#Elliott is Sarah of course because what would I do if I didn’t make my OCs have weird daddy issue aus

[pandora-the-halfling]

Hhhhhhhhhhg

I just thought about a Labyrinth AU with the Grand Inquisitor

[allthebest20]

Search Party: S1 (2016)

Created by Sarah-Violet Bliss, Charles Rogers, Michael Showalter

Starring  Alia Shawkat and John Reynolds

This show was funny, enjoyable, and clever.  I would give it a 6/10. I think Shawkat is a great actor, but she always plays characters that are, like, annoyingly realistic.  Actually, in this show, they are all annoying realistic.  Each of the four main characters remind me of real people I know and dislike.  This is one of the things that makes it so good, tho!  I have two complaints about the plot:

Warning: Spoilers

1. New York City has over 8 million people in it, so it’s just not realistic that they keep running into people they know over this two week period.  I feel like they should have set the show in a slightly smaller city.  I mean most cities could meet all the plot requirements: a market for weird demi-sexual performances, P.I.s, families with a ridiculous amounts of money, culty art stores, opportunities for actors and self-promoting non-profits.

2. why doesn’t Agnes Cho tell Chantal’s family about where she is?  I mean, maybe she thought Chantal needed protection, but how can you watch someone’s family grieve like that and say nothing?  It’s obvious that Agnes wants money too, and she could have collected the reward of a quarter of a million.

It was the character comedy that made the show enjoyable tho, and the season finale is very realistic and unexpected.

John Early plays the amoral white cis gay man we all know.  The way he conducts himself in conversation is so on point. Unlike a narcissistic straight dude who typically talks only about himself, Early’s character Elliott does a great job at pretending like he cares about what you’re saying, but is actually judging you and manipulating the conversation to get something he wants.  His whole cancer lie is funny, but a side plot I didn’t personally care that much about.  I mean, it doesn’t really make sense (he has no contacts from high school anymore? what about social media? photos?), but it is funny how he bounces back so effortlessly.  It seems to be a critique of cancel culture, especially how even when he’s briefly “cancelled,” he doesn’t actually feel any shame or change in anyway.  As a rich, white man, he still has a network willing to prop him up with a book deal, and he ultimately pays no consequences.  Of course, all this sets him up as the perfect little psychopath to help cover up a murder.  It also sets up a lot of funny moments. 

Portia, played by the super hot Meredith Hagner, is the theater kid who you didn’t really like, even though she was really nice, and now she’s going on to have a successful acting career on top of her family’s wealth.  Like most Americans, I want my actors (and artists in general) to be poor and struggling before they make it big, but that’s rarely the case.  I like how her character isn’t just dumb, sweet, or spoiled.  She’s sometimes also clever, cold, and sad.  She plays the insecure, image-obsessed millennial well.  It’s almost easier for her to be a narcissist than Elliot, because we expect hot blonde actors to be narcissists, so she doesn’t have to play a role the same way he does.  Of course, her character also fits into the plot perfectly: the hot lady who men drool over and everyone underestimates, who can also use her acting skills to lie and manipulate people.

John Reynolds’ character, Drew, is your classic boring-ass white man.  He wants things to be normal and mundane so bad.  He has boring friends, he says boring things, he has a boring job.  He’s a good guy, a cutie, but dam, if he isn’t somewhere below average.  I love how Drew is an UNPAID intern, and Dory and him live in a beautiful one bedroom apartment.  It just screams “My parents pay my bills, but I don’t like to talk about it.”

Alia Shawkat plays the lead, Dory.  I love the way they use music to show how she is creating this runaway mystery in her head, but it’s often ruined by outsiders dialogue.  As a young millennial trying to find a satisfying career, I can identify with the mania she’s feeling, and it’s shown well. She’s constantly thinking “Is this a sign?” and “What should I be doing with my life?”  Her character is really hard to read in the first season: why does she want to find Chantal?  Is she trying too hard to create a dark mystery because she hates her own boring life? By the end of the season, I was beginning to think that maybe Chantal wasn’t in real trouble, but TV-bias did have me thinking something twisted was going to happen.  I’m also not sure why Dory couldn’t go to Montreal alone or just with Drew, when it was clear her friends weren’t that into it.  I do understand wanting desperately to know the truth.

