Category: People, Politics & Culture

Posted on

A Tale of Two Selves

Why is the human race, with its superior intellectual capacity when compared to its most recent primate ancestry on the phylogenetic tree, at the same time so unstable, so unpredictable, and so neurotic, and so often acting against its own interest? One would have thought the advanced brainpower would have had the opposite effect, by assisting its host in all aspects of human endeavour and  maximizing its existential advantage to the benefit of all of humanity. Instead, we seem to have ended up being a deeply troubled, schizoid species.

I think we can safely conclude that all the human induced problems in the world are related to the very latest features of our neuroanatomy, as no other species had its brain hijacked by what has been classified as “the human cortex”. While being an integral of our brains, the expansion of the cerebral cortex, the neocortex, and in particular that of its prefrontal region, is a major evolutionary landmark in the emergence of humans, the crowning achievement of evolution and the biological substrate of human mental prowess.

Yes, and so the trouble started, as much of the misery experienced by human beings is likely the result of the conflict within our minds between the inherited lower and newly acquired higher brain functions, i.e., between the animal, or instinctive self and the moral, or rational self, and the latter presumably courtesy of the evolutionary upgrade

The moral self is that part of our self-awareness (as opposed to mere awareness)  that is able to take responsibility for its actions in light of its consequences, whether they are intended or not. In doing so, it must be able to think and act rationally, and see itself as a causal agent with respect to its actions and its consequences.

It presupposes that all rational actions are preceded by a decision making process – essentially making all actions initially optional, as opposed to an automatic or learned response to a stimulus, which would be the case for any action initiated by instinct only.

After receiving a major upgrade in the grey matter department, quantitatively as well as a qualitatively it seems, the new human species saw the world and themselves in a different light from their genetic progenitors. On the assumption that our sensory organs have not changed all that much qualitatively from our immediate ancestors,  we can suppose that sensory data would show the world in many ways unchanged, yet different from the moment they started interacting with it. Instead, it became an environment capable of being changed based on how they interacted with it. No longer were they merely at the receiving end of the world; they were now in a position to alter, if not recreate certain aspects of it.

More importantly,  major substantive changes were introduced in how the new species is able to communicate among its members. Beyond the hitherto primitive primate cultures depending primarily on grunts and gestures for communication – but already including a degree of social structure – Homo sapiens developed something entire new under the sun. They were able to establish cultures capable of abstraction and conceptualization, in language, in the arts and above all, in the sciences

The result has been that, in spite of all the turmoil, upheaval and chaos our species has endured since the beginning of time, self-induced or not – and a subject not easily dismissed or glossed over if our recorded history of past and current civilizations has anything to say about it – our knowledge and understanding of the physical world has steadily increased, to the point that – after a long and initial period of linear growth – it is now growing exponentially, doubling on average every twelve months according to what has been referred to as the  Knowledge Doubling Curve.

This later fact should not surprise us, as we have this innate need to know; it is an essential if not “necessary” feature of our species to keep looking for more answers, about the world, the greater universe, and by extension about ourselves. And necessary, since we will not be able progress along the path – and in the direction  that evolution is pushing us –  unless we keep increasing our knowledge and understanding of the cosmic phenomenon that we find ourselves an intricate part of.  Evolution isn’t some process over and above ourselves – we are the very embodiment of it,  each of us being an instantiation of that process!

An essential step in that process will be the need to reconcile the instinctive self with the rational self, to establish some sense of a harmonious, symbiotic or constructive relationship between the two, such that we  will only undertake actions that are to the greater long-term benefit of our species. Will we ever be capable of this?  I don’t know, but time will tell, and as AI continues to edge forward in our lives, it may well decide the matter for us, one way or the other. More about that later.

Posted on

The World is Larger than the Sum of its Parts

As I stated up front – in so many words – I’m writing this primarily for myself in the attempt to figure out what the world is all about beyond the twists and turns that life can throw our way, and beyond the  typical humdrum of daily tasks that – while not necessarily meaningless in themselves –  tend to obscure the larger existential questions, and so, by extension, what life might conceivably mean to everyone else.

I know that sounds rather presumptuous, but given that each of us is just one of many – and, when it comes down to it, not all that different from each other when it comes to what we bring to the table to take on the challenges of everyday life. That is to say, how different can we be in our overall approach to life, when as members of one species we are primarily driven by our shared biology, and the differences between us are no more than varieties on a theme, i.e., they are differences of degree, and not of kind.

Beyond that, there are the circumstances of our birth such as the place and social-economic environment that we grow up in including our culture –  that help shape us into the individuals that we are today.  That this will leave each of us as distinct and unique individuals with needs and desires and expectations from life possibly as different between two people as day and night is undoubtedly true, yet at the same time the differences again are a matter of degree, and not of kind.

And if I can shed some light on the meaning and purpose of life for myself by sharing my thoughts about it, perhaps this might help someone else to start thinking about what life means to them, and add some definition or context or value to their outlook on life in a world that, in my humble opinion,  is going down the wrong path in terms of pursuing the best possible future for our species.  This is not to say that I think the human race is irrevocably going to hell in a handcart, although there are many among us who appear to be doing their best to make this happen.

I’m thinking of the massive environmental damage being inflicted on our precious planet on a daily basis, and beyond that: who can begin to enumerate the number and variety of social  economic and health issues ranging from poverty to homelessness to starvation across the globe? Just this week the NY Times in an article titled The U.S. Can No Longer Hide From Its Deep Poverty Problem showed a tally of those living on $4 a day or less in selected developed countries, and it included 5.3 million people living in the US.  I don’t necessarily want to pick on the US, but with the highest GDP in the world you wonder how this can even be the case when a country is deemed the wealthiest country in the world.

Then there is the disturbing statistic that half of the world’s wealth belongs to the top 1%, while the top 10% of adults hold 85%, and the bottom 90% hold the remaining 15% of the world’s total wealth.  If you believe that these discrepancies  are simply a function of some folks working harder and smarter than others, and reaping the benefit of it, then bless you, but you may have to learn something about how some people, organizations and certain governments operate in order to produce the incredible wealth that they have accumulated.

