China/Pharma

China Trials


A Chinese government investigation has revealed that more than 80 percent of the data used in clinical trials of new pharmaceutical drugs have been "fabricated".
The report uncovered fraudulent behaviour at almost every level, and showed that some pharmaceutical companies had hidden or deleted records of potentially adverse side effects, and tampered with data that didn't meet their desired outcomes.
In light of the findings, 80 percent of current drug applications, which were awaiting approval for mass production, have now been cancelled.
The investigation, led by the Chinese State Food and Drug Administration (SFDA), looked at data from 1,622 clinical trials for new pharmaceutical drugs currently awaiting approval. The applications in question were all for Western medicine, not traditional Chinese medicine.
The SFDA found that the more than 80 percent of the data failed to meet analysis requirements, were incomplete, or totally non-existent.

They also showed that many clinical trial outcomes were written before the trials had actually taken place, and the data had been simply manipulated to match what companies wanted to find. Worst of all, it wasn't just a few scientists or pharma companies doing the dirty work. The report found that pretty much everyone involved was guilty of some kind of malpractice of fraud.
Perhaps most worryingly, even third party independent investigators tasked with inspecting clinical trial facilities are mentioned in the report as being "accomplices in data fabrication due to cut-throat competition and economic motivation".

Némirovsky

Suite française

 

The author Irene Némirovsky was born to a banker father in Kiev in 1903, a city repeatedly ravaged by pogroms she never forgot, she spent her early childhood in St Petersburg before fleeing the Russian Revolution for Sweden, then Finland, and finally settling in Paris. Her first language was French. A student in literature at the Sorbonne, she was high-spirited and rebellious. She married Michel Epstein, another banker. They had two daughters. In 1929 Bernard Grasset published her first book, David Golder, to popular acclaim. The ten novels and many short stories that followed made her, at just twenty-six, a member of the largely male French literary establishment.

Both Jewish, she and her husband converted to Catholicism in 1939.

When war broke out, she and her husband moved with their daughters to a village in central France. On July 13 1942 she was arrested. Four days later she was on a transport to Auschwitz. According to camp records, she died on August 19. She was thirty-nine. Her husband followed soon after. The girls, hidden by friends, survived.
 

Suite française, the lost manuscript by Némirovsky, was published in 2004. It depicted the moment of French exodus when 6 million French people took to the roads, in a long river of cars, bicycles, horse-drawn carts, prams, lorries fleeing before the German advance.

But, while we are to accept art for what it is or what we see, not so the artist who must be subject to immense--and usually speculative--analysis. Her portrait of a greedy and heartless Jewish banker in David Golder led to accusations of her being  a “self-hating Jew.” Ruth Franklin, a senior editor on the New Republic, suggested that she had trafficked “in the most sordid anti-semitic stereotypes.” Némirovsky, it was pointed out, had continued writing, De Man-like,  for the French magazine Gringoire long after its extreme anti-Semitism had become plain.
 

To interviewers who asked her why she wrote so unflatteringly about the Jews she would say that she focused only on the “rich, cosmopolitan Jews . . . for whom the love of money has taken the place of all other feelings”. She wrote, she said, only what she saw.

One can sympathize with the agonizing French as they look back on this part of their history; it seems to have driven many philosophically mad. But there is no reason for outsiders to collaborate on their scapegoating.

Her younger daughter, Elisabeth Gille, has written a book about her, The Mirador.

Sunday/Smith

Stevie Smith was a popular Twentieth Century poet often anthologized in children's poetry collections but she was well regarded by Sylvia Plath and Seamus Heaney; a writer who hid deep topics in simple words and broad ideas in the everyday. This is a poem about loss and loneliness in age.


The Old Sweet Dove of Wiveton ( Norfolk)


Twas the voice of the sweet dove
I heard him move,
I heard him cry,
Love, love.


High in the chestnut tree
Is the nest of the old dove
And there he sits solitary
Crying, Love, love.


The gray of this heavy day
Makes the green of the tree’s leaves and the grass brighter
And the flowers of the chestnut tree whiter
And whiter the flowers of the high cow-parsley.


So still is the air
So heavy the sky
You can hear the splash
Of the water falling from the green grass
As Red and Honey push by,
The old dogs,
Gone away, gone hunting by the marsh bogs.


Happy the retriever dogs in their pursuit,
Happy in bog mud the busy feet.


Now all is silent, it is silent again
In the sombre day and the beginning soft rain
It is a silence made more actual
By the moan from the high tree that is occasional,


Where in his high nest above
Still sits the old dove
Murmuring solitary
Crying for pain
Crying most melancholy
Again and again.


