Insulin was discovered in 1921 by Sir Frederick Banting, Charles Best and J.J.R. Macleod at the University of Toronto and was later purified by James Collip. This discovery allowed millions of Type I diabetics to have a relatively normal life, when previously they would only live a year or so after diagnosis.
Banting refused to have his name on a patent because he felt that it was unethical for a doctor to profit from saving lives. Best and Collip sold the patent to the University for $1, citing similar feelings. Fast forward a few decades, and many hedge funds have invested heavily in pharmaceutical companies, including every manufacturer of insulin in the US. In order to make the most of their investments, they have bought political influence to make competition more difficult, and have increased prices to maximize their profit.
Bearing in mind that the standard explanations of development costs and safety checks really do not apply for a drug developed 100 years ago, in which the newest changes are over 20 years old, one can note that the price of a vial of insulin in the Humalog brand went from $21 in 1999 to $332 in 2019. And those costs have not risen at the same rate elsewhere. In 2018, the Rand corporation listed the 10 countries where insulin was most expensive: The USA $98.70, Chile $21.48, Mexico $16.48, Japan $14.40, Switzerland $12.46, Canada $12.00, Germany $11.00, South Korea $10.30, Luxembourg $10.15 and Italy $10.03.
On Friday, the US House of Representatives voted on a bill to reduce the copay (what the consumer pays) of insulin to $35. This move to reduce prices is part of the GOP platform, yet only 12 Republicans voted for the bill, and 193 voted against it.
And insulin is just the tip of the iceberg.
Hedge fund manager Martin Shkreli bought the rights to Daraprim, a decades-old drug used to treat a fatal parasitic infection, and raised the price for a pill from $13.50 to $750. He went to prison shortly thereafter - not for this disgusting behaviour, but for defrauding some investors in his hedge fund.
Mylan purchased the rights to the EpiPen self-injector (to treat life-theatening allergic reactions) from $50 per unit to $300 over a few years, resulting in massive increases in profits and huge rewards for CEO Heather Bresch, who just happens to be the daughter of quasi-Democrat Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia. The latter has been one of the two Democratic senators responsible for blocking much of the people-oriented legislation that the Biden administration has tried to pass.
Legal slavery ended in the US in 1865, but our lives and our health are still for sale.
The Republican strategists have known for decades that demographics are against them. As society becomes more racially diverse and urban, it tends to become more liberal. This is the case in most places, including Iran, Afghanistan, Russia and the like.
On one hand, the policies of the party are primarily protective of wealthier white males and on the other, the New Deal and Great Society structures such as Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid are very popular, so strategies to attract GOP voters have to be a little different.
For Nixon, it was the 'Southern Strategy', where carefully-coded terms such as 'urban', rather than racial epithets, were used to bring the racist Southern Democrats (Dixiecrats) into the GOP fold.
For Reagan, it was the embrace of the Moral Majority, who were formed to maintain segregation in the leadership of the Southern Baptist churches, and pivoted to get attention focused on things such as abortion and gay rights.
For George W. Bush, the tactic was purging the voter rolls, especially in Florida, where a quarter-million voters were thrown off shortly before the election of 2000. Most were minorities, and many were actually eligible. It is arguable that this move alone won that election for the GOP.
Another idea has been to claim voter fraud, which has not been detected in any appreciable amount in half a century, and use that as a reason to restrict voting. Senator Lindsey Graham said in 2020 that Republicans would never win another election unless they 'do something' about mail-in voting. It is worth noting that at least four states use this system exclusively, with no problems.
'I don’t want everybody to vote,' the influential conservative activist Paul Weyrich told a gathering of evangelical leaders in 1980. 'As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.'
In places such as Ohio, the congressional and legislative maps are so gerrymandered that, despite the actual voting numbers being about 54% GOP and 46% Democrat, the former hold about 80% of the relevant offices. While the people changed the state constitution to make the districts more fair, the GOP-dominated election committee has presented three sets of maps giving them an 80% advantage. Each set has been thrown out by the GOP-led Ohio Supreme Court. Their answer this week was to present yet another, similar, one.