So against these things  – and with the brazen assumption that there is a lot more going on in the world than meets the eye –  I am introducing “the larger context”,  which, I postulate, naively as it may be,  is the true meaning  or intent behind the world. It is the reason for it being there in the first place,  including our very own presence in it, and something I hope we will  be able to get a glimpse of once we look  beyond the nonsensical content of religious dogma  (of whatever flavor) and the unsupported and hence unintelligible notion that someone or something else is in charge of our world beyond ourselves.

Why do I think there is ” a larger context” or  “true intent” to life that we are currently not aware of?  Only because we are the offspring of the greater cosmos, and as such contain its “DNA” within every particle of our being.  We are in fact one entity! As a result, what motivates it likely motivates us, either directly or indirectly,  and then at  a level where we would be capable of initiating some course of inspired action commensurate with the evolutionary achievement that we currently represent. However, at the moment one might be hard pressed to think much of that,  given the aforementioned sorrowful status of the world today, and that would include the questionable quality of  leadership of some of the most powerful nations in the world at the moment..

But it is without question that our evolutionary path shows that the cosmos is on a mission, and to date we  appear to be that mission; it is just that we don’t yet know what that mission is about. But it would be unreasonable to think that this is a multi-billion year mission of self-annihilation, given the kludge that we are currently making of it, although I hate to think that we are  doomed to end up that way because we haven’t evolved enough in the grey matter department to be able to take care of it.

And so my hope is that by  gaining even an inkling of  understanding of the world’s greater purpose, on the assumption there is one  – oh, and what an assumption – we might eventually be able to abandon the current seemingly runaway path of self-destruction by rising to the occasion and take ownership of our destiny by determining as best we can what our role should be in this fantastic cosmic adventure that we have only  just woken up in.  Evolution is providing us with some pointers here, but we need to be able to understand a lot more of what has moved us along its path to the present moment  before we can start making more  sense of it.

In the end, much of this is about not being able to see the forest for the trees, or, for that matter,  the universe for the stars, when, usually, the whole is larger than the sum of its parts –  and so is the world; we’re just not seeing it at the moment, and my greatest fear is that we might never be able to.

Posted on

An Unnatural Disaster

donald-trumpThe unnatural disaster that is called President Trump is continuing to threaten the stability of the world, if only because it directly involves such a large and powerful country as the United States of America, formerly known as the leader of the free world.

Following a recent mea culpa admission by co-author Tony Schwartz of Donald Trump’s 1987 book The Art of the Deal, for realizing that this superficially positive and flattering portrayal of Trump’s approach to business glossed over the incredible shallowness of the main character, and so ended up promoting what appears to be a charlatan entrepreneur into the status of (for some) credible presidential candidate.

In addition, in the case of the current  President of the United States we appear to have the actual instantiation of what has been described in the field of psychology as the the Dunning–Kruger effect:

This effect manifests itself as a cognitive bias in which people of low ability have illusory superiority and mistakenly assess their cognitive ability as greater than it is. The cognitive bias of illusory superiority comes from the inability of low-ability people to recognize their lack of ability. Without the self-awareness of metacognition, low-ability people cannot objectively evaluate their actual competence or incompetence.

We were subsequently treated to Michael Wolfe’s 2017 book Fire and Fury, a presumed  reasonably accurate sketch of Trump’s first year in office, showing a largely  dysfunctional administration around a clueless president who is so out of his depth that you can’t help but to feel sorry for the folks assigned to assist him through the daily turmoil of trying to keep him in some semblance of presidential demeanor. One particular astute observation from it, as provided by White House staff that Wolfe has interviewed, was that to interact with Trump can be akin to “… trying to figure out what a child wants”.

Now, former G. W. Bush speechwriter and Republican columnist David Frum has published his new book Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic, described by the SF Chronicle as “a persuasive and detailed account of how Trump is undermining American institutions, including the presidency itself”.

Frum is no light-weight Republican; he is as astute as they come, as evidenced by the following analysis of Trump’s first year in office, and his warning that despotism doesn’t necessarily begin with violent disruption.  “It can come on little cat feet”

The thing to fear from the Trump presidency … is not the bold overthrow of the Constitution, but the stealthy paralysis of governance; not the open defiance of law, but an accumulating subversion of norms; not the deployment of state power to intimidate dissidents, but the incitement of private violence to radicalize supporters.

Frum is not holding back either when it comes to his opinion of the quality of the man now in charge of the White House, and has summarized him as follows:

… an amateur, a charlatan, a con artist, a manipulator, a poseur, a serial fibber if not outright liar, a vulgarian, a swindler, a skimmer and a trimmer, a man-child lacking character, intelligence, integrity, judgment, clarity of thought, a coherent philosophy or a worldview and management and organizational skills.

Now that is a lot of ugly name calling, but the scary thing  is that none of this surprises me in any way. Just watching Trump during a TV appearance, now or in the past during his presidential campaign, leaves me with an instant feeling of unease – well, distaste, really – and reach for the mute button on the remote to avoid the insipid bombastic language, or just the sound of a bragging, brawling, or denigrating tone of voice. Combine this with the pouting face, the silly hairdo, and you are presented with an image of a larger than life windbag, someone with an obnoxious personality so  devoid of any real substance that it would suck all the air out of the room the moment he entered it.

Lastly, as stated by David Remnick in a January 15th article in the New Yorker titled “The Lost Emperor” ….

…. there is little doubt about who Donald Trump is and the harm he has done already, and the greater harm he threatens. He is unfit to hold any public office, much less the highest in the land. This is not merely an orthodoxy of the opposition; his panicked courtiers have been leaking word of it from his first weeks in office. The President of the United States has become a leading security threat to the United States.

