Monthly Archives: December 2009

Pharmac is a textbook example

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Of how a monopoly abuses its position. Obama take note. This comment, from the Macdocotr, is completely correct.

Pharmac is almost universally hated by GPs. The incomprehensible funding decisions. The endless “special authorities” designed only to stop you prescribing a drug. The sudden unexpected loss of control of a patient’s disease because of a change to a cheaper brand. The dwindling choice of drugs which becomes horribly apparent when you try to prescribe drugs for overseas visitors I have managed to find only four exact equivalents of the last 20 drugs from lists overseas patients have brought me. All of these things combine to make the average GP seriously homicidal about Pharmac decision makers.None of this is very surprising. Pharmac simply does not have the same philosophy as mainstream medicine. Doctors are thinking “what can I prescribe to my patient that will give the best result?” Pharmac is thinking “What is the cheapest drug I can use for this condition?” Admittedly, doctors are notorious for being lead around by drug reps who are adept at persuading us that their drug is the best, with the lowest side effects and the strongest action. Pharmac is not so easily persuaded, needing hard evidence to convince them.That last sentence is not quite true. Pharmac seem extremely easy to persuade that a cheaper drug is the exact equivalent of a more expensive one or, worse still, that a cheaper drug does “as good a job” as the more expensive one. Part of the reason for this is the division between itself and Medsafe – the body that approves drugs. Medsafe is only concerned with the safety of drugs, not their bio-equivalence whether the drug is absorbed in the same way. Consequently, Medsafe will declare a drug “the same” without ever testing whether it is absorbed at all, let alone absorbed at the same rate as another brand.

via MacDoctor.

In the good old days (about three elections ago) if you were a specailist and your patient needed something not on the sainted list you could do some calcuiations. Patient scik. Pill made them better in Aussie, when it iwas available. Pull cheaper than hospital bed they are now in. Can named patient have named pill if prescribed named doctor.

So Pharmac wnet feral, Nobbled the witch in the beehive, and got a monopoly.

The moral of the story, folks, is if you are sick to to Australia.

Comrade Lysenko in Copenhagen

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More on the warmists, who now remind me of the scientologists: their beliefs would be amusing if they were not so serious about them and effective at libelling and destroying any opposition.

The 1950 edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, the arbiter and repository of all politically correct Communist knowledge, had the following entry under genetics: “Soviet scientists under the leadership of Academician Lysenko proved scientifically that genes do not exist in nature.” Having Mendelian genetics outlawed on the grounds that it was not a science was probably Lysenko’s crowning achievement.

A self-taught agronomist, Lysenko early on jumped aboard the Stalinist bandwagon and developed a number of agricultural ideas — ideas that rejected all established science as “bourgeois” and therefore “counter-revolutionary,” an approach similar to the Nazis’ assault on “Jewish mathematics.” Included were promises to dramatically raise grain yields through the practice of something called “vernalization,” change the climate of Siberia by planting trees, and make wheat plants produce rye, among others. To push these ideas, Lysenko called his opponents “wreckers” and the mere discussion of his theories “political sabotage.”

Invariably these “saboteurs” lost their jobs (if they were lucky) or landed in the Gulag. Today’s global-warming “deniers” would easily recognize all these tactics minus the Gulag. The U.K.’s energy and climate-change secretary, Ed Miliband, recently even referred to AGW skeptics as “saboteurs.” Some of our latter-day Lysenkos have called for legal prosecution of skeptics.

Despite a well-known record of bogus research, experiment falsification, and faked results, and with Stalin’s blessing, Lysenko and Lysenkoism ruled Soviet agricultural science for three decades with dismal consequences for agriculture and the country at large. While pre-Lysenko Russia was known as the granary of Europe, the Soviet Union was never able to feed its population and relied on huge grain imports until its demise.

Why was this charlatan tolerated for years even after Stalin’s death? The answer to that is simple. Lysenko may have been a fraud as a scientist, but he was a Communist scientist par excellence. Communist ideology, just like Nazi ideology, required strict obedience to partisanship in all realms, and science was not an exception.

And here Lysenko’s contribution was impressive. By denying genetics and propounding the idea that acquired characteristics are inheritable, he provided the “scientific” underpinning of Marx’s theory that after a few generations of Communist dictatorship, a new selfless and docile Communist man — a perfect ant in an anthill — would emerge.

