Saturday, March 5, 2022
While All Eyes Are on the Russia-Ukraine War, Bill Clinton Announces the Resurrection of the Clinton Global Initiative
Former President Bill Clinton announced in a letter on the Clinton Foundation website the reinstatement of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) with a kick-off meeting in New York in September. The timing of this reincarnation is pretty remarkable.
The Clinton’s terminated CGI at the end of 2016, but are resurrecting it now “to meet the urgency of this moment.” Clinton cited a myriad of reasons that he believes the “CGI community” can address including COVID, war, and attack on democracy and a myriad of woke objectives.
“The COVID-19 pandemic has ripped the cover off of longstanding inequities and vulnerabilities across our global community,” Clinton said.
“The existential threat of climate change grows every day,” he continued.
“Democracy is under assault around the world, most glaringly in Ukraine where Russia has launched an unjustified and unprovoked invasion that has put millions of lives in grave danger,” Clinton said.
Then there are refugees and division.
“The number of displaced people and refugees worldwide is higher than it has ever been—more than one in 95 of all people alive on the planet today has been forced to flee their home—and rising,” Clinton said.
“And it seems that all across the globe, people are pulling away from those who are different from them—putting our future at greater risk and making it harder to solve the challenges and seize the opportunities in front of us,” he continued.
Apparently in a world that is “steep” in challenges, the original group of CGI alongside “new members and voices including influential emerging leaders and grassroots activists” are going to fix all of these problems. According to Clinton, CGI members will not only “take action and achieve real results” but will also “create a culture of possibility” to help the sheep “in a world hungry for hope.”
As reported by the Associated Press, “The initiative, which began meeting annually in 2005 and boasted speakers ranging from former presidents Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter to celebrity philanthropists like Bono and Ben Affleck, ended in 2016 during former Sen. Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, when questions were raised about the appearance of potential conflicts of interests if donors then had...
Visage à trois #98
Three Additional Bonus Videos:
- Usually Short.
- Usually Timely.
- Usually Scraped, Gleaned And Pilfered From Social Media.
Visage à trois #97
Goodbye Dr. Seuss, Hello Ibram X. Kendi
Dr. Seuss is too white to be Dr. Seuss.
After canceling six Dr. Seuss books on spurious charges of racism, the massive German publishing giant and the secretive company that owns the rights to the deceased author’s work announced that they would be unveiling new “inclusive” Seuss books by diverse writers.
Seuss, or Theodor Geisel, an old dead white man is insufficiently diverse for his publishers.
While the names of the new stable of “inclusive” writers haven’t been made public, Penguin Random House, a subsidiary of the German Nazi-linked Berteslman giant, also publishes or distributes prominent racists like Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, and Ta-Nehisi Coates.
CEO Markus Dohle recently announced a $500,000 fund to fight against parents trying to keep critical race theory hatred and racist books, like those promoted by Penguin Random House, out of schools. The German subsidiary has also published “Anti-Racist Baby” and other racist children’s books by Ibram X. Kendi through Random House Children’s Books.
Random House Children’s Books is also publishing the new “inclusive” Seuss skinned books.
The line between Penguin Random House and Dr. Seuss Enterprises is hazy at times. Seussville, the cutesy book site, is run by Random House. The two organizations appear to closely collaborate together on finding exciting new ways to strip mine Dr. Seuss’s legacy.
While Dr. Seuss was reluctant to embrace merchandising and exercised careful control over his work during his lifetime, he left behind no real family or children. Since then he has become, in the words of Dr. Seuss Enterprises, a “brand” to be licensed for movie deals, clothes, NFTs, and every kind of junk that those who knew him believed that he would have absolutely hated.
Once told that he could be in the Guiness Book of World Records as the writer who had been paid the most money per word, he had retorted, “I'd rather be in the book as the writer who refused to be paid the most money per word.”. But these days he’s not around to protest.
And so there’s an NFT, a partnership with the anti-American women’s soccer team to promote “girl power”, the Dr. Seuss Experience, and a steady stream of “new books” and “lost stories”.
The launch of Seuss Studios with its “inclusive” authors basing entire books around a single Seuss sketch disguises the cynical strip mining under the veil of identity politics.
When the original six Seuss books were canceled and banned, some conservatives defended it as a decision by a private organization. Dr. Seuss Enterprises is certainly private. It’s so private that there’s surprisingly little information available about...
Armed And Ready...
Armed and ready, I got my gun sight trained on you
Armed and ready, don't let me down tonight
Are you high tonight, are you feelin' right
Is it hard enough, is it loud enough
Are you high!
Public backlash as parents are barred from attending meetings of Texas’ ‘Racial Equity Committee’
For the first time since the district’s “Racial Equity Committee” was formed in 2016, the committee has barred members of the public from attending its meetings.
After trying to park his vehicle in the parking lot of the school hosting the meeting, a disabled Fort Worth resident who tried to attend FWISD’s “Racial Equity Committee” (REC) meeting on Thursday was told to remove it from district property.