While much of this commentary makes the Trump presidency sound like something akin to a toxic spill – and equally difficult to contain – it  can be claimed that  much of this negative appraisal of  is based on anecdotal accounts,  and then primarily by biased individuals who simply don’t like him to begin with.  But for those not convinced by now that Trump is in fact the blowhard that millions of Americans have  already made him out to be, you may want to read a Newsweek article from  October 18, 2016,  written by Kurt Eichenwald and titled  A People’s History of Donald Trump’s Business Busts and Countless Victims, .  Trump’s specialty, it seems, was  to snatch huge fistfuls of cash from a companies that were about to go broke, wiping out the savings of millions of people who had invested in them after he had convinced them to do so.

God  – or somebody – help  America, and in the process the rest of the world.

Posted on

On The Back Foot Once Again

And so another year has passed, and while the saying goes “another year older, another year wiser”, I’m not convinced that this actually applies to our species. It was a year ago  that one of the largest and most powerful countries in the world installed a political novice and intellectual lightweight of questionable character as their leader at a time that the world needed strong – and especially united – leadership to help save the planet from itself

The ensuing year proved many of the dire predictions true and consistent with what one might expect from having a leader who might best be described as “Captain Chaos” if it wasn’t for the fact that there is nothing comical  about the current leader in the White House. Well, perhaps his unique hairdo might qualify for a sad laugh or two. Personally, I very much regret ever having seen it.

I can’t help but think the Americans have done themselves – and in the process the world – a huge disserve by installing a head of state who couldn’t be more divisive even if he tried to. This as opposed to electing someone who would have made America “whole” again. And this is not to say that the loosing candidate would have made a much better choice – and although this would certainly have been the case in the intelligence and experience department – as divisiveness appears to have become a permanent feature on the US political landscape for some time now.

So, we start this year on the back foot once again,  as it is clear from the absolutely sorry state of the world today that  we haven’t got a clue of why or what we are doing here, all 7.6 billion of us, on this planet, in this universe, all the while fouling our own nest as we ride roughshod over our fellow human beings – as well as the many other living creatures on this earth – in a haze of metaphysical and ideological confusion, and in the West more than anything else, driven by insatiable consumerism.

For many – if not the vast majority of people in the world – it is difficult to see beyond the current moment as the effort to survive and provide for themselves and their families occupies their daily lives from morning to night.

Nevertheless, trying to understand life – or the raison d’être for it – our world, the larger universe, is something we should all have an interest in. That is, if we want to experience and value these things beyond the tragedy we appear to be mired in today, and in a way that show our daily actions to be steps in the larger task of advancing our species in line with an evolving universe that otherwise appears to be descending into entropy.

The inescapable fact remains that we are finding ourselves at the receiving end of a cosmic event that we do not grasp the meaning of by any stretch of the imagination, yet we soldier on regardless – seemingly without goal or purpose. Or at least no goal or purpose that would in any way make sense or do justice to the sheer scope and unimaginable effort that the universe represents and that is represented within every particle of our bodies. Even a mere inkling as to where we are going with this can be a beginning in the way we shape our lives and create a world that is more meaningful while suggesting a destiny that is worthy of this effort.

And when it comes to exploring these kinds of thoughts on a medium such as this site for more than ten years now,  I am under no illusion that I am writing this  for a very small audience –  and as such will be stating my views primarily in my own echo chamber.

But so long as I am making reasonable sense to myself I will be satisfied, even with the full realization that I might well be bleating into a vacuum. Nevertheless,  I continue to hope I can get someone else thinking about this material, and so I want to be sure I have presented my views as clearly as possible.

This is just to say that – if I have any pretensions at all – they apply to anyone who also believes that our species is in serious trouble and slowly but surely giving in to the forces of entropy. As such we appear to be marching towards extinction unless we change our ways significantly, and for the better – using the amazing creative energies that lie within – and towards a future that represents the very best in us. But, it is clear that this day has not yet come and is likely still some time away …

Only the day after tomorrow belongs to me. Some are born posthumously. (Nietzsche)

Posted on

Better Never to Have Been

A South African philosopher by the name of David Benatar believes that the world would be a better place if sentient life disappeared altogether, i.e., no remaining life-form capable of undergoing pain or suffering. As a consequence he claims it would have been better if no one had children ever again since reproducing is intrinsically cruel and irresponsible – not just because a horrible fate can befall anyone, but because life itself is permeated by badness.

Benatar is a proponent of what has been termed the anti-natalist position. In a 2006 book titled Better Never to have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence he writes that

While good people go to great lengths to save their children from suffering, few of them seem to notice that the one (and only) guaranteed way to prevent all the suffering of their children is not to bring those children into existence in the first place.

The disappearance of sentient life on this planet would be of no consequence to anyone or anything according to Benatar, and in that context he joins earlier existentialist writers such as Sartre and Camus when he believes the universe is indifferent to our fate; it is without meaning, and other than that “we are subject to blind and purposeless natural forces”.

But when at least Nietzsche would find some purpose in suffering (and hence life) when he wrote “To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering” Benatar does not believe that human suffering and the struggle to survive are capable of providing meaning to existence.

While one might want to argue about all the good things in life providing value to it, he would claim that they can never offset the badness of all terrible tragedies that might happen during one’s lifetime, including one’s death. I guess he has a point when you think of all the natural disasters that have happened – and are likely happen again – be they earthquakes, floods, famine, and what have you.  Or man-made tragedies, such as the 9/11 terror attack, the holocaust or the slaughter of millions of people  in the various wars. What kinds of positive experiences might one put on the other scale to suggest that all this will balance out in the end?

This is not to say that on an individual basis someone might not be able to look back at one’s life and conclude that it has by and large been a very positive experience – but I’m assuming that Benatar has appraised the human condition from a species perspective, and from there concluded that it – life – just isn’t worth it when it is all added up. So why bother; sentient life is just a waste of time, causing much unneeded pain and suffering

I have some sympathy for the view that planet earth would be better off without the likes of us,  given our longstanding and well established record of harming ourselves and the  environment.  And no doubt there is something to say for discontinuing the amount of pain and suffering we have inflicted onto our fellow creatures in the animal kingdom through our thoughtless practices of whatever nature – such as the asinine practice of trophy hunting certain animal species into extinction, to give just one example.