STEVIE SMITH (1954)

Reverie

"It is sometimes necessary to repeat what all know. All mapmakers should place the Mississippi in the same location, and avoid originality. It may be boring, but one has to know where he is. We cannot have the Mississippi flowing toward the Rockies for a change."--Saul Bellow in "Mr. Sammler's Planet"

Constantine Simonides (1820–90) created a vellum roll containing the first three books of the Iliad, which he claimed was more than 2,000 years old. This he sold to the great nineteenth-century collector of manuscripts Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792–1872) in 1854. This tiny manuscript (it can fit into a matchbox). The collector/scholar Toshiyuki Takamiya  characterized it as “one of the greatest forgeries in history”.

A House bill would allow bosses to ask employees to undergo genetic testing as part of voluntary wellness programs.


The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.  To the naive mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement, it may seem absurd that in complex conditions order, and adaptation to the unknown, can be achieved more effectively by decentralizing decisions and that a division of authority will actually extend the possibility of overall order.  Yet that decentralization actually leads to more information being taken into account.--Hayek


Bill Clinton gave a strange speech recently. This is a line:

"People who claim to want the nation-state are actually trying to have a pan-national movement to institutionalize separatism and division within borders all over the world."

Now, I have not been paying close attention over the last months but it seems to me that the Democrat Party has forged its own identity in what would generally be thought of as "identity politics," pitting one American group against the other. No?

Another line:

"...[People]...have found more political success and met the deep psychic needs people have had to feel that their identity requires them to be juxtaposed against someone else."

And is a state limited to a people? An identity? How about a philosophy or a religion? Under a definition like that, would the State of Israel be an easy merge with, say, the State of Iran?

All this seems very simplistic for a national speech. It is astonishing as an international policy.

The demographic situation in Japan is so grim that social scientists have actually estimated the date on which the Japanese people become extinct.

 

People succeed in markets by reducing scarcity – that is, by easing scarcity’s grip on their fellow humans.  And the more they ease scarcity’s grip, the greater their success.  Profits are earned in competitive markets only by successfully making desired goods and services less scarce than they would otherwise be.
People succeed in politics by increasing scarcity – that is, by tightening scarcity’s grip on their fellow humans.  And the more they tighten scarcity’s grip, the greater their success.  Power and prestige in politics are gained chiefly by successfully carrying through on promises to make desired goods and services more scarce than they would otherwise be so that politically influential suppliers of those goods and services reap higher profits from the artificial increase in scarcity.--Bordeaux
A thought worth considering.

Louis J. Marinelli, the 30-year-old English teacher who is the president of the "Yes California" movement, that wants to separate California from the rest of the United States, lives in Yekaterinburg, Russia - a provincial Russian city, about 1,000 miles east of Moscow.


What is....the Loris-Melikov constitution?

From the WashPo:
In August 2015, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife made a landmark announcement: Trail cameras in northern California had captured images of a pack of gray wolves. It included two adults and five loping pups, all with unusual black coats. That made the group the first pack to settle in the state in almost a century. Gray wolves were once common in California, but by 1924 their population had been exterminated. “This news is exciting for California,” department director Charlton H. Bonham said with the announcement. “We knew wolves would eventually return home to the state, and it appears now is the time.”
Then the pack vanished.
State biologists have not spotted the wolves, which were dubbed the “Shasta Pack” because of their presence in the county home to Mount Shasta, since May, the San Francisco Chronicle reported last week. That’s puzzling because wolf packs typically stick to their territory. Then again, a lack of other wolves nearby could mean the family felt free to roam more widely.
Check your closets.

CNN is reporting that Putin might be the richest man in the world. It is just amazing how financial success seems to follow these political leaders.

Nine Navy officers, including an admiral, were charged in a federal indictment unsealed recently with offenses related to trading classified and internal defense information to a foreign defense contractor in exchange for expensive dinners and prostitutes.

 

I hope that no teacher in the [London] School [of Economics] will ever give any countenance to the pernicious belief that steady and honest service in satisfying the demand of the people for the necessaries and conveniences of life is something to be ashamed of because it is profitable.  The modern workman and the modern trader can practice virtue as well as a Greek philosopher, a mediaeval begging friar, or a twentieth-century social reformer.--Edwin Cannan

China's idled steel production capacity is greater than the world's entire demand last year.

