"Remember the big to-do that the New York Times created in 1998 over a cancer drug that a Nobel Prize winner said would "cure cancer in two years?" (That quotation was later denied.) On the day that news story was released the stock price soared for the company making the developmental drug then said to cure cancer. But for metformin, a drug first approved by the FDA in 1958, there is little fanfare. Its patent expired years ago and it is a generic drug with low profitability. A quick check on Google shows just six news outlets online are distributing the story. Of the 7 billion people on the planet, how many will learn of this?"This is because Big Pharma and therefore the FDA and politicians profit from cancer, so they don't want to cure it.
Using grains to domesticate humans.
"Both Oppenheimer and Diamond would predict a strong connection between state power and grain production. Oppenheimer’s model required first herdsman, people with a mobile and reliable food source, and then farmers, sedentary people who could produce an even greater food surplus to produce the state, and according to Diamond all of these things are correlated historically and geographically. Both models agree with a disturbing idea: just as agriculture is the domestication of animals and plants, the state is the domestication of humankind. The only difference is the "cattle" are not eaten directly... yet."Wow. This is shockingly obvious now that I read it, but it had never crossed my mind before.
No comments:
Post a Comment