And so the question remains if the continuation of sentient life – and in particular human life – is a value added experience of sorts, and the point being that – regardless of incredible misery, pain and suffering being regular features of human existence – life is worth the effort of sustaining it.

Clearly, professor  Benatar thinks not, but I have already argued that it is, since just because we appear to be unable to determine the meaning or purpose of life today  beyond the immediacies of survival doesn’t mean it has no meaning or purpose in a larger context. (I suspect this question is too large for us today).

 

Posted on

The Right to Bear Arms

Another post outside my usual range of subjects, yet relevant – I believe – in terms of what we are doing with our lives while not being at all sure what we should be doing with them.

This one is about Americans and their guns, a perennial issue that continues to get under my skin.  They love their guns – but with on average as many as 32,000 people being killed by a firearm in the US annually, you wonder why? Well, I do, so let’s look at this situation a bit more closely …

Now the USA is a large country, and with more than 323 million inhabitants the 32k losing their life as a result of some pulling the trigger on a firearm of sorts is perhaps less meaningful than presenting these facts on a per capita basis and comparing them with other OECD countries.

Using their own data, last year a study by the American Journal of Medicine published on February 1st of 2016 showed that Americans are 10 times more likely to be killed by guns than people in other developed countries. I think that is a mind-numbing statistic! And you don’t need to look far to come up with some reasons as why this might be the case: the fact that Americans have roughly 10 times the number of guns per 100 inhabitants than any other country in the world.

The simple fact remains that, if you don’t have a gun, you can’t kill anyone with it, including accidentally, or yourself (!) This latter fact should deserve more appreciation as there are statistics out there that show that most gun deaths are suicides, and that the states with the most guns report the most suicides! (2005 data) There is a lot of research that shows greater access to guns dramatically increases the risk of suicide. For that reason alone, it would seem logical if not outright commonsense to seek some restrictions on who can have one, e.g., only law enforcement in protecting the greater interest of society, as a means and deterrent to keep bad people at bay.

But logic or common sense has nothing to do with firearm control in the USA – this in light of the nearly sacred Second Amendment that guarantees US citizens “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” I say “sacred” because to some Americans it is as if Moses himself brought this Amendment down from the mountain, and is something akin to a God-given right – if not a little difficult to reconcile with the “Thou shalt not Kill” commandment. And speaking of your typical hard-nosed ultra-right God-fearing US Christian, in addition to the Second Amendment, many take Jesus’ command to his disciples in Luke 22, “And the one who has no sword must sell his cloak and buy one,” as the first personal carry permit.

However, anyone questioning the wisdom of keeping such a right in place hundreds of years after the US Constitution was signed on September 17 of 1787 will be attacked with a ferocity akin to challenging the right of America to defend itself as a sovereign nation.

There are a number of reasons for that, and not the least by the inherent ambiguity in the way the amendment is written: was the amendment created to ensure the continuation and flourishing of the state militias as a means of defense, or was it created to ensure an individual’s right to own a firearm?

The fact is that the world today is much different from what it was in the 1789:

Standing armies were mistrusted, as they had been used as tools of oppression by the monarchs of Europe for centuries. In the war for independence, there had been a regular army, but much of the fighting had been done by the state militias, under the command of local officers. Aside from the war, militias were needed because attacks were relatively common, whether by bandits, Indians, and even by troops from other states.” (quoted from usconstitution.net)

Today it seems utterly unreasonable for a modern democratic country to have such a constitutional provision as the 2nd Amendment around on the assumption that the people may one day need to take up arms and fight their governments – the very people they have elected to represent them in all matters of nationhood.

Nevertheless, gun enthusiasts, manufacturers and their representatives – such as the NRA – have seized on the ambiguity to take the concept of gun-ownership one step further, namely that the right to own a firearm equates to the necessity of having to own one, and this in the interest of your own safety, to have the right means to defend your family, should that ever be necessary.

As a result, an average of 5,790 children in the United States receive medical treatment in an emergency room each year for a gun-related injury. About 21% of those injuries are unintentional, while on average, 1,297 children died annually from a gun-related injury, according to the study, published in the journal Pediatrics in June of 2017. So much for gun ownership in the interest of protecting your family. What an absolute tragedy!

And while it is true that – as gun lobbyists are fond of pointing out – there has been a 49 percent decrease in gun homicides over the last 20 years, the claim that this is the result of personal carry laws must be disputed as violent crime in general has decreased during this period, and gun homicides have followed suit for all of the same sociological reasons. At the same time, a direct link still exists between localized gun statistics and homicide rates.

And that just about sums it up for the 2nd amendment – and the folks supporting it – including the roughly 32,000 Americans that  get shot and killed annually as they pay the  price for supporting it.

Posted on

Universal Healthcare

This post is a bit of a departure from the prevailing flavor of esoteric material found on this site – and more of a social commentary that touches the hands-on, day-to-day status of our lives, as opposed to taking the longer and higher level view of what we are trying to make of our lives on this world as a species of uncertain parentage.

In terms of what we are trying to make of our lives, one would think that “better health outcomes for all” would be a desirable goal for any country interested in the well-being of its citizens. But this appears not to be the case in the USA, given the Trump administration continuing attempts to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that was signed into law in 2010 by President Barack Obama to provide coverage to an additional 20 million people who were previously uninsured. However, even with what has since been called “Obama Care” there are still approximately 40 million Americans who still don’t have health insurance.

During his campaign for President of the US Trump described Obama Care as an “incredible economic burden” which resulted in “runaway costs, websites that don’t work, greater rationing of care, higher premiums, less competition and fewer choices” and promised to replace it a new healthcare bill that would give Americans greater choice and stop the current Obamacare “death spiral” of higher costs.

Trump’s objections to Affordable Care Act appear to have resonated with Americans who were against it because it made health insurance mandatory. This needs to be seen in the context that you end up paying for it even if you choose not to participate in it, as you will have to pay a tax “penalty” unless they qualify for an exemption, and this would include such things as affordability.

