Thanks to a Scam

 

   I am alive today thanks to a scam of the pharmaceutical corporations.  The big dollar pharmaceuticals no longer need test tubes.  My drug costs Medicare $195,125.74/yr., or $534.59/pill/day.  It works just fine, thank you, it has kept me alive since 2019.  I have the presently incurable disease called chronic lymphocyte leukemia.  The drug Imbruvica, sold by Abbvie, is the maintainer of my existence.  But, why so expensive?  Well, the short story is the drug was developed by Celera, who sold the sales rights to it to Pharmacyclics for $3 million (hopefully a fair profit for a job well done).  Pharmacyclics sold to Johnson & Johnson for $975 million, multiplying the cost of the right to sell the product by 325.  Abbvie saw an opportunity there and paid $21 billion for the sales rights.  This purchase raised the cost of selling the drug by 7,000 times.  Too bad Medicare and I couldn’t have bought the drug from the developer, Celera.  Your feckless government is aware of this and your representative is ready to say, “I stand up for my voters and place them right behind me.”  The process described here will destroy Medicare.  It won’t be there for your children or your children’s children.  There is no reason to believe the pharmaceutical scam isn’t widespread and growing.  Greed above all.  “Gold rules!”  In the long run the pharmaceutical corporations are destroying their golden goose, in the short run they have unearned profits and extreme wealth.

   Is it the duty of your government representatives to protect the public from horrendous corporate greed?  In our free market economy it seems not.  When your government is employed by corporations, not voters, the democracy is no longer functioning.  Another example of our reaching this point is an 85%, bipartisan vote of our Senate to approve an annual military budget, 20 billion dollars larger than last year’s budget and larger than the next 10 nations in the world’s combined military budgets.  This is a military that stays home when Putin is marching.  We are willing to fight any nation in the world, if they don’t have nuclear weapons.  We proved that in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Putin tried to imitate our actions in Iraq in the Ukraine, but it won’t work in the long run, just as our adventures didn’t.  Putin has realized that we won’t fight if the use of Nukes is threatened and he becomes free to take any action.  This will be a problem for Russia and The US down the road.  Perhaps nukes were never a promise of peace for the future.  I guess it will be the task of thinking people to create a system of sustainable world peace.  We won’t do it with ever expanding annual military budgets and nuclear arsenals.  We also need to take a hard look at a Senate that can’t come up with other than a 50/50 partisan vote on healthcare, education or infrastructure but comes gleefully together for a gargantuan annual military budget.  Why do you think this is?

   “A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.” – George Bernard Shaw

  Cheers, Old Buz     4/24/2022

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Lost in Translation

   A good friend of mine ends his emails with a quote from Confucius, “The essence of knowledge is having it to use it.”  My first reaction to the quote was the statement does not show wisdom.  It shows a misunderstanding of the word essence.  I understand essence to mean the deep meaning or root meaning of a word.  A basic meaning, found below a common definition.  Many words can be substituted for the word knowledge in this quote.  Try the words a hammer or a saw and the quote is equally inaccurate.  Confucius is honored with wisdom lasting over twenty-five hundred years.  To be fair to Confucius, he never spoke these words.  The words he spoke were in Chinese and therein lays the problem.  It is in the translation.  The Chinese translation for essence is benzhi and translating it back to English, the first word choice is nature.  The Chinese translation for knowledge is zhishi and translating it back to English, the first option is understanding.  Now we have a more reasonable quote, “The nature of understanding is having it to use it.”  Or, I might say, “Knowledge without understanding cannot be put to reliable use.”  The meaning of any translation is in the hands of the translator, be it written or verbal.

Remember this while reading a bible:

“The essence of a quotation is often lost in translation.” – Jesus of Nazareth (Spoken in Hebrew.)

Cheers, Old Buz     4/21/2022