Saturday, August 8, 2015

Don't you just hate it when they do something right


Liberty University is requiring its students to attend a Bernie Sanders speech

 Liberty Univserity has semi weekly “convocations,”  required school assemblies, with people and issues it considers important. 

They have invited Bernie Sanders to speak at one, and he has accepted -- as did Ted Kenney and Jesse Jackson, though not, I regret to say, Obama, Biden and Hillary Clinton.

The Chancellor of Liberty University, Jerry Falwell Jr, is reporat at remarking to the effect:

[O]ther “liberal” schools could learn a thing or two from a
purportedly closed, conservative campus like Liberty’s.
When former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice was
invited to speak at Rutgers University’s commencement
last spring, students and faculty protested for weeksuntil she voluntarily backed out. Falwell says he’s seen no
such response to the Sanders invite from Liberty’s
own student body.
And in this case, Liberty University has right on its side.

Ask Me about American Heros


Yesterday, August 7 of 2015, Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey died at the age of 101.

Because of what would now be called bureaucratic inertia and government interference, she literally saved the lives and health of thousands of US children.

The rest of the advanced world, including her native Canada, allowed Merrell's drug thalidomide  to be prescribed  as a tranquilizer and painkiller with specific indications to prescribe the drug to pregnant women for morning sickness.

She had only recently joined the FDA, and  "was one of only seven full-time and four young part-time physicians reviewing drugs".

Thalidomide had been on the market in other countries for almost three years, so there was intense pressure from the drug company to approve.

Despite this, she performed her job, requiring more information on that drug because of reported adverse external studies (in particular an English study that documented a nervous system side effects) before approval.

By 'preventing US citizens from having the benefits of new medical technology', the United States was largely spared the at least 10,000 cases of phocomelia (malformation of the limbs) in new borns, with a mortality of 50%.

Perhaps she should be on the $10 bill*.






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*Personal Rant: Hamilton, who created the US finance system, should stay on our money.  The more problematic (though populist) Jackson should go.