The next two season’s explore Dory’s motives more, but I honestly wouldn’t strongly recommend them.  Season two and three were both kind of anxiety producing: four cocky idiots trying to get a way with a murder in which they left behind a mountain of evidence, resulting in (SPOILER) Dory stupidly refusing to plead guilty and claim it was self-defense.  It’s like despite everything, she still thinks she’ll get away with it OR (more likely) she just can’t come to terms with herself as a murderer.

They obviously should have called the cops after they killed Keith.  As two educated white kids, they could have gotten away with it, even lied about the altercation to make it seem like Keith was more violent than he was.  Elliot makes her second guess whether is was self-defense or not, even though Keith had been acting extremely sketchily towards her.  Obviously, he didn’t deserve to die, but someone had to do something to get him off her.  Ultimately, they all decide they are above the justice system, but I think Elliot is a little more to blame.  The justice system is fucked, but not necessarily against them.  If they had called the police immediately, they might have had to spend a few years (research tells me 0 to 12 before parole, average 3 to 5) in Canadian prison, but a man is dead, so maybe that’s okay.

It’s also worth mentioning Clare McNulty, although she’s really only in the last episode.  Her character, Chantal, is hilariously normal: that girl who is so average looking and untalented, you think, well she must at least be friendly and humble, but astonishingly, she’s neither of those things.  So often, TV shows only portray special characters, but like most of the characters in this show, Chantal is annoyingly normal and familiar.  Her very existence reminds me of the assumptions we (or is it just me?) make about women’s confidence and morality levels.

It’s a funny show, relatable, realistic, and entertaining.  I would recommend the first season, and the next 2 only if you are bored and have low-anxiety.  I also just learned that Bowen Yang does a podcast about the show? I love him, so obviously I’ll give it a listen, though I can’t possible imagine what he could be saying about it.

[yewavenue3-blog]

A Very Merry Australian Christmas Dinner!

Welcome to our 2018 Christmas celebration! This year for Christmas we feasted on a menu of ham glazed in mead, prawn, mango and avocado cocktail salad, a thousand layered smoked salmon crepe cake, crispy prosciutto potatoes and a fennel and sweet potato gratin and a black forest cake. And there was no shortage of Christmas cheer!

Of course no Christmas is complete without drama and our most pressing drama this year was whether my father would make it home for Christmas after his recent stroke. Thankfully, his progress has been good and he was allowed to come home for good.

Thousand layer crepe cake

I had my whole menu planned weeks in advance and decided to do a really Australian Christmas. What does that mean? For me an Australian Christmas means seafood and ham. We would be having 12 people over so I needed something large to serve everyone but I wanted it to be easy so ham it was.

So a month before Christmas I had chosen a ham. I didn't want to wait until the last minute and I also wanted to choose the perfect looking ham. So I asked my mother if she had room in her fridge to store it and we brought the 6 kilo beast to her house. But the day before Christmas Eve dinner she messaged me. Did she want us to defrost the ham? You see her instinct is to freeze everything and she had put it in the freezer!

Christmas tree bread, sweet potato & fennel bake, prosciutto wrapped potatoes and caper and cabbage salad

"What do I do?" she cried. We talked her through the cold water method for defrosting and after battling the huge queues to buy prawns and seafood we went to pick up the ham (crossing our fingers that it wasn't frozen inside, nightmares of food poisoning our guests foremost in mind).

Mead glazed ham

First to arrive was my Uncle Sam and his partner Lien who only arrived 5 minutes early (they're working on arriving on time and used to arrive 30 minutes early which is alarming for a busy hostess). Then my cousin Richard arrived and then my other cousin Roger with his partner Catherine and their kids Natalie and Jason.

