Hang John Scopes

Well, the knuckledraggers are at it again. The Lost Cause continues to pollute the USofA.

"Many of the claims made in this video are not aligned with scientific fact, but rather reflect the biased and ideologic perspectives of the extremists who created the video. ACOG is strongly opposed to the spread of misinformation about reproductive health."

And, of course, all anyone needs to know about anything is to be found in the Bible. The Old Testament, really. No need for that new-fangled stuff in that other Testament. The MARF^™(party like it's 1829) will never be happy until there's a Time Machine designed to run only backward, and we all are marched into halls to be sent back to those idyllic times, when men were men, women were women, darkies tended to the rich white folk, the population was minuscule (about 11,000,000 Free Whites and 2,000,000 Darkie slaves), and making babies was the prime directive. And they all pissed and shit in the creek.

The Wisdom of Carole King

I feel the earth move under my feet.
-- Carole King/1971

Was drinking my cuppa Joe in my local greasy spoon when the booth shook a bit. It's happened before when one of the local Jaba the Huts fell into the abutting seat. Nothing to write home about. Of course, when I got back and clicked on the pc, there was the news. 4.8 magnitude about 50 miles west of NYC, about 150 miles as the crow flies from where I type these missives. Reported to be felt in DC and Boston; Feuerstein's X feed was where I found out.

Who knew that NE got earthquakes? Turns out, with some regularity, but so small in magnitude that they're rarely felt. Here's why

Quakes on the East Coast can still pack a punch, as its rocks are better than their western counterparts at spreading earthquake energy across far distances.

For the NYC-philes, this comes as no great surprise. Although the fact that there is a distinct fault (not responsible for today's tremor) through the city might. Does to me. Years ago I saw some documentary on NYC, Manhattan in particular, which started with an across-the-Hudson profile of the skyline. It was obvious that it didn't make much sense. Lower on the island is a line of really tall buildings, moving north there's mostly rows of townhouse types, and then still farther north back to tall ones again. Why is that? Turns out that the tall ones are possible because the bedrock pokes up to the surface near the south end of the island, then heading north it dips down for some distance, then up again. It would be very expensive to put piles deep to the bedrock along the dip. So no one bothers.

If you live in NE, or remember your junior high (middle) school social studies (back when you could be taught that, of course), then you know that the Northeast has about the rockiest soils in North America. Getting crops to grow is a major chore. All those neat rock fences you see outside of cities aren't ornamental, they exist because those rocks had to be pulled out of the ground in order to have a semblance of a farm field. Rather than haul them away someplace (the front-loader didn't yet exist in the 1600s), pile them up as a fence.

And, of course the MARF^™(party like it's 1829) lunatics will blame the woke folk for pissing off the Christian God, who punished us with the tremor. I know, I know. We'll just sacrifice a few nubile virgins on a barge in Boston Harbor. God will be mollified.

By The Numbers - part the fifty second

A few times in these essays, I've complained about the socialism/welfare for the rich, in particular the drug industry. They take the work of academia and NGOs and leverage same into about the most profitable sector in the economy. And we, the sick, get to pay more for those drugs than anywhere else on earth.

Now comes new reporting that the gravy train may soon come to a screeching halt. Where does much of this research come from? Who pays for it? In large part, the USofA taxpayer.

According to the National Institutes of Health, the number of postdoctoral fellows supported by NIH grants has been steadily falling for more than 20 years, with a significant dip after 2020. The number of postdocs in the biological and biomedical fields has declined 9% between 2018 and 2022, and those in health-related fields have fallen by 8%, according to a survey published on March 20 by the National Science Foundation.

PhRMA bitches that they don't get enough credit for turning this basic research into sellable drugs. They sure don't seem to care all that much.

By using that technology to develop their mRNA vaccines for Covid-19, pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer and Moderna made a windfall in profits. Between 2020 and 2021, Pfizer saw its revenue nearly double. In the same period, Moderna's total revenue skyrocketed from $803 million to $18.5 billion, astounding growth the company said was "primarily due to commercial sales of (the) COVID-19 vaccine."

The golden goose ain't dead yet, but it's on life support. It's long been my contention that smart people do what they do just because they do what they do; they don't want to do anything else. If we're lucky, those in bio/chem/medicine who choose to skip straight to Big Pharma big bucks jobs are the dumb ones who don't really care about doing smart work. One hopes.

Mulkey Waters

By now, even if you only read or watch High Brow news, you've come across the threat by Kim Mulkey, LSU girls basketball coach, to sue the Washington Post should it publish a story she labels as false. Hmmm??? Didn't Nixon have something similar to say?? Or the Orange Jesus?? And most other sociopaths.

So, what's the story? Neither Mulkey nor the Post have, as I type, revealed the substance. But Mulkey at both Baylor and LSU, has a history. Here's a review. Near as I can find, neither that reporter nor the organ were sued by Mulkey. Red State collegiate atheletics has been deep in doodoo forever. Coaches that manage to win hardware get lavished with tens of millions of dollars in bakksheesh. Kids, a precious few, go on to get their own bakksheesh in the pros. The vast majority 'earn' a degree in basket weaving and some such, rather than a valuable skill or a measure of higher order thinking; just the pleasure of being cannon fodder for greedy adults. Wouldn't it be nice if LSU spent that $30+ million on science labs instead?

