Welcome to the world of oligarchy.
Back in the day Republicans were at worst mob connected & corrupt.
Republicans have become supervillain worshipers.
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In the 1990s, the Perkiomen Valley School District put water bottle fountains in all schools. The school district determined the TCE level in water was unsafe for children.
Betsy & me have friends who live in Collegeville and say they’ve never heard of anyone getting cancer from TCE.
Cathy & Dave Masic's grandson developed brain tumors from TCE.
Dave & Cathy Masic didn’t want to go public so we did not talk about it.
The EPA found excessive amounts of TCE in their well water capping their well. The EPA brought water containers for the Masic's drinking & bathing.
At the same time their 2 year old grandson who lived with Cathy & Dave developed cancerous brain tumors.
Cathy lived for years at the Ronald McDonald House next to Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia while their grandson endured multiple surgeries. Their grandson survived. He grew into a basically normal young man. I believe Cathy's devoted care for him is a big reason he survived.
Philadelphia Suburban Water Company extended a water line along Rt. 113 for the properties in the Skippack Twp area.
The TCE contamination in Northwest Montgomery County continues to this day. I can’t in good conscience stay quiet about this.
MORE AT:
Saturday, February 25, 2023
“Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) chided Republicans for their proposal to “cut cancer treatments for kids and grease a new tax cut for the rich.”
White House spokesman Andrew Bates said in a post on the social media platform X that Republicans threw out “historic investments to fight pediatric cancer, including new requirements on Pharma — the Give Kids a Chance Act. Why? Because the richest man in the world had a whim.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) also targeted Musk for the loss of the pediatric cancer measures.
“We now know what it looks like when Elon Musk calls for ‘government efficiency.’ For starters? Cuts to funding for child cancer research. I wish I were making that up,” Warren said.
It’s not clear why Republicans dropped the health care package. The cost of the package was offset, according to a congressional cost estimate reviewed by STAT. So it wasn’t the cost itself that led to it being stripped…
The following are the five pediatric cancer measures that Republicans excluded in the new continuing resolution bill:
- A program that rewards researchers for approvals of pediatric cancer drugs with valuable vouchers that require faster Food and Drug Administration reviews of another drug application of any kind. The priority review voucher program was to be extended until 2029.
- A program that would allow kids with cancer who are covered by Medicaid and the Children’s health insurance program known as CHIP to receive out-of-state treatment.
- New authority for the FDA to fine companies when they don’t complete required pediatric studies. The FDA already has this authority for adult studies.
- New FDA authority to require that companies study pediatric drugs in combination with other treatments for the same disease when those treatments are owned by the same company or are available as generics.
- Funding for pediatric cancer research at the National Institutes of Health.
FROM:
STAT
Reporting from the frontiers of health and medicine
The fate of the health care package is in doubt as lawmakers work to keep the government open
By John Wilkerson, Sarah Owermohle, and Rachel Cohrs Zhang
Dec. 20, 2024
“Musk controls the very tiniest things, and the very biggest. He oversees companies, valued at more than a trillion dollars, whose engineers have built or are building, among other things, reusable rocket ships, a humanoid robot, hyperloops for rapid transit, and a man-machine interface to be implanted in human brains. He is an entrepreneur, a media mogul, a political provocateur, and, not least, a defense contractor: SpaceX has received not only billions of dollars in government contracts for space missions but also more than a hundred million dollars in military contracts for missile-tracking satellites, and Starlink’s network of four thousand satellites—which provides Pentagon-funded services to Ukraine—now offers a military service called Starshield. Day by day, Musk’s companies control more of the Internet, the power grid, the transportation system, objects in orbit, the nation’s security infrastructure, and its energy supply.
And yet. At a jury trial earlier this year, Musk’s lawyer repeatedly referred to his client, a middle-aged man, as a “kid.” The Wall Street Journal has described him as suffering from “tantrums.” The Independent has alleged that selling Twitter to Musk was “like handing a toddler a loaded gun…”
“It was in his nature to want total control.” (Musk.) “He didn’t have the emotional receptors that produce everyday kindness and warmth and a desire to be liked.” (Musk…) “
“Sometimes great innovators are risk-seeking man-children who resist potty training,” Isaacson concludes in the last lines of his life of Musk. “They can be reckless, cringeworthy, sometimes even toxic. They can also be crazy. Crazy enough to think they can change the world.” It’s a disconcerting thing to read on page 615 of a biography of a fifty-two-year-old man about whom a case could be made that he wields more power than any other person on the planet who isn’t in charge of a nuclear arsenal. Not potty-trained? Boys will be . . . toddlers?
Musk’s estrangement from his daughter is sad, but of far greater consequence is his seeming estrangement from humanity itself. When Musk decided to buy Twitter, he wrote a letter to its board. “I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy,” he explained, but “I now realize the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form.” This is flimflam. Twitter never has and never will be a vehicle for democratic expression. It is a privately held corporation that monetizes human expression and algorithmically maximizes its distribution for profit, and what turns out to be most profitable is sowing social, cultural, and political division. Its participants are a very tiny, skewed slice of humanity that has American journalism in a choke hold. Twitter does not operate on the principle of representation, which is the cornerstone of democratic governance. It has no concept of the “civil” in “civil society.” Nor has Elon Musk, at any point in his career, displayed any commitment to either democratic governance or the freedom of expression.
Musk gave Isaacson a different explanation for buying the company: “Unless the woke-mind virus, which is fundamentally antiscience, antimerit, and antihuman in general, is stopped, civilization will never become multiplanetary.” It’s as if Musk had come to believe the sorts of mission statements that the man-boy gods of Silicon Valley had long been peddling. “At first, I thought it didn’t fit into my primary large missions,” he told Isaacson, about Twitter. “But I’ve come to believe it can be part of the mission of preserving civilization, buying our society more time to become multiplanetary.”
MORE AT:
The
NEW YORKER
BOOKS
How Elon Musk became a superhero and then a supervillain.
By Jill Lepore
September 11, 2023