Inside the crepe cake

Last to arrive was my mother, father and sister. I looked at my dad and asked, "Where is your rice?" because he usually turns up at all dinners with a bowl full of steamed rice. He shrugged his shoulders with newfound nonchalance. Could this be a new father that can go for a meal without his beloved rice?

Prosciutto wrapped baby potatoes

Of course there were the distinctly Chinese touches to Christmas. Lien told Catherine (who has always been an extra small size) that she had put on weight. Uncle Sam asked father, "How much you pay for your hospital visit?".

Individual Prawn Salads

There was of course way too much food. I packed up lots of it for everyone to take home as there was way too much for just us (although Mochi would disagree, she was eyeing off the ham all night).

Uncle Sam asking my father, "How much you pay for the hospital visit?"

My father had to leave after 2 hours on the dot as he gets tired although we all suspect that this rule also suits his personality perfectly as he never wants to linger after a meal. 1 hour and 55 minutes after we started he started kicking my sister under the table to signal that he wanted to go home. Then at two hours exactly he turned to Mr NQN who was giving them a lift home. "I go now?" he said.

Sweet potato and fennel smoked mozzarella gratin

Everyone else stayed for much longer. We ate black forest cake as nibbled on my Dear Reader Matilda's delicious ciamballette and biscottini which are so delicious that by the evening of Christmas Day there were only 4 cookies left!

"I can haz ham?" says Mochi

Afterwards we opened up presents. My main present was a karaoke machine which delighted me so much (I'm sure my neighbours will have the opposite reaction). While we unwrapped Mr NQN and I were watching a tv ad for Christmas from a supermarket and Mr NQN turned to me and said, "Do they know that nobody's Christmas is like that?".

So tell me Dear Reader, how was your Christmas? What did you eat? Do you make something different each year for Christmas or do you prefer to stick to the same menu?

Black Forest Cake

Thousand Layered Seafood Crepe cake

All Original Recipes by Lorraine Elliott

Preparation time: 30 minutes

Cooking time: 60 minutes

Serves 16-20

Sparkling with jewels and with each layer spread with a delicious filling, this crepe cake is a show stopper. Don't feel intimidated by this though. If you do have a crepe pan, that makes things easier but it's fine without too. And yes a dozen eggs really go into it but I promise this will be a beautiful cake to remember and feeds many, many people!

For crepes

1 cup flour

1 cup buckwheat flour

12 eggs, at room temperature

1/2 teaspoon fine salt

1.2 litres milk

For filling

400g/14ozs. taramasalata

200g/7ozs. sour cream (full fat)

200g/7ozs. cream cheese, softened

40g/1.42ozs. French onion soup packet mix

75g/2.7ozs. tobiko or caviar

600g/21.2ozs. smoked salmon

pomegranate arils, cherry tomatoes, radishes, dill and chives to decorate

Step 1 - Blend the ingredients together in a large food processor (split in two or three if you need to). Allow to rest for 30 minutes. Then heat a crepe pan and add oil or butter.

Using the springform tin collar to shape the crepes so that they are even

The crepe after collar is removed and the edges trimmed

Step 2 - Place a 22cm/9inch spring cake collar on the pan and pour the batter in (about 200ml/7flozs. or so). Trim the edges with a butter knife, remove the collar and then flip over once one side is done. Repeat many times until all the batter is used. You can stack these on top of each other while you are making them and then cool them completely.

Step 3 - Blend the sour cream and cream cheese together with the soup mix. Set aside (make sure it's of a spreadable consistency).

Layering with smoked salmon

Step 4 - Place one crepe on a serving plate and then spread with the French onion dip and then alternate with the taramasalata and then add smoked salmon on some layers. Place a layer of the tobiko in the middle layer of the crepe and then keep doing until you've used up all the crepes and you have about 1/2 cup of the French onion dip left.

