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Former Congressman David Stockman also headed Reagan's Office of Management and Budget. Not of the Reagan White House Office, but the Office of the entire United States. Here's what he said about the failed budget negotiations:
"Fiscal governance in Washington is totally kaput. They never pass an annual budget resolution and enforcement plan, which was taken as a sacred duty back in the day; and there are never even annual appropriations bills for the mere 25% of the budget still subject to the Congressional “power of the purse”.
Instead, what occurs is a perennial string of short-term Continuing Resolutions (CRs) followed by an 11th hour, 3000 page pork-ridden “Omnibus Appropriations” bill that no one has read and which gives log-rolling (i.e. more domestic for more defense) a new definition.
In short, the debt ceiling was the only fiscal control mechanism left. And even that has been neutered time after time in the last decade by the hideous, flat-out lie that if the Treasury on any given day is one dollar short of being able to cover all of its due bills it must default on each and every one of them including interest payments, thereby destroying the credit of the United States. Yada, yada.
Finally, that lie was being put to the test and would have been eviscerated sometime next week. Yet after a lifetime on the public teat, Kevin McCarthy like his two GOP predecessors surrendered to the Doomsday Machine because he works for the GOP wing of the Swamp, not the voters, current and future.
And he did so while expectorating the most risible of lies: Republicans are changing the culture and trajectory of Washington—and we’re just getting started.
Not close. Not in the ballpark or even the catcher’s box behind home plate.
The deal does absolutely nothing to change the current “trajectory” toward fiscal disaster because it reduces nary a dime of built-in spending for defense, entitlements/mandatories, veterans and net interest, while those items account for 89% of the $80 trillion of built-in spending over the next decade."
Any investment in bioscience research comes with 100% risk because one never knows if a particular strategy will produce beneficial outcomes.
Publicly traded pharmaceutical companies have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maximize profits and the only sure way to generate profits is through regulatory capture.
So Big Pharma just lies about its products and buys off the regulators (and the politicians and the media) every time.
The biggest profits come from giving a drug to the entire population in the name of preventive care — vaccines and now statins.
By pathologizing natural human emotions, the makers of psychopharmaceuticals also seek to sell treatments to nearly the entire population.
Causing harm increases profits by 100x or more (a single injury can produce a lifetime of profitable treatments).
Said simply, causing harm and disease massively increases the size of the market for pharmaceutical products so that’s Big Pharma’s business model today.
Dr. Toby Rogers
The “Putin apologist” smear is as omnipresent today as the same kind of smear was in 2002 in the US, deployed against anyone who questioned the wisdom of the coming war on Iraq. It’s designed to shut down thought. As usual, Hungary is the one dissenter from the EU consensus.
Rod Dreher
The case for getting out of NATO encompasses four fundamental propositions:
First, the Federal budget has become a self-fueling fiscal doomsday machine, even as the Fed has run out of capacity to monetize the skyrocketing public debt.
Second, the only viable starting point for fiscal salvation is slashing the nation’s elephantine Warfare State by at least $500 billion per year.
Third, the route to that end is a return to the “no entangling alliance” wisdom of the Founders, which means bringing the Empire Home, closing the 750 US bases abroad, scuttling much of the US Navy and Army and withdrawing from NATO and similar lesser commitments elsewhere.
Fourthly, jettisoning NATO requires debunking its Origins Story and the false claim that it brought peace and security to post-war America when what it actually did was transform Washington into the War Capital of the World, dominated by a panoptic complex of arms merchants, neocon warmongers and a vast Warfare State nomenklatura.
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