MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

The FDA Is Blocking Game-Changing New Drugs For Kidney Disease Henry I. Miller

Posted By on July 2nd, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/07/01/the-fda-is-blocking-game-changing-new-drugs-for-kidney-disease/

Imagine you’ve been diagnosed with chronic kidney disease, told by your physician that if it can’t be managed, you may eventually need a transplant or long-term dialysis. This scary situation is one faced by hundreds of thousands of Americans every year.

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is an illness that affects an estimated 37 million people in the U.S. That’s more than one in seven adults across the country, or nearly the entire population of California. Despite this alarming statistic, investment in kidney disease research and therapies lags other sectors. We must redress that imbalance.

CKD is a serious condition that, if unaddressed, leads to organ failure. Without early interventions and disease management, CKD leads to an increased chance of heart disease, stroke, vascular disease, and even early death. Another serious, common complication – renal anemia – can cause debilitating symptoms that severely impact patients’ quality of life. Physicians and the millions of Americans living with CKD need more, and better, treatment options. 

While there have been increased efforts toward innovation in the kidney care community to provide new, effective treatments for patients, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has rejected most of the drugs for kidney disease that it has reviewed in recent years. Perhaps for that reason, nephrology has historically had one of the lowest rates of new drug applications submitted to the FDA, particularly when compared to other therapeutic areas like oncology and cardiology. 

Although the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has championed advancements in kidney care through initiatives like the public-private Kidney Innovation Accelerator (KidneyX), the FDA seems not to be onboard. By failing to approve drugs to treat patients with CKD and renal anemia, the FDA is out of step with the administration’s efforts to advance the development and access to cutting-edge treatments that have the potential to greatly improve patients’ lives and appear to have demonstrated a favorable risk-benefit profile.

The development of new kidney drugs such as vadadustat, one of a class of drugs called HIF-PHI, has given hope to the community that more options will be available to patients. Like other drugs in this new trailblazing class, it works by using the body’s innate oxygen sensing mechanism to stimulate red blood cell production, a great help to patients with anemia due to CKD.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

‘Strangely, Beautifully Alive’ American traditions and Independence Day. James Freeman

Posted By on July 2nd, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/strangely-beautifully-alive-11656701722?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

This is the weekend for reflection upon the most important sentence ever written in this country:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Of course the Declaration of Independence, created 246 years ago this week, contained many other useful sentences. One in particular may offer a healthy perspective for those among us who are inclined to restructure American governance when it doesn’t yield a desired political outcome:

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

The Declaration also noted that the “King of Great Britain” had “a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.” Among these offenses, contemporary political combatants may wish to note, was that the British government was not allowing enough immigrants to come to America:

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

In our own time the southern U.S. border has tragically become a place of lawlessness, suffering and chaos. Yet the people of color who endure almost unspeakable hardships, risk their lives and sometimes die trying to enter the U.S. demonstrate every day that America is not a racist, oppressive society but the hope of the world. People want in because they know that the liberty promised in that great sentence has been extended to all Americans. The founders were demanding an expansion of legal migration, which still sounds like a plan.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Should We Follow the Science Instead of the Votes? A thought experiment in replacing elections with surveys. By Harvey C. Mansfield

Posted By on July 2nd, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/should-we-follow-the-science-instead-of-the-votes-democracy-polling-elections-preferences-republicans-democrats-11656697672?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

The Democrats, ever solicitous of the people’s welfare and comfort, want to make voting easier. The Republicans, guardians of public morality, want to make sure votes are genuine. So why not abandon elections and replace them with surveys?

Surveys turn citizens into “respondents” answering from home by phone or computer. Respondents are scientifically selected to represent a slice of the population. Answering is easy, to please Democrats, and since your qualities and attributes are selected without regard to your name, there’s no risk of fraud, which should please Republicans. Now that we have surveys made reliable by the science of polling, why do we need elections with their hoopla, ceremony, and expense—not to mention their chanciness, rowdiness and unreason?

An objection to this question comes to mind at once. Polls often go wrong, failing to predict accurately the result of a following election. It would seem that we need elections to check on the surveys. But no—the objection takes for granted that an election is superior to a survey for reckoning the people’s will. That should be taken as a question, not an assumption. We must not underestimate the power of science. We must entertain the possibility that the survey is correct and the election—because it fails to follow the method of science—is incorrect.

