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● Ignorance is not overcome by brute force—it is overcome only by enlightenment.
● Philosophy is the perfect science and the science of perfection.
● The living of philosophy is the most noble of all arts.
● Absolute knowledge exists only in the Divine Nature itself and is alone discoverable by the inner perceptions of an enlightened soul. This is because the soul itself, being part of the Divine Nature, partakes subjectively of divine knowledge. “
– Manly Palmer Hall
Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans… . If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn’t we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe it’s as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can’t explain his to us, and we can’t explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too differently, there occurs a breakdown in communication … and there is the real illness.
Can the Supreme Court hike drug prices?
The Supreme Court oral arguments on marriage equality deserved all the attention they received — but it’s another case heard this week that will affect even more people over the course of their lifetimes. And it could cost Americans millions in prescription drug bills.
The case falls within a sadly predictable continuum for the Roberts Court, which virtually always sides with the corporate litigant over the government or individual. This time, the arguments in FTC v. Actavis revolve around an insidious tactic common to the nation’s largest drug companies, and known as “pay for delay.” As a result of the likely ruling in this case, drug companies will be able to charge consumers as much as five times the potential cost of their products. And both government regulators and consumers will watch helplessly as pharmaceutical companies bribe generic drug makers to retain their exclusive holds on the lifesaving medicines we all inevitably require.
The first thing to know here is that U.S. pharmaceuticals get a very good deal from the federal government. For every new drug they produce, they get rewarded with long-term patents that grant them exclusive rights to market and sell the product for as much as 20 years – which guarantees them billions in profits and no competitors in the marketplace. Drug companies claim that they must be allowed to profit off of products they nurtured with expensive research and development. In reality, taxpayer-funded research from academia or the National Institutes of Health account for the vast majority of vital drugs brought to market every year, and R&D is a small fraction of the overall drug company budget. What’s more, drug companies routinely use their monopoly power to jack up pharmaceutical prices, which cost far more in the U.S. than anywhere in the world.
Ave Babalon
