Month: February 2017

Headstones Vandalized at Philadelphia Jewish Cemetery

Headstones Vandalized at Philadelphia Jewish Cemetery

This is absolutely terrible. The perpetrators need to be in prison. There is simply too much hate in the US right now. This is especially cruel to the families of those that are laid to rest.

More than 100 headstones at a Jewish cemetery were vandalized in Philadelphia over the weekend, adding to a recent wave of anti-Semitic acts across the nation.

Police arrived at Mount Carmel Cemetery in the Wissinoming section of the city on Sunday morning to find someone saying three of their relatives’ headstones were damaged, according to the Philadelphia police department.

The officers inspected and found dozens of additional headstones knocked over. Police said the incident occurred on Saturday night, and they are investigating the crime.

The incident comes after as many as 200 headstones were toppled earlier this month at a Jewish cemetery in Missouri.

Bomb threats have also been made against Jewish community centers this month, according to the JCC Association of North America, an umbrella organization for local Jewish community centers around the U.S.

Source: Headstones Vandalized at Philadelphia Jewish Cemetery – WSJ

A speech to denounce Meryl Streep and her one-sided statements

A speech to denounce Meryl Streep and her one-sided statements

 

A well-written speech to denounce the stance of Meryl Streep. For the sake of the copyright of the author, I will not produce the entire speech here. Unfortunately, just putting some snippets here will simply not do the speech justice. Please jump over to the speech to read a discussion of sanity.

 

Sweden’s embrace of refugees isn’t working and the US should learn from their mistakes

Sweden’s embrace of refugees isn’t working and the US should learn from their mistakes

 

Excellent article for anyone that is interested in the challenges of integrating a disenfranchised people into a culture and economy that they are not familiar with and are not prepared for.

Please read the article in the Source below but here are a few highlights:

The effects are palpable, starting with national security. An estimated 300 Swedish citizens with immigrant backgrounds have traveled to the Middle East to fight for Islamic State. Many are now returning to Sweden and are being welcomed back with open arms by our socialist government. In December 2010 we had our first suicide attack on Swedish soil, when an Islamic terrorist tried to blow up hundreds of civilians in central Stockholm while they were shopping for Christmas presents. Thankfully the bomber killed only himself.

Riots and social unrest have become a part of everyday life. Police officers, firefighters and ambulance personnel are regularly attacked. Serious riots in 2013, involving many suburbs with large immigrant populations, lasted for almost a week. Gang violence is booming. Despite very strict firearm laws, gun violence is five times as common in Sweden, in total, as in the capital cities of our three Nordic neighbors combined.

Anti-Semitism has risen. Jews in Malmö are threatened, harassed and assaulted in the streets. Many have left the city, becoming internal refugees in their country of birth.

The number of sex crimes nearly doubled from 2014-15, according to surveys by the Swedish government body for crime statistics. One-third of Swedish women report that they no longer feel secure in their own neighborhoods, and 12% say they don’t feel safe going out alone after dark. A 1996 report from the same government body found that immigrant men were far likelier to commit rape than Swedish men. Last year our party asked the minister of justice to conduct a new report on crime and immigration, and he replied: “In light of previous studies, I do not see that a further report on recorded crime and individuals’ origins would add knowledge with the potential to improve the Swedish society.”

Mr. Åkesson is party chairman of the Sweden Democrats. Mr. Karlsson is the party’s group leader in Parliament. They finish this article with the following quote that is significant:

For the sake of the American people, with whom we share so many strong historical and cultural ties, we can only hope that the leaders in Washington won’t make the same mistakes that our socialist and liberal politicians did.

Source: Trump Is Right: Sweden’s Embrace of Refugees Isn’t Working – WSJ

Foreign Countries Freeload on U.S. Drug Research and Drive Up Costs for American Consumers

Foreign Countries Freeload on U.S. Drug Research and Drive Up Costs for American Consumers

Because foreign countries can import new U.S. drugs and price them however they see fit, many have largely checked out of the innovation business themselves. The U.S. produced 57% of the world’s new medicines between 2001 and 2010, up from less than a third in the 1970s, the Milken Institute reported in 2011.

The bottom line is that foreign countries freeload off American medical innovation, enjoying the fruits of U.S. ingenuity while forcing American consumers to shoulder a disproportionate share of the burden of funding research – effectively causing the American consumer to subsidize the pharmaceutical needs of foreign consumers.

President Trump says American companies have been getting “systematically ripped off” by foreign governments and firms. He’s right. Yet he has backed a proposal that would make the problem even worse—permitting Americans to buy prescription drugs from overseas retailers, a practice known as importation. This policy wouldn’t help American consumers much, but it would gut American pharmaceutical companies.

Importation would threaten the research-and-development efforts that yield new lifesaving drugs. Our strong intellectual-property laws, coupled with a comparatively free-market pricing system, encourage firms to research new treatments. Companies wouldn’t take on the enormous cost of developing a new drug without a solid chance of recouping their investment. On average, a new medicine takes 10 years and costs $2.6 billion to develop, according to the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development.

The problem is that rather than promote innovation, many other countries impose price controls on prescription drugs—including new medicines invented in the United States—to make them artificially cheaper for consumers. If American companies refuse to sell their medicines at these steeply discounted dictated prices, foreign countries threaten to break their patents and produce knockoff versions of the medicines.

For decades, federal officials have largely ignored these threats and left American research companies to fend for themselves. U.S. companies gave in to the bullying—quite understandably. Since they already spent the money to develop the drug, they figured it’s better to make some extra sales abroad, even if those sales are at a discount and they can rely on the American consumer for the majority of their per dose profit.

Foreign price controls succeed because they are carried on the back of the American consumer. The American consumer subsidizes the cost of foreign pharmaceutical costs making US healthcare costs higher while lowering the healthcare costs of foreign consumers.

The Bipartisan Congressional Trade Priorities and Accountability Act of 2015 requires the federal government to negotiate trade deals that “achieve the elimination of government measures such as price controls and reference pricing which deny full market access for United States products.” Mr. Trump might actually have the negotiating skills to turn that goal into reality.

If Mr. Trump wants to “bend the cost curve of healthcare” as Mr. Obama promised (and failed) then ending the subsidy of foreign consumers should be high on his list.

Source: How Other Countries Freeload on U.S. Drug Research – WSJ