With millions more Americans now being covered under the Affordable Care Act it should not come as a surprise to anyone that the total cost of healthcare in the United States has risen significantly. But this is caused by more than just the fact that more Americans are being covered, as at $9,000 per capita the U.S. spends more on health care than anywhere else in the world. To give just one example, that is $6,000 per capita more than what is spent in Finland on health care, and with an infant mortality rate less than half than in the US.

Given these astronomical costs, it is difficult to believe that the US ranks about fifty-seventh in the world in infant mortality and thirty-sixth in life expectancy as reported by the World Health Organization in 2016. It gets even more embarrassing at the state level, where per capita more children perish in infancy in Mississippi than in Botswana, to give just one example. The conclusion has to be that Americans are not getting value for money when they are paying for health care, and there are some apparent reasons for this, the main one being a cultural one.

The best way to make that point is to look a Europe and the evolution of social health institutions and the fact that they are seen as being as much sociological as economic in character – e.g., as a way of life that will benefit the majority of people.  You will find this approach reflected in the universal healthcare programs of countries such as Australia, Austria, Canada, Ireland, The Netherlands, France, Germany, Denmark, Switzerland, Taiwan, Singapore, and Japan. There are many others—including Moldova and Portugal. This in contradistinction to the evolution of U.S health institutions into primarily an economic means, i.e., a way to make money regardless of whether this will benefit the greater whole of society.

Their health systems are simply framed by a different set of values. The primary purpose of their healthcare system approach is to provide decent medical care for all of their inhabitants. In contrast, our current American healthcare system is organized to transfer money from the many to the few.  (Dr. George Lundberg)

US attitudes with respect to any kind of universal health care are further complicated by the belief that the Government shouldn’t be in the Health Care insurance business.  This harks back to the assumption that any business will be run more efficiently and hence more cost-effectively from the private sector, where costs are a function of competition in the marketplace, hence guaranteeing the best value that money can buy, regardless of the service or product you are talking about.

This assumption is worth looking into a little further as it appears to ignore the primary raison d’être  of for-profit organizations, namely that they are in business to maximize profits. At bottom it is driven by the principle that you should always charge the highest amount the market will bear, regardless of your actual costs to produce or deliver your product or services, and regardless of the economic impact it has on the individual or community that you are operating in. Hence affordability is not something that comes to mind in the context of running a business that is looking to cash in on its market share as well as increasing it by buying out the competition.

If any of this seems contrary to or incompatible with what you would want to be the basis of an affordable universal health care service you will know why a wealthy nation such as the US of A has a problem in keeping up with the rest of the world in providing such an essential service for the majority of it citizens.

Finally, this whole matter of raising public support for funding something like a universal healthcare program falls afoul of the average US citizen’s inability to distinguish socialism from communism, and can be laid at the doorstep of their public education system.  For many Americans the implementation of universal healthcare would be the first step in becoming a communist country, never mind that successful capitalist free-market economies such as found in most – if not all – Western European Countries have adopted some version of this kind of health benefit for their citizens without having descended into communism. Seems to me the communist bogeyman as envisaged by Joe McCarthy is still very much around in the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.

Posted on

In Pursuit of a Greater Good

It is difficult not to get seriously depressed by the kind of news you get today, such as reports about the absolute savagery in the ongoing civil war in Syria by survivors of a deadly attack in Khan Sheikhoun describing chemical bombs being dropped from planes, while directly contradicting the government’s version of events. But then, on occasion, you can find something at the opposite end of the spectrum that will lift your spirit and bolster your faith in people once again because it shows an astonishing degree of enlightenment in thought and action, even so since it was expressed as early as 2000 BC by the ancient Persian Zoroaster faith in a hymn from the Farvardin Yasht:

We worship this earth, we worship those heavens: we worship those good things which stand between the earth and the heavens and that are worthy of sacrifice and prayer, and are to be worshiped by the faithful man. We worship the souls of the wild beasts and the tame. We worship the souls of the holy men and women, born at any time, whose consciences struggle, or will struggle, or have struggled, for the good.

While “worship” or “faithful” or “holy” or “sacrifice” and “prayer” are typical terms as applied by the formalized, totalitarian religions as a means to keep the great unwashed under their thumb – and as much as the Zoroaster faith preached that God alone should be worshiped –  these terms can stand perfectly on their own without reference to a an imaginary deity of sorts,  i.e., God – by applying them to the way in which we pursue the truth about ourselves.

That is, we pursue these truths faithfully, for their own sake, and without coercion from anyone, and to the benefit of all mankind. And what we will find is the good inherent in all of us, and it is this truth that is “holy” and should be “worshiped” in the sense that we will put this above everything else that we treasure about life in the world.

By “sacrifice” we might well have to be less selfish than usual on occasion, in order to put the greater good ahead of ourselves in order to help others. And by “prayer” we need to do nothing more than express the hope and belief in ourselves that we are here for the right reasons, which is to realize the common good in ourselves as we rise to our full potential as human beings.

I can’t claim to have any special insight here, but it seems to me that, first of all, it makes sense to pursue the things that benefit us most as a species, and not look at sacrificing some individuals to the betterment of others as a means to advance the human race as a whole. This has to be a fundamental truth about ourselves, but sadly, the sum of human history to date shows primarily the exploitation and slaughter of the many to benefit the few.

If this proves anything all – and notwithstanding the enlightenment expressed by the ancient Zoroastrian faith –   it is that the formalized religions have been absolutely no help at all to the betterment of humanity, and in fact can be seen as the instigators – and in many cases the perpetrators – of much of the murder and mayhem that has befallen the many people of this earth for reasons that make no sense at all.

Surely we can get there without religious totalitarianism  and especially without  religions in their most virulent and primitive form and when ancient tribal laws are used in an inhumane and brutal manner. All this coercion in the name of a ‘higher” authority has nothing to do with serving an almighty god of sorts or whatever else they claim to be about.  In the end this more likely about the few having the means to control the many in everyday life, such as when women and girls are devalued to the level of cattle, to be used and abused at will because it is their duty to comply.

