News: Ruthless capitalism, circular firing squad update, etc.

From the Business as Usual Files:

Brass knuckles capitalism poisons drug prices

The AP writes about a combination drug that just got FDA approval. The product is used to treat Lou Gehrig’s disease or ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis). ALS is an incurable neurodegenerative disease that’s usually fatal within five years. Its price is beyond shamelessly exorbitant:

In September, Relyvrio became only the third drug approved in the U.S. for ALS, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, an incurable neurodegenerative disease that is usually fatal within five years. But patients and physicians who celebrated Relyvrio’s approval several months ago are now contending with the obstacles posed by the U.S. health care system.

Patients with insurance coverage say the $158,000 per year price tag set by drugmaker Amylyx Pharmaceutical is fueling insurance delays or denials, and sometimes exorbitant out-of-pocket expenses.

Even when Relyvrio is covered, some patients see themselves shouldering co-payments between $1,000 and $4,000 per month.  

Some patients who are already taking a do-it-yourself approach to the treatment see little reason to change.

A professional cost-benefit analysis indicates that Relyvrio should cost between $9,100 and $30,700 per year. The drug showed some effectiveness in slowing the progression of ALS for a few months compared to untreated control patients. The data on efficacy appear to be weak. The company is conducting a larger study to answer lingering questions about its effectiveness, including whether it really extends survival.

The approved drug is a combination of one known pharmaceutical drug and one over the counter nutritional supplement. The drug, sodium phenylbutyrate, can be bought separately for $550/month ($6,600/year) and the supplement, taurursodiol, costs about $30/month ($360/year) from online sources. Some ALS patients are considering this option instead of paying the exorbitant company price.

sodium phenylbutyrate - not a complex molecule

(it’s relatively expensive because it is an approved drug, and supplies,

prices and availability are controlled by suppliers and drug laws)

taurosodiol (tauroursodeoxycholic Acid) - a naturally-occurring bile acid

used to treat some liver and bile disorders (this molecule is low cost to buy)

Going the do-it-yourself approach (separately buying the two ingredients) costs about $7,000/year compared to the $158,000/year the company charges. As usual, the company vigorously argues that the high cost is needed to recover its R&D costs. The cost-benefit analysis indicates that is a typical, shameless drug company lie. That’s cruel, brass knuckles capitalism at work.

From the Pulling Heads out of Butts Files:

Democrats are waking up to their circular firing squads 

A really interesting NYT opinion piece by Michelle Goldberg suggests that at least some elite Democrats are starting to wake up to the party’s tendency to shoot itself. Goldberg opines:

It’s no secret that many left-wing activist groups and nonprofits, roiled by the reckonings over sexual harassment and racial justice of the past few years, have become internally dysfunctional.

In June the Intercept’s Ryan Grim wrote about the toll that staff revolts and ideologically inflected psychodramas were taking on the work: .... Privately, I’ve heard countless people on the professional left — especially those over, say, 35 — bemoan the irrational demands and manipulative dogmatism of some younger colleagues.

That’s why the decision by Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the progressive Working Families Party, to speak out about the left’s self-sabotaging impulse is so significant. .... he has a sharp critique of the way some on the left deploy identity as a trump card. “Identity and position are misused to create a doom loop that can lead to unnecessary ruptures of our political vehicles and the shuttering of vital movement spaces,” he wrote last month in a 6,000-word examination of the fallacies and rhetorical traps plaguing activist culture.

Among many progressive leaders it’s been received eagerly and gratefully. It “helped to put language to tensions and trends facing our movement organizations,” Christopher Torres, an executive director of the Leadership for Democracy and Social Justice institute, said at a Tuesday webinar devoted to the article. 

All the problems Mitchell elucidates have been endemic to the left for a long time. Destructive left-wing purity spirals are at least as old as the French Revolution. .... It’s not surprising that such counterproductive tendencies became particularly acute during the pandemic, when people were terrified, isolated and, crucially, very online. There’s a reason Grim’s article was titled “Elephant in the Zoom.”