This was done in 1995 by one of the founders of survey science, the late Sidney Verba, a friend and colleague of mine at Harvard. In a speech on “the citizen as respondent,” he made the claim that voter surveys are both more democratic and more accurate than elections because they reach those who don’t vote. Nonvoters are different from voters; they are less well-informed and less active on their own account, hence more vulnerable. The political scientist can reach out to them to capture their unvoiced opinions or even generously to articulate their feelings for them.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

A Warning From Australia’s Power Crisis Green mandates cause shortages, as Canberra takes over the electricity market.

Posted By on July 2nd, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-warning-from-australias-power-crisis-green-energy-anthony-albanese-11655659465?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Australia’s new Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has promised to ramp up green energy, but a national electricity crisis is showing that fossil fuels are hard to drop. Oz’s power crunch offers a warning for America’s political class, if it’s willing to listen.

Australia’s grid operator in June suspended the national spot market for power to prevent looming blackouts. Regulators ordered power generators using fossil fuels when they could run while also fixing prices. The grid operator last week lifted market controls but warned they could be reimposed if prices spike.

Australia’s climate left blamed the mess on fossil-fuel companies manipulating markets. Sound familiar? Some accused coal generators of deliberately withholding power to drive up electricity prices to boost profits before they are forced to close by climate regulation. As usual, the real culprit is bad energy policy. Australia has plentiful gas reserves, but it lacks the pipeline capacity to transport the fuel to metropolitan areas in the nation’s south. Coal still generates about 60% of Australia’s power, and renewables make up a third. The latter is about as much as in California, which is experiencing similar power shortfalls.

Renewable mandates in Australia have made it harder for coal plants to turn a profit. Many have shut down. Others skimped on maintenance, though they are stressed from powering up and down to back up renewables. Meantime, coal and natural gas prices are surging globally amid the war in Ukraine and economic recovery from the pandemic. Weak solar and wind output at the start of Australia’s winter has also squeezed power supply.

This confluence of events caused Australia’s spot power prices to spike, which prompted its grid operator to cap wholesale prices. Coal and gas generators couldn’t cover the cost of their fuel. Predictably, they throttled production, which set the stage for the recent market suspension.

P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Cancel Culture Goes to Washington George Washington University must change its name, says an article in, yes, the Washington Post. By Allen C. Guelzo

Posted By on July 2nd, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/cancel-culture-goes-to-washington-slavery-emancipation-freedom-history-president-11656699767?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

George Washington is a problem for George Washington University, according to the Washington Post. For years, the university in the nation’s capital has struggled with the shadow cast by President Washington’s ownership of slaves. In 2020 university officials began investigating the school’s sports teams’ name, the Colonials, because of the “ways colonists ravaged communities of color.” Last month “Colonials” disappeared. This spring, the Washington Post published an op-ed by Caleb Francois, a senior at the school, insisting that the university deal with “systemic racism, institutional inequality and white supremacy” by dropping the Washington name completely and renaming the university for Frederick Douglass.

George Washington certainly did own slaves. In addition to the 10 he inherited from his father, he accumulated another 65 through outright purchase over the years. When he married Martha Dandridge Custis in 1759, she brought another 84 slaves to the household at Mount Vernon. By 1786 the slaves numbered 216. In 1799, the last year of his life, Washington owned 317 men, women and children. Even in the years Washington served as the first president, he kept at least eight slaves in his home in the first capitals, New York and Philadelphia.

Nor was Washington necessarily an easy master. He punished four slaves for their “pranks” by selling them to the hell-on-water of the West Indies, and he approved the whipping by his overseers of the “very impudent.” When Ona Judge, one of the dower slaves Martha Washington brought with her to Philadelphia, bolted for freedom, Washington tried (in vain) to re-capture her. As a cure for his endless dental problems, he yielded to the persuasions of a French dentist in 1784 and paid his slaves for nine teeth to be extracted from their mouths and implanted in his.

