Muda69

I have a relative whose child was basically shunned by the rest of the student body for most of a school year for declaring in a gym class that he was an atheist. This was in the sixth grade in a government school.

Football Coach Prayer Case Captures Public Schooling’s Basic Equality Problem: https://www.cato.org/blog/football-coach-prayer-case-captures-public-schoolings-basic-equality-problem Such a simple and noble solution.

Twitter Admits It Hid Tweets About HBO's QAnon Docuseries https://gizmodo.com/twitter-hbo-qanon-censor-q-into-the-storm-1848842476

How sad. Censorship is harmful on many levels, even though I fully acknowledge that the owner of the GID, or his duly designated representatives, have the right right to do so.

"football related" <> "high school football related", Irishman. Everybody who follows football at practically any level knows Mr. Herbstreit is primarily a college football analyst/announcer/etc. And sorry, I don't know what "Zucked" means. I assume it has something to do with the founder of Facebook, but I don't have and never will have a Facebook account.

Where did DE say Mr. Herbstreit had something to do with high school football?

How Elon Musk Can Improve Twitter https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/04/how-elon-musk-can-improve-twitter/

The term "Free Speech", as commonly used in the context of the 1st Amendment and government, has nothing to do with Mr. Musk purchasing Twitter. I seriously doubt Twitter's terms of service, which basically allows them to lock or outright delete the account of any person using its service, will change in any meaningful way.

Why exactly? Do you believe if Mr. Kennedy wins it will open the floodgates for repressed high school football coaches across the country, and they will all start praying on the 50 yard line at the end of games? Which to be honest I have never understood the need to do this, other than "look at me" proselyting.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/trump-says-he-probably-wouldnt-have-any-interest-in-returning-to-very-boring-twitter-if-musk-allows-him-back-on-11649951473?mod=home-page

From the link Bobref provided: Probably the truth. This case has no real significant national importance.

https://apnews.com/article/sports-football-religion-prayer-washington-7490d215c8b1ead529299ac92114dbab Anybody have an opinion on how the SCOTUS will rule, and what will be the consequences of that ruling?

https://christopherrufo.com/radical-gender-lessons-for-young-children/ This is morally insane. Now if a parent wants to teach this kind of stuff to their children in their own home, or send them to a private school that does the same, that is their right. But don't expect the government school to teach such claptrap. And frankly any government school teacher who champions such "education" needs to be fired, surely they find new employment in a private school somewhere that supports this.

Not everyone is a glutton for punishment, and spending tons of gas $, like you are Robert.