It is here that Lysenkoism’s resemblance to AGW is most striking. Just as the former was only tangentially concerned with agriculture, the latter is only tangentially concerned with climate. Like many previous campaigns against imaginary evils (such as acid rain, overpopulation, urban sprawl, etc.), its real targets are capitalism and individual rights. Its solution is the unrestricted primacy of government over the citizen and of collectivism over individual rights.

via Comrade Lysenko in Copenhagen: How Stalin’s favorite scientist paved the way for today’s global….

Best kiwi comment for the week

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I don’t get comments here. But this is the best from the kiwi blogs I found this week. On the warmists….

I’ll believe there’s a crisis when the people telling us there’s a crisis start acting like there’s a crisis”.

I think this goes to the heart of why nothing will come out of Copenhagen, and is why I gave this post its title. If you’re still considering a private jet and a limo service absolute necessities, I’m not particularly interested in hearing how you need me to bung you wads of cash to reduce carbon emissions (through some obscure, magical process).

The science is another matter. It seems obvious enough that carbon emissions are going to cause us trouble, I just suspect a lot of what we're hearing right now is rank alarmism based on computer models that aren’t worth sh_t. Propose some useful mechanisms to reduce pollution and encourage moves to renewable resources and I’ll be all for it – but propose jacking up prices so money can be traded by financial scammers and handed over to corrupt Third World officials to no useful environmental effect, and strangely enough I’m not going to be enthusiastic.

via Blogger: No Minister – Post a Comment.

Let us leave Babylon (sorry, Carbonhagen)

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This is about what anyone reasonable would expect. The G10 are acting in their best interests — well sort of. They are still signed up the the warmist delusion. However, they have enough sense not to trust the UN, and not to allow the kleptocrats who run most of the undeveloped world to rake in their take of the UN graft.

Developing countries that have seen the text are understood to be furious that it is being promoted by rich countries without their knowledge and without discussion in the negotiations.

“It is being done in secret. Clearly the intention is to get [Barack] Obama and the leaders of other rich countries to muscle it through when they arrive next week. It effectively is the end of the UN process,” said one diplomat, who asked to remain nameless.

Antonio Hill, climate policy adviser for Oxfam International, said: “This is only a draft but it highlights the risk that when the big countries come together, the small ones get hurting. On every count the emission cuts need to be scaled up. It allows too many loopholes and does not suggest anything like the 40% cuts that science is saying is needed.”

Hill continued: “It proposes a green fund to be run by a board but the big risk is that it will run by the World Bank and the Global Environment Facility [a partnership of 10 agencies including the World Bank and the UN Environment Programme] and not the UN. That would be a step backwards, and it tries to put constraints on developing countries when none were negotiated in earlier UN climate talks.”

The text was intended by Denmark and rich countries to be a working framework, which would be adapted by countries over the next week. It is particularly inflammatory because it sidelines the UN negotiating process and suggests that rich countries are desperate for world leaders to have a text to work from when they arrive next week.

via Copenhagen climate summit in disarray after ‘Danish text’ leak | Environment | guardian.co.uk.

Oh, and our PM should leave. I’m sure he could detour to Paris for a holiday, and he is honest enough to pay for that himself.

Outlook next year part 1.

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I appreciate that Kate Ross (who works here) has had a year where keeping going has been hard. However, the screening that she mentions is (for most businesses, who cannot afford to have a huge HR department) a good reason to use her service

An example of this – last week we advertised a middle management role. We had 9000 views, 750 applicants read the advertisement and over 300 applied statistics from Seek. 300! We have numerous positions to fill and this is incredibly time consuming when 90 per cent of the applicants do not even meet the brief. When clients have a few roles to recruit they will approach an agency and ask for the “best price.” Fair enough, we all need to be flexible.

via Kate Ross: What have recruitment agencies learned from 2009? – page 2 – Business – NZ Herald News.

In health the problem is getting enough quality staff. It takes at least 14    years to train a spccailist. It takes at least 7 -10 years to train a nurse or social worker (I know their degrees take three years, but they need a lot of supervision for at least some years). Good people are hard to find. Hiring bad people is very very expensive both emotionally, financially and often not acceptable from a risk management point of view.

So, we have been recruiting in health. For empty jobs. However, the ceiling on these jobs is shrinking, as we are being asked to make even more cuts.

Kate sees some hope for next  year, based on what she is seeing happening over the last few months. This timing fits with a typical recession. The risk, however, is that the recession elsewhere will be prolonged and worsened by US and EU policies. As we rely on exports, the recovery elsewhere is as important (or more so) than our domestic situation.

Fiat currencies, Fiat quality.