Step 5 - Place the French onion dip into a piping bag fitted with a large star tip. Pipe around the crepe cake and then decorate with pomegranate arils, cherry tomatoes, thinly sliced radishes, dill and chives. This cake is best made a day ahead and then refrigerated so that the dip is firm. Serve cut into slices like a cake.

Ham Glazed with Honey Mead and served with Ham Jam

Preparation time: 40 minutes

Cooking time: 90 minutes

1 large ham (around 6kilos)

Cloves

2/3 cup brown sugar

2/3 cup mead

1 tablespoon seeded mustard

1 chilli, sliced (optional)

Step 1 - Preheat oven to 170C/340F and line a large baking tray with parchment (one large enough to fit your ham). Remove rind from ham - you should be able to get it off in one piece and try to lift it off carefully leaving an even layer of fat underneath it. Stud with cloves lining them up so that they're in evenly spaced lines. Then score the fat.

Stud with cloves first

Then score using cloves as a guide

Step 2 - Mix the brown sugar, mead, mustard and chilli. Baste the ham all over with some of this mixture and then bake in the oven for 2 hours basting the ham with rest of the brown sugar mead mixture every 30 minutes.

Prawn, Avocado and Mango Cocktail

Christmas without prawns in Australia would just seem weird. Rather than have everyone's hands getting dirty peeling the prawns, I served a prawn, mango and avocado cocktail in a glass on everyone's place setting. The cocktail sauce was a big hit - if you've got some Old Bay seasoning please give this a go!

2kgs/4.4lbs prawns, shelled

1-2 avocadoes, cubed

1/2 large mango, cut into cubes

1/2 cup mayonnaise

2 tablespoons chilli sauce

2 tablespoons ketchup

2 teaspoons Old Bay seasoning

1 teaspoon lemon juice

Chives to sprinkle

Step 1 - Mix the mayonnaise, chilli sauce, ketchup, Old Bay and lemon juice together. Place the avocadoes, mango, pomegranate seeds, spicy mayonnaise in individual glasses.

Cabbage and Caper Mother In Law Salad

Inspired by a visit to Barzaari in Chippendale, this salad was just so delicious that I had to eat it again. Best of all, it was super easy too!

1/2 cup mayonnaise

3 tablespoons maple syrup

1 teaspoon sesame oil

5 cups thinly sliced purple cabbage

3 tablespoons capers, rinsed well and patted dry

1/4 cup toasted sesame seeds

Fresh parsley to garnish

Salt and pepper to taste

Step 1 - Firstly mix the mayonnaise, maple syrup and sesame oil together. Then mix all ingredients together to ensure that there is an even distribution. Season with salt and pepper.

Crispy Prosciutto Potatoes

There's nothing better than a roast potato, I'm quite convinced. But then you wrap it in prosciutto and glaze it with maple syrup and you've got a super potato!

1.5kgs baby potatoes

2 tablespoons butter, cubed

2 tablespoons oil

15 slices (or as many as there are potatoes) prosciutto

1 tablespoon maple syrup

Step 1 - Par boil the potatoes until they are tender and then top with butter and oil bake them in a 230C/446F oven until crispy (around 25 minutes). This tastes great dipped in sour cream or aioli too.

Step 2 - Wait til the potatoes are cool so that they are easier to handle (you can do this ahead of time) and then wrap the potatoes in prosciutto and bake at 200C/400F for another 10 minutes or until prosciutto is crispy. Brush with maple syrup and place in the warm oven for 5 minutes. I added the maple when I warmed the potatoes up.

Fennel and Sweet Potato Gratin

Inspired by Sarah from Sarah Cooks, this fennel and sweet potato uses smoked mozzarella to give the dish a wonderful flavour.