Life has no value  when it is so easily denigrated or even dispensed with in order to prevent dissent.  I’m referring to caning people in public, hacking off hands or stoning people to death: they are barbaric acts that have no place in a society that values the sanctity of life.   Clearly, no effort towards the greater good is happening here.

Posted on

The Ugly Business Of Big Bad Pharma

Being Bad comes naturally to Big Pharma, as evidenced by their history in the marketplace. Over the previous decade or more the pharmaceutical industry has raked up a least 20 billion USD in fines for all kinds of absolutely unconscionable unethical and outright criminal behavior, ranging from publishing fake journals to plug their own products, hiding information about the deadly consequences of their drug during the testing phase, to bribing physicians to promote off-label prescription  of  anti-depressants leading to increased suicides in children. And no one went to jail for this!

The US government has been signaling for the last couple years that pharmaceutical executives should expect to become targeted for prosecution or debarment.  This in light of the fact that companies regard the risk of multi million-dollar penalties as just another cost of doing business.  This according to a 2006 study by the  University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine in Los Angeles for the National Institute of Mental Health of off-label use of drugs, including Zyprexa, for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease.

However, in their most recent effort in 2011 to oust Forest Laboratories’ Howard Solomon from his 30-year tenure as its CEO following accusations of fraud in 2009 related to Lexapro have been unsuccessful.  The expression ‘Thick as Thieves comes to mind when considering a statement made by the company’s board in defense of Mr. Solomon: “Mr. Solomon has always set a tone of the highest integrity from the top.”

Yes, and the moon is made of green cheese.

The following is a litany of offenses committed by Big Pharma since around 2003, and an ugly rap sheet by any other name. By no means a complete account, it shows  the complete lack of ethics  in an industry that exists ostensibly to improve the lives of those who have suffered the misfortune of some illness or disease. As such, it reveals a disgusting lack of concern for the very people who are at the receiving end of their unscrupulous efforts to bring their products to market, regardless I seems – of whether it would kill them or not. Presumably they would prefer the latter, but that isn’t necessarily a deterrent in the relentless and clearly morally blind quest for obscene profits, the sole raison d’être that whole sorry industry is about.

Most recently, drug-maker Pfizer was fined in December of 2016 a record £84.2m ($107m USD) by the UK’s competition regulator after the price charged to the NHS for an anti-epilepsy drug was increased by up to 2,600%. The CMA also fined the drugs distributor Flynn Pharma £5.2m for charging excessive and unfair prices in the UK for phenytoin sodium capsule.

Before September 2012, Pfizer manufactured and sold phenytoin sodium capsules to UK wholesalers and pharmacies under the brand name Epanutin, and the price was regulated. In September 2012, Pfizer sold the UK distribution rights to Flynn Pharma, debranding the drug and making it generic.The drug was no longer subject to price regulation, leaving Pfizer free to sharply increase the price it charged Flynn, which in turn further raised the price it charged the NHS.

In February of 2014 Endo Health Solutions Inc. and its subsidiary Endo Pharmaceuticals Inc. agreed to pay $192.7 million to resolve criminal and civil liability arising from Endo’s marketing of the prescription drug Lidoderm. As part of the agreement, Endo admitted that it intended that Lidoderm be used for unapproved indications and that it promoted Lidoderm to healthcare providers this way.

In November of 2013 Johnson & Johnson agreed to pay a $2.2 billion fine to resolve criminal and civil allegations relating to the prescription drugs Risperdal, Invega and Natrecor. The government alleged that J&J promoted these drugs for uses not approved as safe and effective by the FDA, targeted elderly dementia patients in nursing homes, and paid kickbacks to physicians and to the nation’s largest long-term care pharmacy provider, Omnicare Inc. As part of the agreement, Johnson & Johnson admitted that it promoted Risperdal for treatment of psychotic symptoms in non-schizophrenic patients, although the drug was approved only to treat schizophrenia.

In December of 2012 the European Commission has fined drug makers Johnson & Johnson and Novartis a combined 16 million euros or about $21.95 million on December 11 for delaying market entry of a cheaper generic painkiller in the Netherlands. European Commission Vice-President Joaquin Almunia, in charge of competition policy, said the two companies ‘shockingly deprived patients in the Netherlands, including people suffering from cancer, from access to a cheaper version of this medicine, Xinhua reported.

The commission said in a statement that Johnson & Johnson’s patent on a patch containing the drug Fentanyl expired in 2005, however in July 2005, it signed a so-called ‘co-promotion agreement and paid Novartis to delay launching a generic version. The delay lasted 17 months, and was more profitable for both companies than competing honestly would have been. US pharmaceutical firm Johnson & Johnson was fined 10.8 million euros while Novartis of Switzerland was 5.5 million euros.

In December  of 2012 Amgen agreed to pay a $762 million fine to resolve criminal and civil charges that the company illegally introduced and promoted several drugs including Aranesp, a drug to treat anemia. Amgen pleaded guilty to illegally selling Aranesp to be used at doses that the FDA had explicitly rejected, and for an off-label treatment that had never been FDA-approved.

Also in December of 2012 Sarnoff-Aventis agreed to pay $109 million to resolve allegations that the company gave doctors free units of Hyalgan (an injection to relieve knee pain) to encourage those doctors to buy their product. Sanofi lowered the effective price by promising these free samples to doctors, but at the same time got inflated prices from government programs by submitting false price reports, alleged the United States. Medicare and other government health care programs “paid millions of dollars in kickback-tainted claims for Hyalgan,” according to the DOJ announcement.

In October 0f 2012 Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals Inc agreed to pay $95 million to resolve allegations that the company promoted several drugs for non- medically accepted uses. These drugs included the stroke-prevention drug Aggrenox, the lung disease drugs Atrovent and Combivent, and Micardis, a drug to treat high blood pressure. The FDA alleged that Boehringer improperly marketed the drugs and “caused false claims to be submitted to government health care programs.”