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THe entire article is worth reading, but the analogy that the greenback has been mismanaged — to the point it is valueless. I would much rather by a fiat 500 than a chrysler 500 — it is smaller, more stylish, cheaper and will hold onto its value.

The question is what will be the next reserve currency. I do not think the euro or the pound are candidates — the euro because of the comprimises the Germans have to make and the Pound because Brown has mismanaged it.

And the mandarins have only had their act together around the rembi in the last few years.

But I’d be short on the US dollar.

In ancient times, the solidus circulated far and wide. But it was a tangible thing, a gold coin struck by the Byzantine Empire. Between Waterloo and the Great Depression, the pound sterling ruled the roost. But it was convertible into gold—slip your bank notes through a teller's window and the Bank of England would return the appropriate number of gold sovereigns. The dollar is faith-based. There's nothing behind it but Congress.

But now the world is losing faith, as well it might. It's not that the dollar is overvalued—economists at Deutsche Bank estimate it's 20% too cheap against the euro. The problem lies with its management. The greenback is a glorious old brand that's looking more and more like General Motors.

You get the strong impression that Mr. Bernanke fails to appreciate the tenuousness of the situation—fails to understand that the pure paper dollar is a contrivance only 38 years old, brand new, really, and that the experiment may yet come to naught. Indeed, history and mathematics agree that it will certainly come to naught. Paper currencies are wasting assets. In time, they lose all their value. Persistent inflation at even seemingly trifling amounts adds up over the course of half a century. Before you know it, that bill in your wallet won't buy a pack of gum.

via James Grant Mourns the Loss of the Gold Standard – WSJ.com.

Some seasons are better than others.

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As this year draws to a close today’s reading is appropriate.

Psalm 40

1I waited patiently for the LORD;

he inclined to me and heard my cry.

2He drew me up from the esolate pit,

out of the miry bog,

and set my feet upon a rock,

making my steps secure.

3He put a new song in my mouth,

a song of praise to our God.

Many will see and fear,

and put their trust in the LORD.

via PC(USA) – Devotions – Daily readings for Monday, December 7, 2009.

John Key, take note.

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Sarah Palin got this right….

The president’s decision to attend the international climate conference in Copenhagen needs to be reconsidered in light of the unfolding Climategate scandal. The leaked e-mails involved in Climategate expose the unscientific behavior of leading climate scientists who deliberately destroyed records to block information requests, manipulated data to “hide the decline” in global temperatures, and conspired to silence the critics of man-made global warming. I support Senator James Inhofe’s call for a full investigation into this scandal. Because it involves many of the same personalities and entities behind the Copenhagen conference, Climategate calls into question many of the proposals being pushed there, including anything that would lead to a cap and tax plan.

Policy should be based on sound science, not snake oil. I took a stand against such snake oil science when I sued the federal government over its decision to list the polar bear as an endangered species despite the fact that the polar bear population has increased. I’ve never denied the reality of climate change; in fact, I was the first governor to create a subcabinet position to deal specifically with the issue. I saw the impact of changing weather patterns firsthand while serving as governor of our only Arctic state. But while we recognize the effects of changing water levels, erosion patterns, and glacial ice melt, we cannot primarily blame man’s activities for the earth’s cyclical weather changes. The drastic economic measures being pushed by dogmatic environmentalists won’t change the weather, but will dramatically change our economy for the worse.

via Facebook | Sarah Palin: Mr. President: Boycott Copenhagen; Investigate Your Climate Change “Experts”.

This ain’t religion as we know it, folks.

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The Death cult madment have been at it again. They have attacked a place of worship, indiscriminately killing people, because a local general and his staff were there.

Aslam Tarin, a senior district official, said at least 40 worshipers, including 10 children, were killed and more than 80 others injured, many of them seriously. A part of the mosque was completely destroyed

via Mosque Attack Targets Pakistan’s Military – WSJ.com.

Now, 20 years ago the good province of Ulster was marred by the troubles. The Prods and the Cats. Not the true worshippers of God: religion was the mask. When the people got together in mass — the fighting stupped.

But many had dies in anti insurgency attacks. And most were at pubs, or barracks. The Churches were left, for they were a place of sanctuary, a place where people were safe. To talk.

Pakistan is set up as a Muslim country: religion is the main differentiation point between them and the Raj (although it means there are four good cricket teams now from the subcontinent, which is a good thing). If the Mosque cannot be a place of sanctuary, how can the fighting stop?

We need to pray for those who have fallen, and their families, but we also need to pray that there will be some non political leadership here.