“On balance, I think social media has been bad for democracy,” Mitchell told me. .... These platforms can give power to the powerless, but they also bestow it on the most disruptive and self-interested people in any group, those likely to take their complaints to Twitter rather than to their supervisors or colleagues. The gamification of discourse through likes and retweets, he said, “flies in the face of building solidarity, of being serious about difference, of engaging in meaningful debate and struggle around complex ideas.”

Maybe some elite Democrats are waking up. If so, one of the very first things they ought to see is their own catastrophic failure to deal with immigration. The fascist Republican Party relies on heavily demagoguing immigration. The issue, especially when turbocharged by relentless demagoguery, resonates with lots of Americans. That includes more than a few independents and legal immigrants.

For context: From what I can tell, heavy demagoguery behind every major authoritarian movement in modern democracies plays heavily on illegal immigration and national ethnic identity. In majority White democracies, a White Replacement Theory (myth)[1] is typically emphasized.

From the Immigration Policy is Messed Up Files:

Chaos in El Paso

The Hill writes:

The mayor of El Paso, Texas, declared a state of emergency on Saturday, as migrants continued to pour into the southern border town in anticipation of the end of Title 42.

Migrants have converged on El Paso in recent days, overwhelming shelters and forcing some to sleep on the streets amid dropping temperatures. With more asylum seekers expected, El Paso Mayor Oscar Leeser said the city felt it was time to make the emergency declaration.

“I really believe that today our asylum seekers are not safe as we have hundreds and hundreds on the streets,” Leeser said at a press conference on Saturday. “That’s not the way we want to treat people.”

“We want to make sure that people are treated with dignity and being out in 20, 25-degree weather is not want we want to see,” he added.

We all know what the fascist Republican Party propaganda Leviathan will make of news like this. Right? Right. 

CBS 8 in San Diego reports: 

The number of migrants trying to cross into the United States is climbing daily, with Title 42 set to expire in less than a week. Title 42 allows the government to turn away migrants at the border with the goal of protecting the public from the pandemic. In Texas, more than 2,000 migrants are arriving daily. Closer to San Diego, local activists tell CBS 8 they too are seeing more migrants. Shelters in both Tijuana and the El Paso region are full. “There isn't a lot of infrastructure. They're sleeping in cold freezing weather,” said Pedro Rios, director of American Friends Service Committee.

Title 42 expires next Wednesday.

Immigrants rushing the US-Mexico 

border to cross into the US

Footnote:

1. White Replacement Theory (Wikipedia): The Great Replacement, also known as replacement theory or great replacement theory, is a white nationalist far-right conspiracy theory disseminated by French author Renaud Camus. The original theory states that, with the complicity or cooperation of "replacist" elites, the ethnic French and white European populations at large are being demographically and culturally replaced with non-white peoples—especially from Muslim-majority countries—through mass migration, demographic growth and a drop in the birth rate of white Europeans. Since then, similar claims have been advanced in other national contexts, notably in the United States. Mainstream scholars have dismissed these claims as rooted in a misunderstanding of demographic statistics and premised upon an unscientific, racist worldview.

News bits: Halting species extinction, etc.

Global meeting to halt species extinctions:

Republicans oppose the effort

As usual, the corrupt, pro-pollution, anti-species, fascist Republican Party is acting in usual form as a gigantic albatross on planet Earth. The NYT writes:

Crucial Talks on Preserving Nature Are on Now.

Negotiators from around the world are meeting in Canada in an effort to halt, and reverse, staggering declines in wildlife.

There’s another hugely important environmental summit happening right now in Canada. It’s also about a global crisis that threatens life on earth, but one that’s gotten far less attention: Rampant, human-induced biodiversity loss. That means not only species extinctions, but also staggering declines in the variety of life on the planet.

