The Binary Circumstance

From 60 Minutes:

[President George W.] Bush created the program in 2004 with the bi-partisan backing of Congress; last year, Congress raised the funding to about $7 billion a year for the next five years.

Dr. Mugyenyi has called this the greatest aid effort in modern times. “There has never been a rescue mission, a mission of mercy of this magnitude that has produced such magnanimous results,” he explained.

He told us Africans now see America differently.

Here in the United States where mostly gay men fought for HIV/AIDS funding in the 80′s and taxpayers paid for the research to develop the drugs and many HIV patients were used as guinea pigs to test them, many people can’t afford to get medications to fight HIV. Others have access to them but pay thousands of dollars a year for the treatments.

Things are better in Uganda.

But today generic drugs have made AIDS pills much cheaper: treating one patient for a year used to cost more than $7,000; now, it’s less than $300. As HIV destroys a person’s immune system leading to AIDS, patients need powerful pills, antiretrovirals they’re called, or miracle pills.

Where are the AIDS patients in the U.S. being treated for $300/year?

What’s wrong with this picture?

The Democrats are determined to “reform” health care whether you want it or not and have just released the specifics of the bill they hope to ram through Congress this weekend without any Republican support.

I stated on more than one occasion that the only way to reform health care is to make it a free market. Over time, this will produce results similar to what has happened in telephones and computers over the last 30 years where market forces have caused quality and innovation to soar while prices have plunged.

I’m not going to say more on that or discuss how forcing businesses to provide health insurance could be a big job killer when unemployment is already very high.

I just wanted to point out what nobody else is pointing out about the whole process now taking place in Congress. Millions of Americans are about to be enslaved to those who want to force a particular view of health care on them. How can a health care system that forces the will of some people on others be considered good for the health of those who don’t want it? Is battering good for the person who is being battered in a relationship? Of course not. So why is it healthy when it’s done politically?

While I admire the quality of relentless determination, it would be nice if it was focused on increasing individual liberty rather than further restricting it. This bill forces individuals to subsidize the insurance industry, doctors, hospitals, drug companies, health care unions and many other related industries. If you don’t subsidize them by buying mandatory insurance, you have to pay a fine.

This story sounds like it’s out of the Dark Ages. Once science gets married to religion or politics, it ceases to exist. This is yet another reason why I don’t want the government messing around in my health care, although it’s obviously already too late to stop that. They’ve been doing it for decades.

This article makes you wonder how many other possible cures they’ve suppressed.

From Alternet.org:

Most Americans don’t know anything about the Madrid discovery. Virtually no major U.S. newspapers carried the story, which ran only once on the AP and UPI news wires, on Feb. 29, 2000.

The ominous part is that this isn’t the first time scientists have discovered that THC shrinks tumors. In 1974 researchers at the Medical College of Virginia, who had been funded by the National Institute of Health to find evidence that marijuana damages the immune system, found instead that THC slowed the growth of three kinds of cancer in mice — lung and breast cancer, and a virus-induced leukemia.

The DEA quickly shut down the Virginia study and all further cannabis/tumor research, according to Jack Herer, who reports on the events in his book, “The Emperor Wears No Clothes.” In 1976 President Gerald Ford put an end to all public cannabis research and granted exclusive research rights to major pharmaceutical companies, who set out — unsuccessfully — to develop synthetic forms of THC that would deliver all the medical benefits without the “high.”

60 Minutes did a story tonight on the California water shortage and their decaying levee system. It is well worth watching and you can watch it here.

Watch CBS News Videos Online

I think it’s interesting that although a huge increase in the state’s population is mentioned, nobody explicitly says in the story that relentless population growth is the root of the problem. California and the American southwest have been grabbing water from surrounding areas for decades and all that has done is promote more growth. People forget that most of California is a desert. It’s supposed to be dry. That’s what makes a desert a desert.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is called “the green governor,” thinks that spending $40 billion to build more dams, shore up the levees and move more water around is the solution. That sounds like a short-term solution to the current lack of jobs but isn’t it just making the same mistake they’ve made in the past? It can only lead to more growth which will ultimately lead to the need for more water.

On the subject of water wars and shortages, I also recommend Blue Gold: World Water Wars