So, with that in mind, GOP-led legislatures in at least 11 states have taken massive steps to ensure their victories, requiring voter IDs that target minority voters, putting fewer voting machines in minority districts, forbidding people from giving food or water to those in line, restricting hours for early voting, restricting mail ballots, dissolving the autonomous election boards and replacing them by ones controlled by the GOP and many other measures, all in the name of 'preventing fraud'. In states with Democratic governors but GOP legislatures, such as Wisconsin and Virginia, they have stripped the governors of much of their power.
Yesterday, Judge Mark E. Walker, of the Federal District Court in Tallahassee, Florida, struck down most of the new election law passed in that state.
My first love was bike riding, it was a sport I enjoyed for many reasons yet fell into it by accident.
As with most kids I wanted a bike and my paper round gave me the means to buy a Raleigh Lenton with Sturmey Archer gears. I was very pleased and started to get out and about on it, and then one day I wanted new drop handlebars and was told there was a very good bike shop in Seven Sisters Road, Tottenham called Hetchins, so I went there.
Little did I know this was to be a start of a short but fairly successful bike riding part of my young life.
Hetchins were if not the best the equal of any frame makers in the country, beautiful hand-crafted frames with ornamental lugs that were a work of art. I had to have one and I saved and purchased a frame and bit by bit the bits that made it into a decent road racing bike.
By chance the shop manager was an old bike rider who also ran a local, small, club and encouraged youngsters to take up the sport, but his world was not road racing but track riding and after visiting the old, now defunct Paddington track in west London and hearing that magic to me of the hum of high pressure tubular tires on concrete, yes you can hear them or the sound that emanates from them, I was hooked and immediately started to save again for a track bike; for those that don’t know, they are single speed fixed gear machines with no brakes other than the fixed gear.
I took on a Saturday job to supplement my paper round and my track bike purchase. After a season learning the ropes as a fourteen year old I started racing as a junior, up to eighteen years old; in those days that was the only category there was, and only two national titles, the track sprint and the road race. today few would believe so little was available to aim at, though all the other events were included in meeting schedules.
To start with I mostly raced at Paddington at their weekly track league meetings but also on a grass track at Enfield who also had regular meetings run by the same shop manager.
The following year I started to get serious and joined the Polytechnic CC, the premier track club in the country. The club had a who’s who of riders who had won national and international titles going back to the start almost of bike racing; it also had the facilities of the Regent Street Polytechnic in London, probably the poshest address for a club room there was or will be. In reality apart from running several top bike meets during the year and having all these top riders as members there was little they did for you: these were the days of self progress, no coaches to speak of apart from the national team, no sports psychologists, no training schedules, and therefore your own training programs were trial and error based on what you read about or spoke about with other riders.
I went on to race all over the country, riding with my spare race wheels to many meetings miles away and riding home afterwards as many of us did, and rode abroad a few times. There was no money and no sponsorship, you paid for everything, even at international level many had to pay their travel expenses to represent their country; it was a very different world from today.
I write the above as an intro to something that happened last weekend that was or could be a sea change in bike racing. When I rode there were a few black riders racing on the track, but I was not aware of any racing on the road. When I stopped racing, I gave a rather special racing vest to a black rider we had as a club member who had become a friend.
The success of Major Taylor goes back to a period when professional track riders were indeed professionals: they rode for prize money and were paid appearance fees as well as being sponsored by companies. Match racing was promoted in much the same way as boxing was and still is. True professionals on the track died out during the Seventies apart from in Japan, where one form of racing, keirin, behind a moped is supported by the Japanese equivalent of the Tote. In fact the last truly great professional track sprinter was our own Reg Harris, he and a few contemporaries were indeed the last of the few. Very little remains of Harris' racing but this is a short Pathe News clip of him winning the world title in 1950 and then he became Sportsman of the Year; a few years later the era came to an end.
Today the sport is split between track riders who are mainly, as with athletes, supported by governments and/or lottery schemes or university grants and the like, as a way for a country to earn gravitas for Olympic and World medals. It is in many ways no different from when there was an amateur/professional divide in sport and communist bloc countries got round the professional accusations by employing athletes in public jobs that involved doing nothing other than train for the sport they were involved with. Other countries did the same in various guises of ‘other’ employment or income supplement, e.g. in France a few top riders worked for the Ministry of Sport! The ending of the amateur status should have been a good thing but as seen in many sports it has created a communist bloc look-alike that somehow is regarded as being ‘different’.