The meeting is known as COP15, because it’s the 15th conference of the parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity. Ultimately, its goal is a new 10-year agreement that would enable the world to halt and reverse biodiversity loss.

Managing lands and oceans more sustainably. Restoring degraded areas. Creating new protected areas while recognizing the rights of Indigenous people. Helping depleted species recover. Ensuring that the harvest and trade of wild species is sustainable, safe and legal.

The United States plays an odd role. Republicans have refused to ratify the Convention on Biological Diversity, the global pact that provides for the meeting, so the United States is one of only two countries that are not a party to the talks. (The other is the Holy See.)

The Republican Party: 

pro-corruption

pro-pollution

pro-species extinction

pro-White Christian Sharia law

pro-wealthy White Christian male Taliban

pro-gun violence 

anti-democracy 

anti-abortion

anti-inconvenient fact, truth and science

anti-civil liberties

anti-secularism and secular law

bigoted

intolerant

fascist

mendacious

cynical

cruel

Anti-vaxx crackpottery spreads

and becomes mainstream

The NYT writes:

A third of parents now feel they should be the ones to decide whether to get their children immunized against measles, mumps and other childhood diseases.

For generations of most American families, getting children vaccinated was just something to check off on the list of back-to-school chores. But after the ferocious battles over Covid shots of the past two years, simmering resistance to general school vaccine mandates has grown significantly. Now, 35 percent of parents oppose requirements that children receive routine immunizations in order to attend school, according to a new survey released Friday by the Kaiser Family Foundation.  

Forty-four percent of adults who either identify as Republicans or lean that way said in the latest survey that parents should have the right to opt out of school vaccine mandates, up from 20 percent in a prepandemic poll conducted in 2019 by the Pew Research Center. In contrast, 88 percent of adults who identify as or lean Democratic endorsed childhood vaccine requirements, a slight increase from 86 percent in 2019.

This shows, yet again, the stunning power of demagoguery, crackpottery, lies, slanders and other forms of dark free speech on the internet. It also shows the basis in lies and crackpottery that underpins the fascist Republican Party. Dark free speech makes tens of millions of adult Americans think and act stupidly and sometimes self-destructively. Even effective public health measures are under irrational attack. This poison effort is driven by morally rotted, lying, hateful cranks endlessly spewing free speech lies and crackpottery. Why morally rotted? Because:

The social incentives to deceit are at present very powerful; the controls often weak. Many individuals feel caught up in practices they cannot change. It would be wishful thinking, therefore, to expect individuals to bring about major changes in the collective practices of deceit by themselves. Public and private institutions, with their enormous power to affect personal choice, must help alter the existing pressures and incentives. ..... Trust and integrity are precious resources, easily squandered, hard to regain. They can thrive only on a foundation of respect for veracity.

“[Johnson repeatedly told the American people] ‘the first responsibility, the only real issue in this campaign, the only thing you ought to be concerned about at all, is: Who can best keep the peace?’ The stratagem succeeded; the election was won; the war escalated. .... President Johnson thus denied the electorate of any chance to give or refuse consent to the escalation of the war in Vietnam. Believing they had voted for the candidate of peace, American citizens were, within months, deeply embroiled in one of the cruelest wars in their history. Deception of this kind strikes at the very essence of democratic government.” 

When people are deceived, they sometimes act on the basis of lies and false information. Sometimes those actions kill themselves, their own children or others who are innocent. If that’s not moral rot, what is it?

From the Capitalist Profit Motive and Public Health Don’t Mix files:

Government has to step in when there’s not enough profit

The NYT writes:

Recent shortages of amoxicillin, an effective antibiotic that pediatricians have long relied upon to treat strep throat and ear infections in children, have put a spotlight on an urgent global threat: the world’s shrinking arsenal of potent antibiotics and the lack of incentives to develop them.

