Comment Re:Obligatory (Score 1) 630
Who is this ingenious "Kung Fu Monkey" that I may subscribe to his newsletter?
Thanks for the cough-inducing guffaw..
Who is this ingenious "Kung Fu Monkey" that I may subscribe to his newsletter?
Thanks for the cough-inducing guffaw..
I assume you mean something like what happened in South Africa? Of course, nobody was going to miss trading with them so much (quick: name 3 things in your house made in SA. Time's up....). Plus, apartheid was particularly odious to the "great and good" who run things, including especially the media that it was a very popular trade embargo.
The problem with China is not just that they are egregious offenders against the rights of their citizens (including those who'd really rather forgo the privilege, like the Tibetans), but that they have become indispensable to our own financial comfort. This makes any proposal at using trade leverage a non-starter.
There are two things that work in medicine. Surgery and antibiotics. Everything else treats symptoms or confirms you need either surgery or antibiotics.
This is nonsense, of course. There are a wide variety of medications for diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol and a huge number of metabolic/physiological illnesses from Alzheimer's to Yaws (can't think of a "z" disease at the moment).
Stem cell therapies (even using embryo-derived cell lines) are not illegal. However, there are professional and ethical standards of treatment and research protocols that would prohibit this kind of "scientific voodoo" medicine. The sad fact is that this woman was desperate enough to try this snake oil treatment, but it was a serious error in judgment.
We don't know the details of her decision or of the medical issue that she faced. But there is no "policy" issue here; we can't command the science to provide a reliable treatment without careful study. Sadly, this patient either didn't have the time or the patience to wait and paid the price for that.
It seems (from the article) that the draconian punishment of exclusion from all federally-funded programs was not optional, thus necessitating the bogus "whipping-boy" subsidiary. This is stupid law, of the same stripe as large minimal sentences for drug possession and many other politically-motivated examples. That's just our lawmakers pandering to the thirst for vengeance exhibited by many other posters here who seem to want to punish the corporation, as if it exists as a real person.
The fact is that you can't really "punish" a corporation, since it isn't really a person (no matter what the law says on that). Neither can you really tax one since the cost of fines and/or taxes are just passed along in the price of products. Tax the income derived from the investment by the shareholders, by all means, but taxing a corporation's profits just makes it another tax collector and distorts operational and investment decisions.
What we have is bad law - treating corporations as persons for some purposes (and, inconsistently, not for some others), and then the one mandating a stupid punishment for crimes that should be attributed to individuals.
All of this further diminishes the rapidly fading sense of personal responsibility that was once such a defining characteristic of American culture. So long, American republic, it was nice while it lasted.
Where there's a will, there's a relative.