But one black track rider stands out in sporting history on his own merits. The BBC have made a small article about him that does not do him justice or tell the story. His biography in the book Major Taylor by Andrew Ritchie gives the whole rags to riches and back again tale, and the genuine battle with racism he had in the USA.
Bicycle track racing between 1890 and 1910 was a pinnacle the sport has never achieved again apart from road racing and Major Taylor was a very big part of it. I am not going to relay his tale here but just want to show that a black world champion is not a new thing in cycle racing though they have been very few and far between; he was also only the second black man to win a world title in any sport.
Road racing until recently has never had black champions, in fact hardly any black riders in the top flight, but in 2015 there was a breakthrough when Daniel Teklehaimanot, an Eritrean, became the first black African rider to earn the polka dot best climber’s jersey which he held for a period during that year's Tour de France; he also won the climber's jersey in the prelude race to the TDF, the Critérium du Dauphiné.
The fact he comes from Eritrea is interesting. Much is made of cycling being an expensive sport and that prevents poor blacks in African countries and elsewhere from even thinking about taking up the sport. Recent efforts by a South African team to promote black riders in the European races were made by MTM – Qhubeka; the team has had a mixed start in pro cycling and its original aim to have an all black squad had to be watered down as there simply were not enough high quality black riders to fill all the places. Chris Froome has been running a foundation in Kenya, his birthplace, to promote local riders but so far without any results.
Fast forward to this year and the big breakthrough has occurred; last week the first of a series of one day races held in Belgian and northern France known as the Spring Classics and including three of the world's most prestigious road races was kicked off with the minor classic, the Gent-Wevelgem.
What is significant about this is not just that he is black but that he comes from a cycling-mad country. Eritrea may seem an unlikely source of professional road racers but not so: the country has many problems outside of cycling, but has a rich cycling history though few would have known, and the mixed terrain and areas of high altitude make it a mini Columbia.
The link below gives the full story and history of cycling in Eritrea:
Road cycling by its historic nature has been the preserve of European riders since the first races were held. That started to change post-war, though a few ‘incursions’ did happen previously, when riders from more remote European nations or ones not noted for producing top riders plus an antipodean influx started to make their presence felt. That was followed by American riders and almost the whole world managed to appear at one stage or another, yet still no black riders and the few who made it over here did not make a mark in the sport.
Is it about to change? Some sports for a variety of reasons have not succumbed to the large numbers of black athletes who have literally taken over many sports as a way to escape poverty, and up to now cycling has been one of them. Of course the attraction of the money in say football is a reason to take that route, and reality says that is the obvious way, as making money in cycling is extremely hard and for the few not the many, as in football.
The similarity between Eritrea and Columbia may well be the difference. Both are cycling-mad countries and Columbian riders have shown the way. Will Eritrea follow suit? It seems that it could. Will other African nations follow up? Not so sure about that; a few maybe, but nothing obvious at this time.
The Winds of Change are indeed sweeping through sport, or the women's versions of sport, something I thought I would never see: the totally gutless politically correct British Cycling are allowing a man to compete in women’s events. The argument over trans rights in sport should never have got off the ground; the fear as I said before is that while so far the trans people who are racing as women have not been very good - hence the switch - inevitably you will get better men who decide winning is easier in the women’s versions and make the switch and this one is a small step up in quality. I have no idea what is going to happen but women competitors are going to have to make a stand by refusing to compete with people like this.
As before the switch is only one way: men to women; that says it all about the mind set of these charlatans. Suddenly sport is being infiltrated by trans competitors; where have they all come from? In time there will be events that women, real women, will simply not be able to compete in any more on a level playing field. It is a farce being foisted on women's sport by gutless governing bodies using selective science to make changes they will surely regret. Who the hell apart from voyeurs wants to watch pretend women competing like this?
What is going on in the western world with this being seen as progress and politicians pushing the agenda, frightened in case they upset a minority by speaking and acting on the truth, that they are not women:
So this week we have good news in the sport, and very bad news. It is time for competitors in all sports to speak out or boycott these events, or for those same sporting bodies to set up a separate class for trans athletes - why that is considered a problem is strange as every other type of competitor by sex, by weight and endless para classifications already exist, so add trans categories.