The broken marketplace for new antimicrobial drugs has stirred debate over a bill, languishing in Congress, that would dramatically reconfigure the way antibiotics are discovered and sold in the United States.

The $6 billion measure, the Pasteur Act, would upend the conventional model that ties antibiotic profits to sales volume by creating a subscription-like system that would provide pharmaceutical companies an upfront payment in exchange for unlimited access to a drug once it is approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

By separating profits from sales volume, supporters of the bill hope that prescribers will save new drugs for patients whose infections are resistant to existing medications. Limiting their use, experts say, can help extend the life of a new antibiotic before evolutionary pressure creates a “superbug” all but impervious to available antimicrobials.

Surprisingly, even shockingly, most congressional Republicans do not oppose this bill. After all, it's evil socialism or communism or whatever they BS usually call any government action. Instead, resistance to this bill is coming from critics of big pharma who argue that (i) it is a taxpayer give-away, and (ii) in their opinion it will not work in slowing the evolution of resistance of pathogenic bacteria to new antibiotics.  

What this does show is that capitalism doesn’t do something if there is not enough profit in it. Even if people die. Even if millions of people die. It’s just business, not personal. And that’s the problem with business.

Sad science: A review of species nearing extinction

A NYT article reviews the status of threatened species extinctions. Overpopulation and climate change are killing species off. The NYT article focuses on mostly habitat loss in view of the recent milestone of 8 billion humans on the planet. The NYT writes:

WILDLIFE IS DISAPPEARING around the world, in the oceans and on land. The main cause on land is perhaps the most straightforward: Humans are taking over too much of the planet, erasing what was there before. Climate change and other pressures make survival harder.

The future of many species hangs in the balance. Meet some of the animals most affected as humans convert more and more land:

At least 33% habitat loss since 2001:

Those show just some of the animals nearing extinction due to overpopulation.

It is sad that America under staunch radical right Republican anti-population control and pro-pollution zealotry has forfeited all of its global moral authority in urging other nations to try to deal with these very real problems. It is not Democrats who oppose population control and efforts to deal with climate change. For the most part, it is the mendacious, fascist Republican Party and many of its rank and file voters who now openly support overpopulation and pollution.

Q: Is overpopulation, climate change and attendant species extinctions at least partly a matter of morality, or do morals have absolutely nothing to do with overpopulation, climate change and/or species extinctions? 

Science 'n news bits: Religion & morality, etc.

The influence of religious moral beliefs on 

adolescents’ mental stability

A 2007 article in Psychriatria Danubina concludes:

A higher index of religious moral beliefs in adolescents enables better control of impulses, providing better mental health stability. It enables neurotic conflicts typical for adolescence to be more easily overcome. It also causes healthier reactions to external stimuli. A higher index of religious moral beliefs of young people provides a healthier and more efficient mechanism of anger control and aggression control. It enables transformation of that psychical energy into neutral energy which supports the growth and development of personality, which is expressed through socially acceptable behavior. In this way, it helps growth, development and socialization of the personality, leading to the improvement in mental health. .... For sample selection the measuring instruments were used to exclude any pathological/abnormal social, religious and moral profile of subjects

The data was obtained from people normal religion and moral teaching. Pathological or abnormal religious zealotry like what Christian nationalism teaches was excluded. Even normal religious teaching and practice instills distrust of non-believers because humans naturally tend to distrust or dislike people who are different in some way that is perceived as significant. This 2012 review article comments:

In a 2007 Gallup poll, most Americans said that they would not vote for an otherwise qualified atheist to be president—they were more willing to vote for a Mormon, a Jew, or a homosexual. Another study found that people ranked atheists lower than Muslims, recent immigrants, and homosexuals in “sharing their vision of American society” and were least willing to allow their children to marry them.

That was 2007. A 2019 poll indicates that the situation changed and about 66% of adult Americans believe that religious and non-religious people are about equally trustworthy. Apparently, opinion has shifted quite a bit in the US in recent years. Interestingly, about 65% of atheists believe trust is about equal between the two groups. I bet that this opinion shift is what scares Christian nationalists into their zealotry, hysteria and hate about secularism.