Cloud computing is essentially the move away from users buying, owning and maintaining their own computer systems to a more on-demand, rental model. In the past people would buy a desktop computer, install their software and store their information on the hard drive under the desk. They would use the processing unit to run the software and the calculations. With more than one computer they could link them up – maybe via a central server – to create a network, allowing multiple users to share information, software and processing power. Moving an IT system into the cloud removes the headache and cost of buying and maintaining your own infrastructure.
This looks to be the direction of computing, cheaper with less management risk.


A Canadian commutes across the U.S.-Canadian border. In November he drives his camper from Vancouver to Miami and in March he drives it back. The US has a trade deficit in November and a trade surplus in March.--Tower

Lilly’s Cialis and Pfizer’s Viagra, both billion dollar sellers in the U.S., go off patent this year. So, presumably, the obnoxious quasi-seductive ads will decline as well. 

Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2012/01/church-of-unintended-consequences.html

The Church of Unintended Consequences steeleydock.blogspot.com A few years ago there was an outburst of outrage over animal skins and furs being used by people, this in a society that allows boxing, foot...

In 1881 Czar Alexander II, the ruler of Russia since 1855, was killed in the streets of St. Petersburg by a bomb thrown by a member of the revolutionary “People’s Will” group.  He had just signed a proclamation–the so-called Loris-Melikov constitution–that would have created two legislative commissions made up of indirectly elected representatives. He was succeeded by his 36-year-old son, Alexander III, who rejected the Loris-Melikov constitution.


Through all the months of the last 100 years, the major gains in the stock market occurred in 6% of the months. The vast majority of gains occurred in 4% of the companies.
 

Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by deficits in social and language communication, as well as repetitive behaviors and restricted interests. Children and adults with autism spectrum disorder have a wide range of abilities. Some people cannot speak at all and many have delayed or limited verbal communication. Some are greatly impaired in their cognitive thinking while others are extremely gifted. A good definition from M. Daniele Fallin Director, Wendy Klag Center for Autism and Developmental Disabilities


AAAAaaaaaaannnnnnddddddd.......a magazine cover:

The Enrichment

The Problem with The Great Enrichment

Suppose we develop a drug in some area-- heart disease, hypertension, skin disease--that is beneficial to everyone who takes it. Some are transformed in their health, while some are only improved.
However, because the effects--while uniformly beneficial to all--are distributed unevenly, we feel we must destroy the drug and make it unavailable to anyone.
That is the general logic of the Left as they look at capitalism.

Reverie

It is truly miraculous that the following proposition continues to be held as proven: Anything that an individual steals from the whole is a general profit. Perpetual motion, the philosopher’s stone, or the squaring of the circle have fallen into oblivion, but the theory of Advancement through theft is still in fashion.--Bastiat

Herodotus describes a king who locked a newborn in a cave with no human voice so he could hear the baby's first word and thus learn the first language of the world. The Middle Ages saw quasi-theological, quasi-mystical attempts to recover the perfect, prelapsarian language of Adam. The Enlightenment brought a new focus on philosophy and science and the concomitant desire for a language that would express the new scientific truths clearly and perfectly.
Is it a Platonic idea that language has a perfect form?


Omar Khayyam is famous in the West for his poems but is better known in the East--in academic circles--as a mathematician. He was also eyed unfavorably because of his distinctly open-minded religious notions. For example:

Oh, Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make,
And who with Eden didst devise the Snake;
For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man
Is blacken'd, Man's Forgiveness give -- and take!

(From The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam)
Thomas Hardy so liked the atheistic spirit of this quatrain that he had it read to him on his death-bed.

Dental work debt is the new school debt.

A lot of people who think they love freedom balk at gender crossing. Conservatives who read my writing on the glories of free enterprise are often on board—even enthusiastic about reading such sentiments from a woman—right up until the moment that they learn my backstory. --McCloskey

"Extraction processes would also need to be extensive, a form of strip-mining, and this raises more ethically-focused concerns about planetary protection. Would it be ethically defensible to transfer environmentally damaging practices from the Earth to the Moon?" This is from an article on the economics of space exploration. We have an excess of minds and time if we, in this complicated and dangerous world, can worry about the ethics of strip-mining the moon.

President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, secretly worked for a Russian billionaire to advance the interests of Russian President Vladimir Putin a decade ago and proposed an ambitious political strategy to undermine anti-Russian opposition across former Soviet republics, The Associated Press has learned.
That, of course, is unimportant as we emphasize borders and nations less and less now, right?

At the end of the 19th Century there was an interest in the creation of common languages, as if a human brotherhood could be stimulated by the same language, a wish upset by the first war. Creators of International Auxiliary Languages (IALs) used elements of existing natural languages to largely utilitarian effect: these languages were practical and easy to learn. Ludwik Zamenhof’s Esperanto, borrowing mostly from Romance languages, is perhaps the best known. But nearly 150 other such IAL projects were devised during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Volapük, Ido and Novial.

