Be careful who you choose as your friends, because you tend to imitate them.

Think carefully about who you will spend time with, because you tend to imitate the people around you. That is the message from this article from BBC, "How Your Friends Change Your Habits - For Better or Worse." Excerpt:

“There is good reason to believe that when we use normative behaviour it makes us feel good because we’re connecting with a social group,” says Higgs. “If you are with a new social group, you are more likely to imitate behaviours.”

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The State of Missouri is on the verge of closing Missouri’s last remaining clinic that provides abortions.

The State of Missouri is about to force the closure of Missouri's last remaining abortion provider, a Planned Parenthood clinic in the City of St. Louis. Here is the article by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Excerpt:

Planned Parenthood officials said Tuesday the facility's license was in jeopardy after the state sought to "interrogate" doctors as part of an annual license renewal process. Officials said the move was an "intimidation" tactic by the Department of Health and Senior Services.

The Missouri State Government wouldn't force this closure without having a plan to address the resulting large increase of unplanned pregnancies, would it? Or is this a plan to fill the cities of Missouri with thousands of unwanted children?

If the plan is to encourage people to use birth control to avoid unwanted pregnancies, then why does Missouri support (with generous tax credits) fraudulent "crisis pregnancy clinics" that lie about birth control options? See this Naral report (p. 4) listing the prevalence of lies by these dishonest tax-supported clinics. See also, John Oliver's investigation of these fake clinics.

Perhaps the people who have been protesting Planned Parenthood will now occupy their time in other ways. Maybe each of them will be adopting and raising hundreds unplanned unwanted babies each year.

Or maybe this is really a plan to help fill the coffers of private prisons. See the Dubner post here.

The closure of this Planned Parenthood clinic would be an immense problem for all residents of Missouri (as detailed by this Guttmacher report), even for those whose instinct is to put a band-aid on an issue that gives them discomfort, with the assumption that the underlying complex problem will just go away.

Continue ReadingThe State of Missouri is on the verge of closing Missouri’s last remaining clinic that provides abortions.

What Julian Assange has done

At Truthdig, comedian Lee Camp summarizes important Wikileaks revelations and points out why each of these leaks is important. In the meantime, many news outlets vilify Assange without recognizing the important work he has done.

Many Americans cheer for Assange’s imprisonment. They believe the corporate plutocratic talking points and yearn for the days when we no longer have to hear about our country’s crimes against humanity or our bankers’ crimes against the economy. Subconsciously they must believe that a life in which we’re tirelessly exploited by rich villains and know all about it thanks to the exhaustive efforts of an eccentric Australian is worse than one in which we’re tirelessly exploited by rich villains yet know nothing about it.

“Ignorance is bliss” is the meditative mantra of the United States of America.

 

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Connecticut AG files suit against numerous generic drug manufacturers for price fixing

The pharmaceutical companies sued in this case are not merely greedy. Many people who desperately need these drugs can no longer afford them, and they are going without, resulting in pain, sickness and even death. We need to stop mincing words. These defendant pharmaceutical companies are functionally assaulting and murdering innocent people through their predatory policies and their lies that there are "markets" when they have illegally destroyed any semblance of markets. Thank goodness that the Connecticut AG has brought this suit (now joined by 43 states). Shame on the U.S. Antitrust Department for not vigorously filing this suit a long time ago. Here is a key quote from the lawsuit:

For many years, the generic pharmaceutical industry has operated pursuant to an understanding among generic manufacturers not to compete with each other and to instead settle for what these competitors refer to as "fair share." This understanding has permeated every segment of the industry, and the purpose of the agreement was to avoid competition among generic manufacturers that would normally result in significant price erosion and great savings to the ultimate consumer. Rather than enter a particular generic drug market by competing on price in order to gain market share, competitors in the generic drug industry would systematically and routinely communicate with one another directly, divvy up customers to create an artificial equilibrium in the market, and then maintain anticompetitively high prices. This "fair share" understanding was not the result of independent decision making by individual companies to avoid competing with one another. Rather, it was a direct result of specific discussion, negotiation and collusion among industry participants over the course of many years.

Try and give me a better example of Hannah Arendt's banality of evil. In short, thousands of ordinary-seeming people, many of them like you and me, work for these corporate entities that have been illegally inflicting pain and death upon innocent people.

Continue ReadingConnecticut AG files suit against numerous generic drug manufacturers for price fixing