On July 3, 2012, the Associated Press reported that British drug maker GlaxoSmithKline LLC will pay $3 billion in fines ” the largest healthcare fraud settlement in U.S. history ” and plead guilty to promoting two popular drugs for unapproved uses and to failing to disclose important safety information on a third in the largest health care fraud settlement in U.S. history, the Justice Department said Monday.

In addition to the fine, Glaxo agreed to resolve civil liability for promoting Paxil, Wellbutrin, asthma drug Advair and two lesser-known drugs for unapproved uses. The company also resolved accusations that it overcharged the government-funded Medicaid program for some drugs, and that it paid kickbacks to doctors to prescribe several drugs including asthma drug Flovent and herpes medicine Valtrex.

Glaxo illegally promoted Paxil for treating depression in children from 1998 to 2003, even though it wasn’t approved for anyone under age 18. The company also promoted Wellbutrin from 1999 through 2003 for weight loss, sexual dysfunction, substance addictions and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, although it was only approved for treatment of major depression.

In May of 2012 Abbott was fined $1.5 billion in connection to the illegal promotion of the anti-psychotic drug Depakote. Abbott admitted to having trained a special sales force to target nursing homes, marketing the drug for the control of aggression and agitation in elderly dementia patients. Depakote had never been approved for that purpose, and Abbott lacked evidence that the drug was safe or effective for those uses. The company also admitted to marketing Depakote to treat schizophrenia, even though no study had found it effective for that purpose.

In January 2009, Indianapolis-based Lilly, the largest U.S. psychiatric drug maker, pleaded guilty and paid $1.42 billion in fines and penalties to settle charges that it had for at least four years illegally marketed Zyprexa, a drug approved for the treatment of schizophrenia, as a remedy for dementia in elderly patients. In five company-sponsored clinical trials, 31 people out of 1,184 participants died after taking the drug for dementia ” twice the death rate for those taking a placebo. Those findings were reported in an October 2005 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Lilly already had a criminal conviction for mis-branding a drug when it broke the law again in promoting schizophrenia drug Zyprexa for off-label uses starting in 1999. The medication provided Lilly with $36 billion in revenue from 2000 to 2008. That’s more than 25 times as much as the total penalties Lilly paid in January of 2009.

In April of 2010 AstraZeneca was fined $520 million to resolve allegations that it illegally promoted the anti-psychotic drug Seroquel. The drug was approved for treating schizophrenia and later for bipolar mania, but the government alleged that AstraZeneca promoted Seroquel for a variety of unapproved uses, such as aggression, sleeplessness, anxiety, and depression. AstraZeneca denied the charges but agreed to pay the fine to end the investigation.

On Sept. 2, 2009, Pfizer unit, Pharmacia & Upjohn, pleaded guilty to  instructing more than 100 salespeople to promote Bextra, a drug approved only for the relief of arthritis and menstrual discomfort, for treatment of acute pains of all kinds.

For this  felony, Pfizer paid (then) the largest criminal fine in U.S. history: $1.19 billion. On the same day, it paid $1 billion to settle civil cases involving the off-label promotion of Bextra and three other drugs with the U.S. and 49 states. This follows earlier allegations of criminal conduct by one of Pfizer’s units  Warner-Lambert -in January 2004, for pushing doctors to prescribe an epilepsy drug called Neurontin for uses the Food and Drug Administration had never approved. Pfizer agreed to pay $430 million in criminal fines and civil penalties, and pleaded guilty to two felony counts of marketing a drug for unapproved uses. while assuring the .S. Attorney’s office that Pfizer and its units would stop promoting drugs for unauthorized purposes.

According to the U.S. Attorney’s office: ‘At the very same time Pfizer was in our office negotiating and resolving the allegations of criminal conduct in 2004, Pfizer was itself in its other operations violating those very same laws. They’ve repeatedly marketed drugs for things they knew they couldn’t demonstrate efficacy for. That’s clearly criminal.

The penalties Pfizer paid this year for promoting Bextra off-label were the latest chapter in the drug’s benighted history. The FDA found Bextra to be so dangerous that Pfizer took it off the market for all uses in 2005.

Also in 2009,  Forest Laboratories was accused of fraud in 2009 related to Lexapro, an antidepressant. In a civil complaint, federal prosecutors alleged that Forest hid from parents and doctors the results of a study indicating that Lexapro might increase the risk of suicide in kids. Meanwhile, the complaint alleges, the company was promoting another clinical trial ” financed by Forest, naturally ” showing Lexapro’s effectiveness. Prosecutors also charged the company with providing kickbacks to doctors in the form of sports tickets, expensive meals, and paid vacations.

In September 2007, New York-based Bristol-Myers paid $515 million ” without admitting or denying wrongdoing ” to federal and state governments in a civil lawsuit brought by the Justice Department.

Across the U.S., pharmaceutical companies have been pleading guilty to criminal charges or paying penalties in civil cases when the U.S. Department of Justice finds that they deceptively marketed drugs for unapproved uses, putting millions of people at risk of chest infections, heart attacks, suicidal impulses or death.

Since May 2004, Pfizer, Eli Lilly & Co., Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. and four other drug companies have paid a total of $7 billion in fines and penalties. Six of the companies admitted in court that they marketed medicines for unapproved uses.

In a setback in May 17, 2006 for bio-pharmaceutical company Chiron now Novartis a federal judge ruled that the company’s medical-method patent covering a drug-device combination used by cystic fibrosis victims cannot be used to bar use of the treatment in lower concentrations. Chiron had been successful in keeping a significantly more efficient nebulizer technology of the market since 1997 because it would require less of the drug TOBI that they had exclusive rights to.  The new ‘vibrating mesh nebulizer would cut the treatment duration at least in half (more like from 20 minutes down to 5) encouraging children to comply with their treatment regimens, and are small and portable, unlike the heavy traditional compressor type nebulizers patented by Chiron for the delivery of TOBI.