In Japan, there is a slang term, “moe”, for those who fall in love with fictional computer characters.

So it appears that Trump's accusation of his being wiretapped is untrue--or, at least, mistaken. But, according to Buchannan,  "while the FBI is still searching for a Trump connection, real crimes have been unearthed – committed by anti-Trump bureaucrats colluding with mainstream media – to damage Trump’s presidency.

There is hard evidence of collusion between the intel community and the New York Times and the Washington Post, both beneficiaries of illegal leaks – felonies punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
While the howls have been endless that Trump accused Obama of a “felony,” the one provable felony here was the leak of a transcript of an intercepted conversation between Gen. Michael Flynn and the Russian ambassador.
That leak ended Flynn’s career as national security adviser. And Director Comey would neither confirm nor deny that President Obama was aware of the existence of the Flynn transcript."
Oh, well.

Comey's testimony, from Yahoo: ....the intelligence community’s assessment that Russia’s hatred of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton was so intense, Moscow would do anything it could to help her opponent. Clinton sometimes butted heads with the Kremlin in her role as secretary of state. When Trump started to lag in the polls and his chances of victory narrowed, the Kremlin shifted its focus to doing as much damage to Clinton’s campaign as possible, Comey said.  

“When Mr. Trump became the nominee, there was some sense that, ‘It’d be great if he could win, it’d be great if we could help him, but we need to hurt her no matter what.’ And it shifted to, ‘He has no chance, so let’s just focus on undermining her.’ That was the judgment of the intelligence community.”

Hilary just makes everyone so mad.

So the Rube-publicans could not pass a bill in a legislative chamber they controlled. The Democrats and the press seem elated. But how is not fixing the ACA, which is beginning to fall apart, a good thing? This is like the draft horses hoping the trace-horse fails.
Though 75 per cent of Jews living in France before the war survived, only 2.5 per cent of those deported came home.

The title of the first and most famous volume of Maya Angelou's autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, came from a Paul Laurence Dunbar poem:

I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,
When he beats his bars and he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings,
I know why the caged bird sings!

Two days before an outspoken critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin was shot dead in broad daylight in Kiev Thursday, a lawyer for the family of a slain Russian whistleblower was injured in a mysterious fall from his fourth-story apartment near Moscow.

 

In 1927 a group with  Ludwig von Mises set up an institute to explore business cycles. They concluded that these cycles were caused by central banks setting interest rates too low — encouraging excessive borrowing, investment and spending. But low rates also discouraged saving, and when funds dried up, investments had to be abandoned and people were thrown out of work. Sound familiar?

Descartes’ wrote a treatise titled Le Monde in which he would explain “all the phenomena of nature” and which also included a heliocentric account of the cosmos. When the Church attacked Galileo, rather than incur the wrath of the Church, Descartes decided not to publish The World after all.

Happiness economics is based on the idea that once you achieve a certain wealth level, more wealth makes you no better off. But wealth isn’t just about more and better stuff.  Economic growth is not an isolated, individual thing except in the restricted economic world we have escaped in the last three hundred years. Wealth is organic; it infiltrates its neighbors and raises all levels. 

 

Stendhal served twice in Napoleon's army, the second on the Emperor's failed mission to Russia. Not until Bonaparte fell from power did Stendhal begin his literary career. His final novel, The Charterhouse of Parma, now on many 'Top 100' lists, was just five months in the making.

AAAAaaaaannnnnnddddddd.......a graph:

Title IX

I recently met a guy who was the Title IX department head at a university. I was interested and, as we talked, I learned that the Title IX I remembered that addressed gender discrimination in resource allocation--especially in sports--had changed. The large majority of his complaints were of sexual misconduct complaints. Why? In 2011, the Department of Education expanded the Title IX mandate to include policing “sexual misconduct."

 

According to the NYT, "Armed with Title IX and a new, academically fashionable definition of “consent” — which insists that sex is never truly consensual between adults unless they both have equal power — women can now retroactively declare they never truly agreed to specific sexual acts, even whole relationships." And in a book review of Laura Kipnis' book, Unwanted Advances on the subject comes this scary line: "But the most powerful and provocative part of her book, its final chapter, suggests that today’s young college women really do suffer from a crisis of agency. The pressure to drink themselves senseless and then hook up is so pervasive that they seem to have trouble saying no."

Remember, "sex is never truly consensual between adults unless they both have equal power." And, while "'No' means 'no,'" 'Yes' may not mean 'yes.'