1 large fennel bulb, trimmed

1.5 large sweet potatoes

300ml/10.6flozs. cream

1 onion, peeled and diced

4 cloves garlic, peeled and diced

150g/5ozs. smoked mozzarella, grated

50g/1.7ozs. butter, cubed

Step 1 - Preheat oven to 210C/420F. Thinly mandolin the fennel and sweet potatoes and then place in a baking dish with the cream, onion, garlic and grated smoked mozzarella and dot with butter cubes. Bake for 40 minutes.

Source: http://www.notquitenigella.com/2018/12/26/christmas-dinner-food-australia-2018/

[titheguerrero]

Dander Still Up. Drowning in Great Dismal Swamp. Film at Eleven.

Maybe this is the last in my series of dander-raising essays, as recent national and world events have most definitely left so many of us with a raging case of TDS. (Trump Derangement Syndrome, look it up it's a thing). So many damned browser tabs open. So little time. Or maybe not. Who knows. Where are all these suicides coming from? My editor keeps telling me, "don't let it make you paralytic." Hey, I'm trying. Just sensing a kind of coalescence in all the corruption our bloggers keep writing about. How do we even differentiate these activities across so many sectors of society. We were going to see our swamp drained. He promised. But instead there's just this big brand new bodacious cesspool. There it is in all the revolving-door sectors. Federal government. Private sector. Health care non-profits and even academia. Just read back over recent weeks and months of this, your favorite blog. The coalescence of corruption is certainly made easier by our enjoyment of a remarkable and possibly quite barmy Confabulator-in-Chief. He's just sort of paved the way for what one pundit recently characterized as a sort of race-to-the-bottom. No corruption (cone of silence? nifty office furniture? wipe our environmental health? Big Pharma gets another bye?) is too small. Or, of course, too large. None of this is terribly new, just the way it's all melded into what the cancer biologists call a syncytium. There are no winners and losers in all this. Just a lot of organelles swimming around and causing havoc at our expense. Just a bunch of top-level narcissists and then, under them, a phalanx of careerist stronzi streaming out of academic backwaters and think tanks to grab their fifteen minutes of ... what? Surely not fame, unless you're looking for a spot on an SNL cold open. Microphone time maybe? Let's call out a few of them. Fifteen minutes, max, by the way. The turn-over in government, especially, in the federal executive, is many times that of any previous administration. Everybody seems to be trying to find their own inner Scaramucci. For now, it seems, it's just all one great big scandal. Adam Serwer in The Atlantic: "there is only one scandal." While the Chest Thumper-in-Chief runs around doing what he does best--sullying the western world and laying down cover for his army of swampy miscreants--the careerists continue to run up a debt whose bill will surely come true. Of course by then, so many of them will have cashed out. Guess who'll be left to pay the tab. You, me, our sickest, our poorest, and Mother Earth. In the private sector it may take years for the ins and the outs to get in and then back out. But of late in both Big Pharma and in Health IT, both the revolving door and the Invasion of the Body Snatchers (aka baleful effect of activist investors and hedge funds) have taken their toll and we pick up the pace. Most recent casualty: Bush family scion and alleged wife-beater Jonathan B, thrown out of possibly the most innovative, but not quite profitable enough, athenahealth EHR company he once founded. Offed just now by the Elliott organization, which is headed up in turn by ultra-right political donor Peter Singer. (Here and here and pretty much everywhere--don't get stuck in his cross-hairs.) Ah, yes, these are the glory days for the Big Families. Donorship gets you a whole party of your own. The Prince-DeVos family, the Koch family, the Uihlein family, the Mercer family. And Las Vegas Gambling Tycoon Sheldon Adelson, who almost single-handedly handed Binyamin Netanyahu an unearned win in Jerusalem. Their common goal: effacement of government, Ron Reagan's great "problem child," in favor of its replacement the Great Dismal Swamp.  (In fact much of the real GDS, out of North Carolina, was actually bought up by Betsy DeVos's brother Erik to train Blackwater mercenaries.)  So now, on to the Great Dismal Swamp of outsourced everything. Outsourcing, along with the revolving door and the Anechoic Effect, these form the inner dynamic, the secret history of what's happening now. Outsource security. Outsource VA health care. (See my earlier blog on a secretary's attempt to resist that.) Outsource public education. Outsource, or at least deregulate, clinical trials of unproven drugs. Privatize, don't shade your eyes (apologies to Tom Lehrer). (Note that in the course of all this privatizing the common weal, these Big Dogs not infrequently can turn on each other. Singer turns on Bush. Koch the Elder turns on Koch the Younger. The dollar is king and the beat goes on and Throw Momma From the Train.) Other major features of this secret history:

The Scorching of the Earth. Both literally (health consequences of climate change), and figuratively: the flaming rhetoric of the careerists. The most glaring recent example, albeit outside of our health purview, White House National Trade Council Director and temporary-in-from-the-cold academic Peter Navarro, awarding "a special place in hell" to Canada.  (Canada?!?) Why? Because it dared to cross his new boss. Cross the boss, thump the chest. Ten points for the thumper, zero points for the country. We'll learn later this year, and again in 2020, whether there's enough of the vaunted "base" left to be snookered by all this guff. The chest-thumpers may discover a special place in hell meted out to folks closer to home.

The Swamp-Ooze of the Careerists. Navarro's one high placed example. Another newly high-placed with a more direct impact on health care, and also flaming the air waves, is National Economic Council Director and former CNBC correspondent Larry Kudlow. In the recent presidential travels Kudlow did not speak cosmologically of heaven and hell, but only politically. He called Canada's measured response "betrayal." On health insurance, he's agin it. It kills jobs, per Mr. Kudlow. And he ought to know how things really work, right? In 2007 he famously predicted the continued success of an earlier deregulatory GOP economic policy suite in that once-great organ National Review. William Buckley turned over in his grave. The headline read: "Bush Boom Continues." The following tag line: "you can't call it a recession." (Emphasis his.) The date: December 10, 2007. (Despite which, get well quick Larry. Maybe find a less stressful job would help.)

Health and the Environment. Ah, yes, and in environmental health we have Scott Pruitt heeding HMV while lining his own pockets and lobbying for his wife's Chick-fil-A franchise (honest I can't make this stuff up), all the while dumbing down any expertise on health. This dumbing down and anti-science motif pervades the Great Dismal Swamp. Never before has there been such a dearth of scientific, pedagogical, or health expertise in any of the departments that so direly need those capabilities. Interestingly, the small-bore corruption of these characters seems more prominent in the upper, Pruitt-like, echelons than in the Small Fry. Or are we just not hearing about the little guys?

Lesser Careerists. You can't have a syncytium without both big and little organelles. The little guys are actually among the more damaging, as they tend to be true believers with claimed expertise that goes poof when examined closely. Among the most famously wrong-minded recent ones we have the Press Secretary herself, Ms. Sanders, who from the depths of her health policy experience pronounced last fall that “I can’t think of anything worse than having the government be more involved in your health care instead of less involved.” Oh, Miss Sarah, I can. Even more peculiar is the role of the rather more obscure Ms. Katy Talento, of the White House Domestic Policy Council. She gets to act as conduit and house pundit for the new HHS secretary Alex Azar. It's fascinating. In several easily-reached venues she's described, by self or others, as "an epidemiologist." Harvard's master of science (not MPH) degree in epidemiology and public health can be obtained, as she did, in something between three and twelve months. Not exactly a board certification. Then she went on to build her career in ideological rightist causes and organizations, including anti-abortion campaigns and one notable set of pronouncements on the supposed link of birth control to miscarriage. Came the time for Azar to prep his new boss on last month's Big Speech on reducing drug costs, Talento broadcast the news that "no ox would be gored." Said she, "This is a fearless president and he doesn't know or care why things have always been done. It's not like your typical Republican authorizing committee that protects this model that they helped write for decades...." Wait, one little thing. It didn't happen. The big play available, as I said in a previous post, would've been having Medicare bargain for prices. Instead--and clearly Azar could've tried and failed to get this--the Caregiver-in-Chief declared that drug prices in the US should come down by having other countries pay more. What so strange about this is not merely the absurdity of such a statement, coming from a former Pfizer top exec. It's the fact that here's a lower-level careerist who went straight into RNC speech writing and working for a right wing southern Republican (Tillis, NC), Hold the phone. Among all the young staffers willing to sell their souls to get the Big Show on their CVs--don't they know it's a shabby little show?--what about the wonderful lady who dissed the ailing John McCain as inessential (he's just now incredibly essential), because, after all, he's going to die soon? Out the door she went, but of course her Republican friends got her a soft landing. Her name is Kelly Sadler, a real comer. Or goner.