Yet Washington’s time was also the Age of Enlightenment, when the classical hierarchies of the physical and political worlds were overthrown, to be replaced by the natural laws of gravity and the natural rights of “Nature and Nature’s God,” as the Declaration of Independence put it. Labor ceased to be a badge of subservience, and commerce became admirable. As commerce and labor gave people a greater sense of control over their lives for the first time in human history, slavery came to be seen as repugnant and immoral.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Lessons learned from the Bennett experiment  By RUTHIE BLUM

Posted By on July 1st, 2022

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-710928

Contrary to what many pundits have been suggesting in their eulogies for Israel’s collapsed government, the short-lived premiership of Naftali Bennett was not a successful experiment. Nor does it deserve accolades for surviving as long as it did.

The reason for this was twofold: a shared desire on the part of the coalition as a whole to prevent former prime minister and opposition leader Benjamin (“Bibi”) Netanyahu from remaining in or returning to the top job; and individual Knesset members’ fear of political exile in the event of another election.

Both provided the glue that kept the bloc of ideologically disparate factions in business. Until now, that is.

One thing that can be said of Bennett is that he managed, with a very small number of seats, not only to forge the ill-fated alliance but to reign over it. It was an unprecedented accomplishment that cannot be overstated.

Hopefully, however, it will be the last such foray into mish-mash minority rule. A majority of the public, on whatever side of the spectrum, should determine the general direction of the country.

This is easier said than done, of course, particularly with Israel’s electoral system and range of interest groups. It’s a tall order in any case, given all politicians’ penchant for campaign promises of the “read my lips” variety. You know, the kind that are as false as they ring.

Thus, purists of all sorts wind up disappointed in the officials they elect. Examples abound. Netanyahu, for instance, infuriated supporters who believed, or at least hoped, that he would honor his annexation vow.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Is Dobbs the First Case to Take Rights Away from Americans? by Alan M. Dershowitz

Posted By on July 1st, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18666/dobbs-v-mississippi-case

Tribe’s blanket statement that never in history have Americans gone to bed with fewer rights than when they woke up is not only wrong historically and constitutionally, but also extremely insensitive to African Americans, Native Americans, the mentally ill, Japanese Americans and other marginalized groups that have been denied the most basic rights over the years.

The truth, which Tribe denies in the interest of his partisan narrative, is that the pendulum of rights has swung widely throughout our history. Even if Martin Luther King Jr. was correct when he said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice,” that arc has not always pointed in the direction of rights — or justice. In a democracy with a complex system of separation of powers, checks and balances and federalism, there will always be some back and forth with regard to rights.

Tribe seems to take for granted that his preferred rights are an ever-expanding given.

Falsehoods will not set us free. Only hard work, based on truth, will push the arc toward justice.

Whatever one may think of Dobbs v. Mississippi, the Supreme Court decision overruling Roe v. Wade, some critics have overstated its uniqueness in taking from Americans their preexisting rights. Professor Laurence Tribe badly misinformed his readers when he said the following:

“Friday was a singular day in our history: the first day in living memory that Americans went to bed with fewer inalienable rights than they had when they woke up. Not just in living memory. Ever.”

Tragically, there have been dozens of cases throughout our history in which Americans had their most fundamental rights taken away.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Jan. 6 Committee Is Causing Never Trumpers To Lose Their Minds By: John Daniel Davidson

Posted By on July 1st, 2022

https://thefederalist.com/2022/06/30/the-jan-6-committee-is-causing-never-trumpers

“But I do know that the testimony we heard on Tuesday was a farce, that the Jan. 6 committee is an abysmal spectacle and an abuse of government power, and that anyone on the right who can’t see that should either hang up his commentator hat or go ask The Atlantic to host his newsletter.”

So many right-of-center commentators want so badly to be liked by the left they’re willing to ignore the truth about the Jan. 6 committee.

Something is very wrong with the supposedly right-of-center media outlets and commentators treating the Jan. 6 committee like something other than the appalling Stalinesque show-trial that it is. In particular, the Washington Examiner and National Review both ran embarrassing, delusional op-eds about the hearings this week. The Examiner even ran an editorial declaring, “Trump proven unfit for power again.”

Why is Trump “unfit for power”? Because of former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony on Tuesday. It was hailed by the corporate press as “explosive” and “damning,” featured on the front pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post, and replayed ad nauseum on all the cable news shows.