Gun battles & the LGBQT community

This one is a head scratcher. NPR reports:

Oregon's LGBQT community worries that 

a new law will keep them from obtaining guns

Some of Oregon's trans and queer gun supporters are worried that a new state law will prevent them from buying firearms.

The law, Measure 114, grants county sheriffs and police chiefs discretion to determine who qualifies to purchase a firearm under a new permit-to-purchase program.

But Measure 114 lacks criteria clearly defining what disqualifies applicants, details on what makes someone a threat and what data can be used by law enforcement in making that decision. That's a problem for activists who have critiqued law enforcement, particularly in the racial justice protests that took place over the past two years.

“I just feel like if I was to go online and say like the police are terrorists or something ... [the police] would be like, ‘Well, you seem like you might not be fit for this community to be armed,’ ” says Mia Rose, a trans person of color and former licensed firearms dealer. “If they were to get that information that you got snatched up off the street [arrested during the Portland protests prompted by the killing of George Floyd in 2020], I would assume that the law would say they could deny your purchase, or deny your right to have a permit.”

 

Mia Rose with her custom-made

AR-15 assault rifle

Since most of law enforcement is more conservative than most of America, the concern that Ms. Rose articulates might be spot on. I smell a lawsuit coming.

From the money really does influence people files

ProPublica writes about how Leonard Leo tries and succeeds in influencing the Supreme Court:

Conservative Activist Poured Millions Into Groups Seeking to 

Influence Supreme Court on Elections and Discrimination

Newly obtained records show how Leonard Leo, an architect of the right-wing takeover of the courts, has been funding groups pushing to change elections and anti-discrimination laws.

 

The documents detail how Leo, who helped build the Supreme Court’s conservative majority as an adviser to President Donald Trump, has used a sprawling network of opaque nonprofits to fund groups advocating for ending affirmative action, rolling back anti-discrimination protections and allowing state legislatures unreviewable oversight of federal elections.

The money flowed mostly through so-called dark money groups, which don’t have to disclose their donors. They are required to reveal the recipients of their spending in their annual tax returns, which are released to the public, but often those are also dark money groups or other entities that have minimal disclosure rules.

The Supreme Court case involving a Colorado-based website designer who refuses to work for same-sex couples provides a window into Leo’s strategy.

At least six groups funded by Leo’s network have filed briefs supporting the suit, which seeks to overturn Colorado’s anti-discrimination law. The Ethics and Public Policy Center, which records show received $1.9 million from Leo’s network, submitted a brief supporting the web designer. So did Concerned Women for America, which has received at least $565,000 over the past two years from the Leo network, as well as an organization called the Becket Fund, which got $550,000 from a Leo group.  

Another case that Leo groups have sought to influence is Moore v. Harper, which could have sweeping implications for American democracy. The question posed in the case is whether the Constitution affords state legislatures the power to create rules for federal elections without state court oversight or intervention.

It is personally annoying when professional reporting keeps calling people like Leo conservative. By now it is clear that these radical right elites are not conservative like the old GOP used to be before Christian zealots and brass knuckles capitalists finally completed their takeover in 2008-2009. That was when the radical right fascists routed the last of the old GOP establishment. Those radicals turned the party into an enraged, authoritarian monster. It was and still is bitterly opposed to democracy, inconvenient truth, secularism, the rule of law, civil liberties and regulation, i.e., defense of the public interest.

The Supreme Court can howl at the top of its lungs that all the money sloshing around in the system does not corrupt or unduly influence it, including no influence on selection of federal judges or their decision-making. That is 100% baloney. It’s a lie, and an insulting one at that.

News bits: Abortion wars in Texas, etc.

