The Dish

Another strange overlap of agreement:

"As to immoral practice, it is hard to imagine anything more grotesque than the mutilation of infant genitalia. Nor is it easy to imagine anything more incompatible with the argument from design. We must assume that a designer god would pay especial attention to the reproductive organs of his creatures, which are so essential for the continuation of the species. But religious ritual since the dawn of time has insisted on snatching children from the cradle and taking stones or knives to their pudenda."

It’s from "God Is Not Great." He goes on about mutilating willies for a few pages, my reader tells me. Barbarism is the right word for it.

I’m sorry to burst Kevin Drum’s bubble, but the pharmaceutical companies in Europe have been in difficulties for quite a while now, under the burden of the socialism he favors for the U.S. healthcare industry. According to the industry’s own website, as long ago as 1994, the European Commission Report on Europe’s ailing drug industry said the following:

"Europe as a whole is lagging behind in its ability to generate, organise, and sustain innovation processes that are increasingly expensive and organisationally complex". The report underlines that the pharmaceutical market in Europe has been negatively affected by significant, excessive and uncoordinated government intervention that stifles competition and discourages innovation. This also creates significant inequity among European patients’ rights to access of medicines.

Socialism fails. Always has. Always will. And the toll in Europe in so many areas is clear. Here’s what socialized medical systems have done to European pharmaceutical research:

# For over 100 years, Europe has been a powerhouse of pharmaceutical progress and innovation. Over the last decade, however, Europe has gradually lost its leadership in the pharmaceutical sector, with a steady transfer of its R&D to the US – where policies and market conditions are more favourable to pharmaceutical innovation.
# Key benchmarking indicators show that between 1990 and 2002, R&D investment in United States rose more than fivefold, while in Europe it only grew 2.5 times.
# In 1990, major European research-based companies spent 73% of their worldwide R&D expenditure on the EU territory. In 1999, they spent only 59% on the EU territory. The USA was the main beneficiary of this transfer of R&D activity.

America is the last refuge for pharmaceutical innovation. And the left wants to kill that off. There’s more evidence of what socialism does to healthcare R&D in Europe:

# The latest data on new molecular entities (period 2001-2005) show the predominance of the US which has now become the leading inventor of new molecules in the world (61 against 51 for Europe)
# The top 20 companies worldwide shows the leadership of US companies. In 2005, nine (9) of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies in the world are of American origin (against 8 for Europe).
# US companies significantly increased their share in the world’s top selling medicines. On the top 30 worldwide products in 2005, 21 originate from the US against 8 from Europe.
# US companies are more successful in disseminating their new medicines at international level: 70% of the sales of new medicines launched on the world markets during the period 1998-2002 were made in the US, compared to only 18 % in Europe.
# Whereas the European pharmaceutical market was still the world’s largest market in 1990 (representing 37.8% of the world market), it now only represents 30% of the world market (compared to 47 % for the North American market).

This is what the left wants to do to pharmaceutical research in the US as well. There’s a case for it: the usual leftist case for nominal equality over quality and progress. They’re not being honest about it. They need to be.

A reader raises an interesting question on healthcare:

I tend to agree that we should let the market drive innovation through rewarding solid research and groundbreaking results with profits that can feed further developments. What worries me is that when money is your motivator, what sort of research has a greater chance of being funded: a treatment, or a cure?

There isn’t much to be gained, from a financial perspective, from a cure. Treatment, however, is a goldmine. Improving the quality of life for the sick is certainly a noble goal, but I fear that when money is the sole motivator then we will have executives deciding between pursuing a cure and pursuing treatment for symptoms – and choosing the latter every time.

Not that I’m suggesting socialized medicine would help – at least, not on its own. If the profit for drug research is slashed by government caps on prices, then it becomes a question of who picks up the financial slack and enables continued innovation?

If the government picks up this slack, perhaps they could have some say in the matter, drive decisions toward cures instead of treatments when possible. The government could save some cost when a cure replaces a treatment, so the motivation would be there. But this is all pure speculation on my part, so I’m turning to you and your readers to find out if current socialized systems see any such effects?

No idea. But I’m sure other readers can help. With HIV, the problem is the extreme elusiveness of a mutating retrovirus that makes a vaccine-cure close to impossible. The good side of treatments, moreover, is that they do reduce your viral load in most cases to a negligible level. That makes you much less infectious, which helps restrain the epidemic. And so a treatment becomes a prophylaxis.

A conservative makes the case. Conservatives should be more outraged by his assault on the law, the constitution and individual liberty. He’s also clearly a war criminal – a knowing enforcer of torture and abuse of military detainees. We once executed Nazis for the same techniques as Cheney has approved and enforced. I don’t want to see him impeached. I want to see him prosecuted under American and international law as a criminal.

Mark Krikorian rhapsodizes about the defeat of comprehensive immigration reform:

Today’s defeat of the Senate amnesty bill was more than a run-of-the-mill legislative victory, representing as it did a self-organizing public’s defeat of combined force of Big Business, (some of) Big Labor, Big Media, Big Religion, Big Philanthropy, Big Academia, and Big Government. So I looked at what else has happened on June 28 — the closest parallel would appear to be the Battle of Monmouth in 1778, of the only two times when Gen. Washington managed to fight British regulars to a draw in a conventional battle. Because that’s all this is — a draw, because the open-borders folks aren’t going to give up. It’s just that they went from their usual tactics of piecemeal, behind-the-scenes victories, buried in appropriations bills and little-known courtrooms and bureaucratic offices, and tried to get the whole enchilada — trying to emulate something else that happened on June 28, the Turks’ defeat of the Serbs at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, leading to Ottoman conquest of all southeastern Europe.

No, you can’t make this shit up.

I’m still a skeptic, but I’m a better-informed skeptic after reading this.

Among the many sane, pragmatic and serious moves the defense secretary has been making – he’s on the side of the grown-ups on torture, for example – this one hasn’t gotten much attention. It’s a clear sign of relaxation on the gay issue, and an acknowledgment for the first time of the great job so many gay servicemembers do and have always done. The more you learn about Gates, the better he looks. He may be critical to rescuing us from the Iraq sinkhole in the coming year.

Coulter appears to be cracking up, if this hysterical rant on MSNBC this morning is any guide. Will Mickey come to her aid? Has she called him yet?

The mind drifts …

Some Catholic theologians are proposing a re-think:

Lawler and Risch say their proposal reflects Catholic tradition. They noted that in the 13th and 14th centuries couples were often first betrothed — a mutual consent to spend the rest of their lives together — before they were actually married. "The first sexual intercourse between the spouses usually followed the betrothal — a fact of the Catholic tradition that has been obscured by the now-taken-for-granted sequence of wedding, marriage, sexual intercourse," Lawler and Risch wrote.

They called for a modern-day betrothal, marked by a public ceremony in which the man and woman agree to marry in the future. Then the couple could live together and have sexual relations if they chose. Then the couple would marry. This process would bring the Catholic Church more in line with today’s social norms, Lawler and Risch wrote, saying about 5 million unmarried couples already live together in the United States.

The usual objection about the "intrinsic evil of fornication" followed. But it makes a lot of sense to me.