, I cured my cancer by drinking magic homeopathic Asahara bathwater!
Look, Laetrile is quackery. There's no evidence that it works. Anecdotal evidence simply isn't reliable in this regard. It is completely unrelated to the present case. Laetrile wasn't shown to affect human tumors in vitro; it wasn't shown to affect rodent tumors in vivo. DCA was. There's reason to think DCA may be effective against some cancers in humans; there's no reason to think Laetrile is.
What are some of the drugs that the Cuban research program has developed? What common diseases have cured that were previously too expensive to treat in vast numbers of people?
Ah, so you wish to live free of governmental interference, without its baleful boot on your neck? Perhaps you'd enjoy a brief jaunt to Somalia, where there is effectively no government. Sure, there are bands of armed thugs roaming the streets, but I'm sure you can think of a free market solution to that, as you'll be freer than any American, being that the existence of government programs of any sort is tantamount to totalitarianism.
Oh, that's rich. Please do some reading about Bristol Myers Squibb's pricing of Taxol, where they essentially made up a price. You've got cancer, you want to be not dead, you'll pay them whatever they ask. This, despite that the research on the drug was largely performed by the NIH.
So your Wonderful! Free! Market! Solution! to this problem is if people don't want to pay the extortionate rates that BMS was charging, they should just not take the drugs, and die. Then, BMS will realize that they want to lower their prices a bit, until they hit their sweet spot of maximum profit. And all you have is a stack of corpses to show for it, which, really, is a small sacrifice to make on the altar of the Wonderful! Free! Market!, right?
What free-marketeers like yourself conveniently leave out is that free markets maximize one thing--profit. If your goal is to maximize BMS's profit, it's an excellent method. On the other hand, if your goal is the well-being of cancer patients, the free market can and does fail. While in many instances the well-being of cancer patients is highly correlated with BMS's fortunes, they are by no means synonymous. To pretend they are is naivete at best, outright lying at worst.
That's the Food and Drug Administration, and if you want to know why that barrier to entry is in place, please read The Jungle and look up "thalidomide".
Yes, because porky boondoggles in construction have sweet fuck-all do with government-funded research.
Please consider that government-funded research has given us the atomic bomb (not saying it's good, but it was certainly a breakthrough), Taxol, most AIDS drugs, a staggering amount of agricultural research through the USDA, the goddamned internet, the World Wide Web (Tim Berners-Lee worked for CERN, which is government-run) and innumerable other benefits. To claim that you can't think of anything public-funded research has led to shows a stunning lack of knowledge or curiosity on your part.
The drug in question was originally developed and tested on an FDA orphan products grant. Anticancer drug Taxol was brought to market as a result of a 1958 National Cancer Institute study which (via the USDA) tested 30,000 plants for possible anticancer properties. AZT, ddI, ddC, d4T, Ziagen and Norvir (AIDS drugs) were developed on government money. Avastin (anticancer drug) was developed on an NIH grant. The list goes on.
How did you get the idea that government-funded science never produces anything of value? Haven't you even heard of the Manhattan Project?
So, you think that the FDA was over-regulating when it refused to approve thalidomide?