https://mises.org/wire/postcovid-america-racked-inflation-americans-pay-too-much-drugs Patents on drugs are thought to spur innovation, but the reality is that they create industry incentives that actually lower the quality of healthcare available while pushing the price of drugs through the roof. It has been claimed that were there no patent laws and free competition in the pharmaceutical industry, many vital drugs would come within the price range of a simple ibuprofen. The reason for this is that once drugs have been invented, they are relatively inexpensive to manufacture. In the meantime, the American people are not just being fleeced on drugs over the counter, but also through the tax system by drug companies charging monopoly prices to the government. Pharmaceutical firms know there are millions of people on Medicare and Medicaid who will demand drugs at monopoly rates because they never see the price tag. This is a grand corporatist scheme that shovels billions of dollars of public money into private hands. For example, in 2014 Gilead Sciences introduced a cure for hepatitis C named Solvadi and marketed it at the astronomical price of $1,000 per pill. The cost of treating every American infected with the disease would have run $268 billion, about similar to the amount that Americans were already spending on all prescription drugs that year. Medicaid budgeted $1.3 billion to pay for Solvadi, but when faced with rationing, Hepatitis C sufferers filed a class action lawsuit in which they accused Medicaid and private providers of violating the law by refusing to cover medicines that were approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). In other words, they expected the government to pay $1,000 per pill! Even people buying their own drugs end up having to pay prices that are inflated because they are competing as buyers against government and private insurance companies that are willing to shell out for them. To add insult to injury, people are even overcharged on patented drugs that they themselves paid for the research on! One study revealed that over half of the most transformative drugs invented between 1984 and 2009 had their origins in research that was supported by the state. Publicly funded universities and government organizations, like the National Institutes of Health, often lend research staff or funds to private developers. Far from incentivizing innovation, patents are encouraging companies to fiddle around with already existing treatments instead of developing better ones. Corporations are often allowed to “evergreen” (or “repatent”) their drugs just by tweaking them ever so slightly. For example, the manufacturer of Prilosec, a remedy for heartburn, extended its monopoly by getting a second patent on the pill’s coating, allowing them to remain the exclusive provider of the active ingredient. It’s no wonder it has been reported that 85 percent of new drugs are no better than the drugs already available! Companies simply withdraw the original drug from the market, forcing physicians to issue the new, more expensive one. The new drug is not qualitatively different from the previous one; it just has a fresh patent. Researchers Robin Feldman and Connie Wang published a study reporting that between 2005 and 2015 at least 74 percent of the drugs associated with new patents in the FDA’s records were not new drugs but existing ones. When a new disease comes along, it’s arguably far better to treat it with an already existing drug invented to treat other illnesses than to develop a brand new one for it. This is because we know a lot more about the safety profile and side effects of pills that have long been on the market. Patents discourage finding new ways to use older drugs because investors would much rather have the market exclusivity granted by a patent than use a safer drug that is already available in a generic form. This came into focus during the coronavirus pandemic, when already existing treatments were ignored while the medical industry rushed to put out a vaccine that was guaranteed to bring in billions, with the taxpayer footing the bill. When Dr. Jonas Salk discovered and developed one of the first successful polio vaccines, he was asked who owned the patent, and famously replied, “Well, the people, I would say. Could you patent the sun?” At that time, however, it took a relatively short time—and a fraction of what it costs now—to bring new treatments to patients. In the past, the competition would have to reverse engineer a drug in order to provide it in a generic form, and this would take some time. Now, it’s mandatory for companies to reveal their pharmaceutical compounds and make their production processes public during the FDA review process. They are not allowed to use trade secrets. This means that by the time the review process is over, other companies already know how to manufacture their drugs. As a consequence of this mandatory, open-book policy, the pharmaceutical industry depends on extreme monopoly prices and patents to recoup research costs that are artificially heightened by the complexity of the FDA’s regulatory system. Mary Ruwart, former medical researcher and author of the astonishing book Death by Regulation, explains that patents wouldn’t be necessary to ensure that pharmaceutical companies could make a profit if the regulatory system were more reasonable. She writes that between 1962 and 1980, excessive government regulations extended the time it took for a new drug to get from the lab bench to the marketplace from four years to fourteen years. Not only would this increase the cost of bringing drugs to market and increase the price to the consumer, but it would also give the competitors of drug companies plenty of time to copy their work. The government, in essence, hampers the pharmaceutical industry with the left hand and protects it with the right. Companies complain (somewhat understandably) that their costs are artificially heightened by excessive regulation and that they have no room to make a profit without patents. Especially in an environment where (allegedly) only two out of ten drugs brought to market turn a profit. So, the government has to protect the industry’s bottom line in the interests of the public good. In the end, it’s the public that pays for everything. The research studies, the regulators, the patent protections, the profits; everything is built into the inflated cost of a pill. There are at least four more reasons to doubt whether patents confer any net benefit in terms of healthcare innovation at all. The first is that patents prevent would-be inventors from mixing recent developments by others with their own “add-on” ingenuities and bringing them to market promptly. The second is that patents deter companies from researching products similar to those their competitors are researching that may appeal to the same or slightly different demographics, because if they are beaten to securing patent rights by a narrow time margin, all their research spending money is wasted. The third is that the incentive to secure monopoly rights can serve as a deterrent to sharing research and collaborating in order to keep costs down and preserve profit margins on a final product, because companies are participating in a winner-takes-all system. The fourth reason is that when one company has a monopoly on the product that serves most people that have a particular condition, there may be little reason to develop drugs for people whom the product does not fit. The research costs will often outweigh the risk of not turning a profit. Let’s take the case of Viagra, which is a very imperfect drug for the treatment of impotence for several reasons. In some people, it causes bad side effects ranging from headaches to stomach pain, and it takes more than an hour to kick in, meaning intercourse must be planned for and cannot happen spontaneously. For most patients suffering from the most severe issues, resulting from nerve damage due to diabetes or prostate cancer surgery, it doesn’t work at all. And for people who need to take it indefinitely, it becomes less effective over time and eventually stops working. Clearly there are good reasons for other treatments for impotence to be developed, but despite the shortcomings of Viagra, it is only now that the patent on it is fast running out that interest been renewed in developing alternatives. Had the drug not been patented in the first place, other companies would have been looking to find other treatments that could compete with Viagra, and no doubt some of them would be better than it in at least some respects. One alternative to restricting the supply of healthcare products by giving companies exclusive monopolies on supplying them is to offer prizes to the original creators of new drugs. In 2007, the US federal government offered the prize of a “priority review voucher” (PRV) that a successful drug maker could use to shorten the FDA approval time on a drug for certain neglected diseases. Winners could even sell their vouchers to other drug companies if they wanted. United Therapeutics reportedly received $350 million from another drug manufacturer for the PRV it won for developing a cancer treatment for young children. This kind of approach could serve as a temporary fix, but really what is called for is a tremendous loosening of regulatory restrictions on drugs and the relaxation or abolition of patent laws. Drugs can be certified as safe and effective by third parties rather than government regulators, in the spirit of Underwriters Laboratories, which is widely trusted give its seal of approval to electrical appliances. This will remove the inevitable temptation for government and insurance companies to jump in bed with Big Pharma to profit at our expense. Bingo. Get the government out of the pharmaceutical industry and let the free and open market do it's job.