As I finish this piece news arrives that the UCI, cycling's international governing body, have overruled British Cycling and stopped ‘Emily’ competing, but here is this from the BBC website -
- does not exactly give the impression this is all over. BC'smealy mouthed response and the fact that the UCI's own rule book on all this is open to interpretation almost certainly means the trans activists and human rights hand-wringers are gearing up for intervention; plus further delving into the UCI statement does give the impression this is just a temporary injunction, which frankly is not good enough by any standard
The UCI along with all the other sporting bodies, and for once Lord Coe has put his head above the parapet and said the right thing, have to make a unified stand and sort this freak show expanding, for that is what it will become if nothing is done, for good. Get on with it and stop all this self-loathing.
“Goodbyes are only for those who love with their eyes. Because for those who love with heart and soul there is no such thing as separation.” - Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī
The US/NATO hegemon is coming to an end, if conservative historian David Starkey is correct. Here he discusses the new doctrine according to Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, whom he compares in terms of diplomatic stature to Kissinger and Bismarck.
Against the West's ambition to impose its values on the world - democracy, human rights - stand Lavrov's realpolitik principles: non-interference in the internal affairs of nations; each nation to develop in its own way according to its own national, cultural and religious traditions; the world to be not 'unipolar' (US supreme), not bi-polar as in the days of US vs USSR, but multipolar - America, Russia, China and a handful of other major States.
Starkey points out that only 20% of the world's population lives in a full democracy. Many other countries have different ways of doing things, so only 11 of the G20 nations have joined in sanctions against Russia. The US hasn't yet woken up to the real world as it is now.
This notion of a watershed in the world order is echoed in the thoughts of Sergey Glazyev, an academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Putin's former special adviser. He takes a long-historic view, saying that advances in technology, economic changes and the introduction of more flexible, market-based systems of management are ushering in a new, ideologically socialist world economic order in which, as in the example of India, the State seeks to maximize growth rates in order to combat poverty.
In the 2008 financial crisis America and Europe, says Glazyev, wasted their monetary stimulus on financial bubbles and inflated budget deficits, whereas in China the money was 'completely directed to the growth of production and the development of new technologies.' Failing to defeat China in a trade war, the US turned to using Ukraine 'as a weapon of war to destroy Russia, and then to seize control of [Russian] resources in order, I repeat, to strengthen their position and weaken the position of China.'
Following WWII, says Glazyev, the British Empire 'collapsed like a house of cards, because the other two winners — the USSR and the United States — did not need this empire and considered it an anachronism. Similarly, the world will not need American multinational corporations, the US dollar, US currency and financial technologies and financial pyramids. All this will soon be a thing of the past. Southeast Asia will become an obvious leader in global economic development, and a new world economic order will be formed before our eyes.'
Glazyev may understimate the degree to which China still depends on its trade with the US and the West, but it's clear which way Eurasia and the Far East think the wind is blowing.
PM Johnson said a month ago https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-38005282
that President Putin had committed a war crime by bombing innocent civilians. Why
would Putin put himself so clearly in the wrong with his aggression towards
Ukraine?
He has rightly earned our condemnation but securing a legal
judgment against him is a different matter. Following the International
Criminal Court’s ruling that the annexation of Crimea counted as an armed
conflict with Ukraine, Russia withdrew from the ICC in 2016 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-38005282
; but then, the US itself rejected the ICC’s jurisdiction in May 2002, ahead of
Congress’ October vote giving President Bush the discretion to attack Iraq. Peace
is of no account when sovereign nations adopt an à la carte approach to the
rules-based international order.
What could Putin’s motives for the invasion have been?
An appeal to Russian nationalism? One of the reasons for
Putin’s continuing domestic support is that he cultivates the mythos of
protector of his people, and according to Article 69 (3) of his revised
Constitution of 2020, that includes ‘compatriots living abroad… exercising
their rights, ensuring protection of their interests and preserving all-Russian
cultural identity.’ https://rm.coe.int/constitution-of-the-russian-federation-en/1680a1a237 In Article
79, the statement ‘Decisions of international bodies, taken on the
basis of provisions of international treaties of the Russian Federation in
their interpretation that contradicts the Constitution of the Russian
Federation shall not be executed in the Russian Federation’ means, says Russian
political analyst Elena Galkina https://bylinetimes.com/2020/03/11/the-true-goals-of-putins-new-constitutional-amendments/
, that ’The Kremlin wants to show that regardless of the decisions of any
international authorities and courts, it will consider the [Crimean] peninsula
a part of Russia.’