Fundamentalist Christian zealots 

checking sewage for abortion medication

Antiabortion zealots are continuing to refine ways to track down and report evidence of abortions in any way their zealot minds and hearts can come up with. Like with the presence of COVID, sewage can be tested for the presence of abortion pills being taken. That sounds nutty, but rabid antiabortionists are zealots. Nutty is not a concern. The WaPo writes:

The largest anitabortion organization in Texas has created a team of advocates assigned to investigate citizens who might be distributing abortion pills illegally.

Students for Life of America, a leading national antiabortion group, is making plans to systematically test the water Erin Brockovich-style in several large U.S. cities, searching for contaminants they say result from medication abortion.

And Republican lawmakers in Texas are preparing to introduce legislation that would require internet providers to block abortion pill websites in the same way they can censor child pornography.

Nearly six months since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, triggering abortion bans in more than a dozen states, many antiabortion advocates fear that the growing availability of illegal abortion pills has undercut their landmark victory. Now they are grasping for new ways to crack down on those breaking the law.

“Everyone who is trafficking these pills should be in jail for trafficking,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, who has started to speak with Republican governors about the prevalence of illegal abortion pill networks. “It hasn’t happened, but that doesn’t mean it won’t.”

So far, criminal penalties are only for people who facilitate illegal abortions, but not for the pregnant women. The WaPo reports that for much of the South and Midwest, abortion ban violations is a crime punishable by at least several years in prison. Note the phrase at least. The jail time under such laws is mandatory, not optional. That is how theocratic American Christian fundamentalism deals self-righteously but lovingly with sin. This is the face of an emerging vengeful, bigoted American Christian theocracy. 

Abortion is yet another issue that is tearing America apart in the radical right’s vicious, no-compromise culture wars. This war isn’t over by a long shot. We are just in the middle part of the war of secularism and secular law vs. Christian Sharia law and Christian Taliban-imposed theocracy.

From the vicious liars and crackpots files: QAnon puts 

 a new poison ingredient in its toxic stew

After the weak showing of Trump and a decrease in his presence after the midterm elections, QAnon has been somewhat adrift. It is casting about for new poison ingredient to spice up the vicious crackpot stew it likes to serve the public. The WaPo writes:

Twitter owner Elon Musk’s boosting of far-right memes and grievances has injected new energy into the jumbled set of conspiracy theories known as QAnon, a fringe movement that Twitter and other social networks once banned as too extreme.

And on Tuesday, [Musk] tweeted a message with an emoji that many people interpreted as saying “follow the white rabbit,” possibly harking back to “Alice in Wonderland” or “The Matrix.” But many QAnon believers saw the rabbit as a wink to one of their foundational icons, a secret indicator shared in one of QAnon’s earliest online prophesies, known as “drops.”

🐇

The White rabbit emoji?

Musk mocked the suggestion that the tweet could be interpreted negatively but offered no clarification. Among QAnon promoters, though, the message was clear: Musk was speaking to them.

One QAnon-amplifying account on Telegram with 118,000 followers, known for spreading a bogus claim that Russian fighters were targeting “U.S. biolabs” in Ukraine, said the tweet was only his latest flirtation with QAnon ideology. 

“Elon called out Fauci for creating [covid-19], [is] calling out the woke hive mind, is paving the path for 2020 to be nullified and Trump reinstated … and now he’s directly quoting Q,” the account said. “Elon is an Anon,” the account added, using the term QAnon disciples call themselves.

Logan Strain, a conspiracy theory researcher who uses the name Travis View on the podcast “QAnon Anonymous,” said Musk’s “conspiracist dog whistles” have galvanized a group that was fractured after 2020, when major social networks including Twitter started banning QAnon accounts and Trump lost the White House.

“He’s responding to and validating a rogues’ gallery of right-wing conspiracists … [and] going through a checklist of far-right grievances in a way that has certainly energized them,” Strain said. For QAnon believers, “what they view as a major battlefield in the information war just opened up again.”  