“They don’t like the light of truth that we have shown on them, they want to lurk back to the shadows to hide while they waste our money and divide our children, our city,” FWISD parent Hollie Plemmons told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“Equity has not helped the students, it’s only made those in the business of equity rich. If that money had been spent on extra teachers to help the kids struggling to read just imagine how much better off the students and scores would be.”
According to CBS DFW (Dallas-Fort Worth), the REC will not hold public meetings and will not post meeting times or locations because there won’t be a quorum of school board trustees present, so it won’t be bound by board policy or the Texas Open Meetings Act.
It’s almost as if they think that parents have no right to...
Trump Was Right Again: The U.S. Subsidizes Europeans’ Healthcare and Defense
And Joe Biden’s State of the Union pitch to lower drug prices won’t change that.
It took Russia’s naked aggression against Ukraine for Germany to admit that Donald Trump was right all along: Europe needs to stop relying on U.S. subsidies and spend more on its own defense.
In a stunning policy reversal, Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced that Germany would do what Trump was long urging and commit at least two percent of GDP to defense spending.
That the United States has been subsidizing Europe’s defense is well known, thanks mainly to Trump’s harping on it. Another thing Trump thundered about, correctly, is that the United States also subsidizes Europe’s socialized healthcare. Pharmaceutical companies rely upon sky-high U.S. drug prices to render economically viable their ability to sell drugs in other countries. The United States thereby subsidizes socialized healthcare in the rest of the world, especially in the wealthiest European countries.
Here’s how and why—and why Joe Biden’s State of the Union pledge to lower drug prices is dead on arrival.
Drug development is expensive. To defray costs and turn a profit, most pharma companies rely upon the holy trinity of drug approval: The United States, Western Europe, and Japan—usually in that order, for compelling economic reasons.
Why that order? The United States is nearly always first because the highest prices can be obtained there. Through their “market access” functions, pharma companies negotiate prices with the “payers”: large healthcare organizations, hospital systems and insurers. These discussions often involve byzantine structures of rebates and third parties known as pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs). But the main goal is always the same: to convince the payers to accept the highest price possible for U.S. sales.
The Trump Administration briefly tried to enact “most-favored nation” status for the United States, under which American prices could be no higher than the lowest approved prices elsewhere. That proposal went nowhere fast. The same will happen with Biden’s State of the Union pledge to “let Medicare negotiate lower prices for prescription drugs.” Pharma companies donate a lot to politicians of both parties. Therefore, neither “most-favored nation” nor negotiated Medicare prices will happen.
The pharma companies have no interest in changing the status quo, as their business models explicitly depend on high U.S. prices. Without being propped up by American consumers and taxpayers, the economic viability of selling drugs in Europe and beyond nosedives. The European health authorities, on behalf of their largely single-payer systems, know they have the upper hand with the drug companies, as everyone acknowledges that high U.S. prices are intended to subsidize lower prices in Europe. This, of course, props up their socialized medicine schemes by...
In a stunning policy reversal, Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced that Germany would do what Trump was long urging and commit at least two percent of GDP to defense spending.
That the United States has been subsidizing Europe’s defense is well known, thanks mainly to Trump’s harping on it. Another thing Trump thundered about, correctly, is that the United States also subsidizes Europe’s socialized healthcare. Pharmaceutical companies rely upon sky-high U.S. drug prices to render economically viable their ability to sell drugs in other countries. The United States thereby subsidizes socialized healthcare in the rest of the world, especially in the wealthiest European countries.
Here’s how and why—and why Joe Biden’s State of the Union pledge to lower drug prices is dead on arrival.
Drug development is expensive. To defray costs and turn a profit, most pharma companies rely upon the holy trinity of drug approval: The United States, Western Europe, and Japan—usually in that order, for compelling economic reasons.
Why that order? The United States is nearly always first because the highest prices can be obtained there. Through their “market access” functions, pharma companies negotiate prices with the “payers”: large healthcare organizations, hospital systems and insurers. These discussions often involve byzantine structures of rebates and third parties known as pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs). But the main goal is always the same: to convince the payers to accept the highest price possible for U.S. sales.
The Trump Administration briefly tried to enact “most-favored nation” status for the United States, under which American prices could be no higher than the lowest approved prices elsewhere. That proposal went nowhere fast. The same will happen with Biden’s State of the Union pledge to “let Medicare negotiate lower prices for prescription drugs.” Pharma companies donate a lot to politicians of both parties. Therefore, neither “most-favored nation” nor negotiated Medicare prices will happen.
The pharma companies have no interest in changing the status quo, as their business models explicitly depend on high U.S. prices. Without being propped up by American consumers and taxpayers, the economic viability of selling drugs in Europe and beyond nosedives. The European health authorities, on behalf of their largely single-payer systems, know they have the upper hand with the drug companies, as everyone acknowledges that high U.S. prices are intended to subsidize lower prices in Europe. This, of course, props up their socialized medicine schemes by...
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