Who wins? On the whole, only the Mulkeys of the world.

The Rich Get Richer (and you know the rest)

Years ago, I saw reporting that the cost of living on Nantucket had gotten so out of hand that the service workers couldn't afford housing any longer and were commuting from Hyannis. Haven't, and didn't, made an effort to verify that with other reporting. But it certainly wouldn't surprise me. As they say about the Orange Jesus, everything he touches dies, and the same is true when the Rich invade someplace and evict the regular people. Alas, these same knuckledraggers continue to support the self same folks who exploit them.

Now, we find my beloved (but decreasingly so) Block Island moves another step closer to a terminal case of Nantucketitis. As a reminder: the Island is about 12 miles from Point Judith on the mainland which makes for a one-hour (car carrying) ferry ride. In season, you can get there in about the same hour (sans auto) from New London, Newport as well, at least. So what is the damn gummint of Rhode Island doing with its precious taxes? Paying to expand (paywall, but you get the gist) the airport on the Island. Bet you didn't know there was an airport?

I mean, the Rich want no part of an hour on an olde ferry chock-a-block with hoi polloi to get to their McMansion. The runway can accommodate a smallish Lear type; with just 2,500 feet of runway, your Boeing Business 787 is out of the question. They really need more space at the airport, now don't they? We haven't been there in season more than once or twice; too many obnoxious mainlanders. Deep 'shoulder season' is more better.

Wasn't it Fitzgerald who said the Rich really are different?

I Told You So - 21 March 2024

More than a few times in the course of producing these essays, the point has been made that the MARF^™(party like it's 1829) crowd bitches and moans about the "animals" hopping over the border. The problem is: more often than not the economic engines in the MARF^™(party like it's 1829) states depend on such "animals" to pick crops, mow lawns, pound roofing nails, and sundry other work that requires neither education nor learned skills. It helps if you can not fall off the roof on your own, since in the MARF^™(party like it's 1829) states (and, some not so) safety apparatus is regarded as a profit-sink. We don't need no stinkin harnesses!!

So, of course, the lamestream press has finally found the thread.

Some would also like to accelerate work authorizations of asylum seekers so they can start training sooner instead of having to wait 180 days, as required by federal law.

Yeah, how long does it take to learn how to pound roofing nails? Less than a Ph.D. in math stats, I'd wager. Not even 6 months. I guess an hour or two. Hell's bells, almost no one even uses a 2 lb. hammer anymore; all replaced by air guns fed by a stack of nails just like an AR-15. (007 used one to kill some bad guys; one right in the eyeball, cool.) And, one might suppose, that the MARF^™(party like it's 1829) native born sub-GED roofing nail pounders like things just as they are. I mean, once they're of age, they can run for El Presidente on the MARF^™(party like it's 1829) ticket! After all, the Orange Jesus can't possibly live much longer, and he ain't much smarter than your garden variety sub-GED knuckledragger.

Your Money or Your Life - part the second

Y'all remember what Dr. McElhone said, right? "Once you've done the easy 80%, what's left is a bitch!" And so it is in the drug industry. For some years, drug companies have been mining in the 'orphan drug' space, aka - seeking drugs for ever smaller patient populations. The Damn Gummint has aided and abetted this transition over the years with orphan drug acts, which bestows benefits to drug companies which target diseases of small patient populations. There's been some debate as to whether the definition of 'small' is way, way too large; but that's for another day.

This note once again deals with the prickly notion of how much to charge for disease altering/curing drugs which target said small populations. Recall the Orange Jesus:

America will never be a socialist country.

Well... NOT!! Without explicit Socialism, albeit for for-profit capitalists, much of USofA capitalists would be up a creek without a paddle. Subsidies all over the place, and the nefarious and pernicious drug industry which has been pursuing multi-million dollar drugs which even few of the 1% could afford. Who ends up paying for these drugs? You and me, of course either explicitly through government programs or insurance premiums.

So, we get this drug from Orchard (and its now recent Japanese owner), which cures (so far supported only by short-term data, by the way) a very, very rare disease in children; if not dealt with nearly immediately, even this new drug doesn't work.

And, of course, it should be noted that Orchard abandoned a previous orphan drug 'cure'. They were not alone in taking that avenue.

So, is it worth $4.25 million? Your money or your life? Well...

Here's an estimate of the average USofA citizen's life-long income: if we take the middle value for men, adjusted, it's $1.7 million.

So, 2 and a half times your money or your life!!

And, one should also note, that Amylyx conned FDA into approving their ALS drug on lousy data, but managed to make a bundle off it in just a few years. And, by the way, 'conned' isn't just an empty epithet. Amylyx offered up lousy data and an aggresive patient community against FDA, and won. Paper tiger.