Musk has never explicitly supported QAnon, and some of his closest allies say they doubt he believes some of the wilder things he says online. One person in Musk’s inner circle, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss Musk’s views, said he uses the claims merely to win the internet’s most prized currency: attention. “He wants to muck it up,” the person said.

But in QAnon circles, Musk’s ambiguity and plausible deniability have been seen as a strategic way for him to subtly push their dogma into the mainstream. A QAnon-boosting account with 165,000 followers on Truth Social, Trump’s social network, wrote Monday: “At this rate, Elon is on pace to start posting Q drops to millions of normies and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop him.”

It looks like Musk is positioning Twitter to be the main online source for radical right crackpottery, lies, slanders and other anti-democratic, anti-inconvenient truth dark free speech. The trick for him is to do that without alienating too many big advertisers. This is another example of the core capitalist moral, profit talks and everything else walks. 

Among some other good things, everything else includes democracy, inconvenient truth and majority public opinion. For Musk and his now morally and socially rotted Twitter, the goal is to keep those ad revenues flowing. Given that big advertisers are capitalist like Musk, they will try to find a way to continue advertising if there’s insufficient public backlash to force a change. 

It looks like us normies, along with all the crackpotties, are going to get bombarded by a tsunami of Q drops from the hellscape called Twitter. Total bummer.

Now I regret having bought a Tesla. I didn’t see this coming. My mistake.

From the constantly moving goalpost files: Russia is 

running out of bombs to pulverize Ukraine?

For months, reports have been coming out from Western sources saying that Russia is running out of the tens of thousands of tons of bombs needed to pulverize the Ukraine into dust. (lots of  'of' in that sentence, by golly) The Guardian says it again:

Russia faces a “critical shortage” of artillery shells and Moscow’s ability to conduct ground operations in Ukraine is “rapidly diminishing” as a result, Britain’s armed forces chief has said.

Adm Sir Tony Radakin, the chief of defence staff, told an audience at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) thinktank on Wednesday that the Kremlin had only planned for a short period to subjugate Ukraine, and has instead found itself embroiled in a conflict lasting nearly 10 months.

“So, let me tell Putin tonight what his own generals and ministers are probably afraid to say,” the military chief said. “Russia faces a critical shortage of artillery munitions. This means that their ability to conduct successful offensive ground operations is rapidly diminishing.  

The admiral’s statement is the latest in a line of similar assertions by western and Ukrainian leaders and officials, who have been counting the number of missiles fired against known stockpiles – although there has been evidence of Russia making fresh munitions as the war has gone on.

This reporting seems to ring false? Russia can build, barter oil and buy with cash more bombs to drop on Ukraine. Why would the bombs run out? Humans seem to have an endless capacity and enthusiasm to slaughter humans. It would be nice if the running out of bombs story was true. But is it? 

Imposing philosophical choices...

I’m gonna keep this really simple, and I’m throwing it together at the last minute here, so please forgive the lack of polish (not that I'm ever that polished 😉).  Anyway…

Yesterday, we talked about Deanda raising his daughters in the Christian mode/tradition of forbidding them from having premarital sex before marriage.  The point, the question really was (in a nutshell), how far can parents go when imposing their philosophical values on their children?

So, here is what I’d like you to debate. (I’m really interested in your thoughts here because I’ve often wondered about it myself.)

Since parents have the right (?) to shape the personalities/belief systems of their “blank slate upon birth” children:

1. Do vegetarian* parents have the parental right to restrict their children to a vegetarian diet like their own, starting from babyhood/birth (a philosophical choice likely made by the parents in adulthood)?

2. At what point should the child be allowed/free to choose a non-vegetarian diet?  Once its old enough to understand the concept of meat-eating, say about 5 years old?  Too young?  Other age?

Take time to think it over, then discuss the ramifications of this dilemma.

Thanks!

_________________________________________

* Non meat-eating