Before we get to the Examiner and National Review, we need to talk about the Hutchinson testimony. Hutchinson, who was billed as a star witness for the committee, did indeed make a number of explosive claims on Tuesday. The problem is that she didn’t actually witness anything. Her hearsay claims were blown to pieces almost as soon as they appeared, in some cases because people with firsthand knowledge immediately came forward to dispute them, and in other cases because the claims themselves were ridiculous on their face.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

NeverTrump Hearts Cassidy NeverTrump is up to its old tricks: bashing Trump, berating his supporters, and cheering his latest nemeses who almost always end up as farcical as Never Trumpers themselves.  By Julie Kelly

Posted By on July 1st, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/06/30/nevertrump-hearts-cassidy/

At least their taste in Trump antagonists is getting better.

After more than six years of bandwagoning with every haggard nemesis of Donald Trump—Stormy Daniels, Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), Alexander Vindman, and Marie Yovanovitch to name a few—NeverTrump reunited this week to swoon over a telegenic 25-year-old former aide in Trump’s White House: Cassidy Hutchinson. The latest actor to offer a cameo appearance in the January 6 select committee’s show trial caught the collective eye of pundits on the putative Right whose mypoic contempt for Donald Trump caused them to be wrong about basically everything since 2016.

Playing the part of the aged rescuer to the J6 damsel-in-distress, NeverTrump praised her courage and defended her uncorroborated and at times outlandish claims about Trump’s conduct related to the events of January 6. Over-the-top descriptions of her surprise performance headlined their immediate reaction to her two-hour testimony. 

National Review’s Andrew McCarthy appeared the most smitten with the former intern for Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Representative Steve Scalise (R-La.). Her testimony, McCarthy insisted, was “spellbinding,” “compelling,” “stunning,” “riveting,” and “devastating” to Trump. 

“Things will never be the same after this,” the former federal prosecutor warned in a column published Tuesday evening. “All in all, though, Hutchinson showed the nation, moment by moment, what he was like on a day when, undeniably, Trump was at his worst.”

McCarthy’s former NR colleague David French was similarly awestruck. Before Tuesday, French explained in a lengthy fan letter to Hutchinson at The Dispatch, he had little hope the committee would produce evidence to prove Trump was criminally responsible for what happened on January 6. 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Attacks on Pregnancy Centers Are More Than Mere Protests The motivations of those who perpetrate these attacks are not only dangerous but strike at the heart of what supports America at its best. By Elizabeth Eastman

Posted By on July 1st, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/06/30/attacks-on-pregnancy-centers-are-more-than-mere-protests/

There is great irony in the violence directed against pregnancy centers since the leak and then official release of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision. Reports of vandalism and destruction include graffiti such as “if abortions aren’t safe neither are you” and firebombing.

Pregnancy centers across America offer many services to women and men, their unborn children, and children post-birth—including pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease testing, ultrasounds, counseling, diapers, clothing, medical referrals for healthcare or community resources, and parenting classes. These services are provided free and funded by donations. 

If the people protesting the reversal of Roe v. Wade are claiming women’s health is endangered by limiting or ending access to abortion, then why target pregnancy centers? The pregnancy center in my local community states on its website: “Our Center does not offer, recommend or refer for abortions or abortifacients. We are committed to offering accurate, up-to-date information about abortion procedures and risks.” 

In the interest of women’s health and well-being, should a woman not be fully informed about the risks related to terminating her pregnancy? Are the protesters instead trying to intimidate those who offer these services and eliminate places where one can get information about making an informed choice? What motivates these protesters?

Alexis de Tocqueville observed that one of the dangers of democracy is when individualism and selfishness take hold and the individual relates everything to himself alone, preferring himself in everything. His remedy for this extreme individualism is found in uniting a particular interest to the general interest. In other words, we can avoid a situation where individuals have reference only to themselves by getting them interested and invested in the public good. Tocqueville argues this is accomplished by virtue of free institutions in which all can participate, primarily through the vehicle of political and civic associations. The individual may consider how events relate to himself, but participation in associations hinders him from devolving into selfishness. These associations are part of the civil and political fabric of America.