Resource wars? Ukraine, whose citizens are the poorest in
Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_Europe_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
, is rich in agriculture and minerals. That said, Ukraine is a vast country and
much harder to hold than to invade, as the Russians are discovering; and Russia
is already the world’s biggest exporter of wheat and boasts huge mineral
reserves of its own. That is not to say that the West is not tempted, and
finance plays its part: Professor Prabhat Patnaik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prabhat_Patnaik
argues that the IMF, once simply an international rescue-bank, is now used to
enforce ‘investor-friendly’ economic restructuring on the borrower https://peoplesdemocracy.in/2022/0306_pd/imf-connection-ukraine-crisis ; in Ukraine’s case this entailed reforms such as
cutting spending on education and health and slashing the gas price subsidy to
its consumers. Patnaik claims that the IMF deliberately loaned more than
Ukraine could ever repay, so paving the way for taking land and mineral
resources in lieu; it will end, he says, by turning Ukraine into Greece and the
economy will be smashed as masses emigrate for better pay abroad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDkkGvKtlVg .
There is, perhaps, an even bigger picture, in which geography
is key.
Locally, assuming negotiated peace is possible, Lt Gen Riley
has sketched out a possible end position here https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/if-ukraine-rejects-a-deal-there-could-be-much-worse-to-come/
: Russia to control the Donbas (including the western coast of the Azov Sea),
Crimea (plus its water supply from the Dnieper) and a land corridor linking the
two. It would be a partition akin, say, to the creation of South Sudan in 2011.
The development he mentions has a maritime dimension. Until
the Soviet Union collapsed, the Black Sea was very largely a Red lake, except
for the shores of north-eastern Greece and northern Turkey. Since then, EU/NATO
has gradually encroached and if we look at the map and visualise both Ukraine
and Georgia within the fold (still under consideration), Blue is certainly
crowding what is left of (what was once) Red.
Russia has long been working on strengthening its facilities
in the Black Sea. The Sochi Olympics served a dual purpose: in 2014 America’s
The Nation magazine https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/what-did-sochi-get-51-billion-highways-railroads-and-lot-white-elephants/
scoffed at Putin’s $51 billion dollar ‘white elephants’, missing the greater
potential of the new Sochi airport, and of the development of the ports there,
at Novorossiisk (in preparation for oil and gas shipping https://tass.com/economy/718145 )
and at Port Kavkaz - which faces Port Crimea across the Kerch Strait, the two
linked (road and rail) since 2019 by Russia’s Crimean Bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_Bridge
, Europe’s longest. South Stream, the planned undersea gas pipeline to
Bulgaria, jinking through Turkey’s zone to avoid Ukraine, had to be scrapped
because of political fallout from the Crimea annexation, but it is clear that
the Black Sea is a hugely important trade nexus for Russia.
The Sea of Azov is also a keystone in Russia’s plans for
growth and it is likely no coincidence that Ukraine’s hardest-line regiment is
named after it. Until 2014 the Sea was jointly controlled by Russia and the
Russophile eastern Ukraine. The River Don empties into it, and is connected to
the Volga, which flows into the Caspian, by the Volga-Don Canal, which strains
to accommodate modern shipping needs. One proposal is/was for a vastEurasia Canal linking the Caspian to the Azov
and so on to the Black Sea; in 2007 Kazakhstan’s President Nazarbayev enthused
that the canal ‘would make Kazakhstan a maritime power and benefit many other
Central Asian nations as well’https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasia_Canal#Recent_developments
; an alternative Russian plan is to widen the Volga-Don Canal. Either way, a
hostile Ukrainian force on the western shore of the Azov would again pose a
threat to Russian trade and prosperity in the area, and indirectly to long-term
plans for a Eurasian trading bloc such as Damir Ryskulov’s 2008 dream of a
Trans-Asian Corridor of Development https://en.paperblog.com/trans-asian-corridor-of-development-russia-s-super-canal-to-unite-eurasia-734226/
.
Is it not time to stop the war, care for and compensate its
innocent victims and negotiate a fresh approach to international relations that
allows for peaceful global economic growth?