More Mr. Biden the hypocrite:

https://mises.org/wire/it-time-end-fixation-federal-law-enforcement Agreed. As an anecdote a relative of mine recently told me he filed an FOIA request with the FBI, asking to see if they had "file" on him. The FBI responded back with a four-page long letter full of legalese basically saying "no, we don't". I then told him "Well now the FBI does have a file on you." 🙂

So is this a positive spin on NIL, college athletes actually choosing to stay for 4 years of college instead of going pro early?: https://reason.com/2022/04/21/americas-best-college-basketball-player-might-earn-2-million-without-going-pro/ Prior to NIL deals being legalized, college players with the talent to play professional basketball were foolish not to make the jump to the next level. Coming back for another season at school meant uncompensated work and the risk of an injury that might reduce or eliminate their hopes of playing in the NBA. The erosion of the NCAA's cartelized control over student-athletic revenue has created a more dynamic set of choices for players like Tshiebwe. Though he was undeniably the best player in college basketball this year—in 34 games, he recorded 28 double-doubles (basketball lingo for games in which a player scores at least 10 points and at least 10 rebounds), including 16 in a row at one point—most experts projected Tshiebwe to be a second-round draft pick, largely due to the different skill sets required to excel in the college and professional versions of the sport. Staying in school for another year, and getting compensated for it, means Tshiebwe will get to further develop those skills in the hopes of a larger payday in next year's draft. It also means another shot at a national championship, after Kentucky was stunningly eliminated from this year's "March Madness" by Saint Peter's College, the Cinderella story of the tournament. "That's not how I wanted it to end," Tshiebwe told ESPN. "It's the best motivation." He's not the only student-athlete getting what they deserve from the NCAA's new rules—which have created some weird and wonderful results. Doug Edert, who became the star of Saint Peter's upset run in March, landed an endorsement deal with Buffalo Wild Wings. A University of Arkansas wide receiver earned a deal for his dog, Blue. An offensive lineman for Ohio State is getting paid to hawk, yes, scented candles. And Louisiana State gymnast Olivia Dunne has reportedly leveraged her massive social media following into NIL deals worth over $1 million. Even the NCAA—which for years fought the idea of letting players profit off NIL deals as it sold players' likenesses to video game companies and sold jerseys with players' numbers on them—is a winner here. By staying in school, Tshiebwe gives college basketball "a rare win for the sport in the talent tug-of-war with the NBA," writes Sports Illustrated's Pat Forde. "So this is a win-win for college hoops as a whole and Tshiebwe in particular. He has established marketability in a place that loves its college basketball heroes. Put his face on billboards on New Circle Road in Lexington. Let him sign autographs at Keeneland Race Course. If he likes the steaks at Malone's, have him endorse those. Pay the man for being the star Wildcat he is." Mainly, this is a story about how opening up markets benefits everyone. Well, everyone except perhaps the college teams that end up facing the brunt of Tshiebwe's revenge tour next season.

Pickles, mustard, and sometimes mayonnaise are the only items I will put on a breaded tenderloin.

Go Sycamores.

https://mises.org/wire/great-reset-vii-capitalism-rich-and-socialism-poor Socialism as an economic system will always be a failure. Full stop.