The Rise of the Druggists. Last but not least, part of the secret history that, now I see it, has really got the dander way up, is how in health care and health policy, Pharma's now fully the tail-that-wagged-the-dog. CVS is moving into health care--see Dr. Poses's recent posting on just how well that organization understands their responsibilities. Actually having pharmaceutical and pharmacy folks elbowing out health care professionals who understand professionalism, it's not a new thing. Philadelphia Big Donor Leonard Abramson founded U.S. Healthcare and made a mint when he discovered how easy it was to make Managed Care actually Denied Care, then, with this proof-of-concept, cashing out and selling to Aetna. That goes way back. More recently, though, the pace of They Come at Night has picked up, viz. the firing of David Shulkin MD at the VA and the hiring of Alex Azar at HHS. These clearly result from both the privatization motive and the Pharma tail wagging the dog. At least two of the three branches of the federal government understand the business model of Pharma. They don't come anywhere near understanding the professional ethics of doctors--even while relying on their personal physicians to exercise such ethics.

Business ethics in medicine, as practiced by Pharma, have been laid out in many, many places in this blog. I and others have laid the blame for a big chunk of the opiate crisis at the door of Purdue pharma and the Sackler family. I regret to remind that the early Sacklers were physicians. But they were first and foremost business folk, possessed of a truly novel business model, which may be called outright dissimulation. (For a fascinating and harrowing description of one high-functioning Ivy-League opiate addict's experiences at Yale, with all its Sackler money and Oxy pills traded on the New Haven Green, see this Guardian piece.) Actually, I've talked to a lot of pharma execs and they're often quite ethical and responsible. They have their hands full fighting off the PBM companies. They get singled out for their K Street spending, but many of them actually have rather low budgets for that, the recent Novartis scandal notwithstanding. Other execs blush at this Novartis nonsense and want nothing to do with it. I say all this mainly to point out some dreadful outliers. It's not just the brand name drug makers, either. Teva, the Israeli generics giant, is allegedly a real problem. As I write this, good old Ron Wilson, the Wisconsin Republican who just keeps on giving his gifts, is blocking his Ranking Member Claire McCaskill from obtaining information Teva's contributions to the opioid crsis. He's saying leave it to the courts.

OK, as I just hinted, I agree with you. None of this recent stuff is really secret. Not even really novel. It's just coalesced like never before into into a dismal swamp. (Orwellian doublespeak: yes, we've seen the swamp drained. Of what? What was he promising to drain? Yes, drained, if that meant getting rid of people ("Deep State"?) who know stuff. So people who don't know stuff can get on with the business of ripping us off.) Hence in my current rant I just wanted to point to those commonalities that are, right about now, more egregious than ever. Honestly, they are. When the history is written, it will prove me right. Oh, wait, Alexander Hamilton wrote it already, hundreds of years ago.

When a man unprincipled in private life desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents, having the advantage of military habits—despotic in his ordinary demeanour—known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty—when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity—to join in the cry of danger to liberty—to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion—to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day—It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may “ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.”

Article source:Health Care Renewal