According to Richard P. Doyle, Jr. of Janssen Doyle LLP, the firm representing the defendants in the case, the ruling marked a huge victory for patients and potentially huge losses for Chiron by allowing doctors to prescribe the eFlow nebulizer manufactured by PARI of Germany: ‘This is a rape and pillaging case on the part of Chiron”, said Doyle. “I’ve never run into somebody so evil.” Chiron spent millions of dollars to keep this new technology off the market simply because it would hurt sales.

And let us not forget Merck & Co. Vioxx maker Merck concealed heart attacks suffered by three patients during a clinical study of the now-withdrawn painkiller in a report on the study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2000, the journal wrote in an editorial released in August of 2005. The editorial, written by the journal’s editor in chief, Dr. Jeffrey M. Drazen, executive editor Dr. Gregory D. Curfman and a third doctor, also alleges the study’s authors deleted other relevant data before submitting their article for publication. Adverse cardiovascular events include heart attacks, strokes and deaths. ‘Taken together, these inaccuracies and deletions call into question the integrity of the data on adverse cardiovascular events in this article, the doctors wrote.

And staying with Merck for a moment, how unethical is this:  Merck paid an undisclosed sum to Elsevier to produce several volumes of fake medical journals that had the look of a peer-reviewed medical journal, but contained only reprinted or summarized articles“most of which presented data favorable to Merck products“that appeared to act solely as marketing tools with no disclosure of company sponsorship. The journals -The Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, which was published by Exerpta Medica, a division of scientific publishing juggernaut Elsevier, is not indexed in the MEDLINE database.

The claim that Merck had created a journal out of whole cloth to serve as a marketing tool was first reported by The Australian and came to light in the context of a civil suit filed by Graeme Peterson, who suffered a heart attack in 2003 while on Vioxx, against Merck and its Australian subsidiary, Merck, Sharp & Dohme Australia (MSDA).

Now,  if anyone should have the naive belief that pharmaceutical companies are in business to produce drugs to make or keep people healthy, that is only true to the extent that some of the drugs they bring to market (and more and more at outrageous prices) will actually do that. But, clearly, that is only incidental to the real objective of why they are in business: to make as much money as is possible while remaining to stay out of jail in light of the countless accusations of sleazy deception, massive fraud, wholesale corruption, and the despicable and outright criminal failure to disclose critical health information which can be assumed to have led to many a patient’s death.

Welcome the world of Big Pharma, where unconscionable corporate scoundrels  appear to rule the roost!  What, you have a better word for them?  Be my guest … You wonder how these folks sleep at night.

Posted on

The Power behind the Throne

Having already demonstrated on countless occasions his inability to put two sentences together coherently (unless, perhaps, in praise of his own grandeur, e.g. “I am very intelligent …” etc.) I assume we shouldn’t be all that surprised to learn that US President Trump’s inauguration speech* was written by two of the president’s closest aides, chief strategist Steve Bannon and senior advisor Stephen Miller, and not by Trump himself – as he had claimed earlier – as reported by the Wall Street Journal on January 21st.

On the other hand, I wonder if Americans have figured out yet that, while Trump is now in the  US President’s seat doing his thing,  this might not be  quite his own thing as there is a puppet master in the White House, pulling the strings he needs to pull to have Donald do his bidding for him and his paranoid anti-Islam ideology.

I’m referring of course to alt-right-wing  and rabid-Islamophobe Stephen K. Bannon who in 2015 was described by a Bloomberg Newsweek article about him, “The Most Dangerous Political Operative in America”, and more recently referred to by the Guardian as “The man who once imagined a ‘global war’ between ‘the Judeo-Christian west’ and ‘jihadist Islamic fascism’. This man is now Trump’s top adviser.

Bannon & Trump

And so I’m wondering what if Trump might not be quite his own man because it’s not the Russians that have the goods on dear Donald, but Steve Bannon does, having dug up some highly compromising information on Dear Donald through his Breitbart News dirt-mining research team known as the Government Accountability Institute, or  GAI.

Earlier, Bannon, in his capacity as executive chair of Breitbart News LLC, had hired discredited author Peter Schweizer, the president of  GAI,  after being very much impressed by his best-selling publication of Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich.

Schweizer, who began his career as a researcher at the conservative Hoover Institution, digging through Soviet archives, led the conservative GAI group that is said to have close ties to the Mercer family – called in 2015 by the Washington Post one of the ten most influential billionaires in politics – as well receiving substantial support from other right-wing sources such as  Charles and David Koch.  In conducting its “fact-based” research the GAI team  has access to resources that include an “after-hours” deal to use European internet infrastructure equipment worth 1.3 billion to comb the internet including the secretive Deep Web for information (read “dirt”). And if it is true that Bannon through the GAI has found some real dirt on Trump,  it would not be inconceivable that he and his alt-right cronies are able to put this to some good use by advancing their own ideological ends.

I’m not sure how else to explain the fact that there is a NON-ELECTED individual talking into the ear of the president all day, as well as why Trump is allowing Bannon as a regular attendee to the National Security Council ′s Principals Committee, a Cabinet-level senior inter-agency forum for considering national security issues. This move has been  severely criticized by several members of previous administrations and was called “stone cold crazy” by Susan E. Rice, Barack Obama’s last national security adviser.

But regardless of what Bannon and the GAI may or may not have on Trump, it remains to be seen how the latter – as a person with NPD** – is able to tolerate the presence of Bannon without being able to control him, especially now, when more and more attention appears to be focused on Bannon’s role in running the country. Having to share the limelight with another human being is not something Trump is capable of, so stand back and wait for this situation to come to a head.

(*) Described at the time by George Bush as “some weird shit …”

(**) Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) is a form of pathological narcissism, first diagnosed by the psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut, in 1968. A rigid pattern of behaviour that drives a lifelong quest for self-gratification, NPD is characterized by a grandiose sense of self-importance, an insatiable need for attention and a chronic lack of empathy.