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June 2023

Doctors Having To Ration Cancer Drugs Amid Shortages

https://kffhealthnews.org/morning-breakout/doctors-having-to-ration-cancer-drugs-amid-shortages/

ABC News reports on impacts ongoing drug supply shortages are having on cancer treatments, with some doctors having to decide which of their patients to treat. Also, Pfizer said an experimental combination of antibiotics is effective at treating some drug-resistant bacterial infections.

ABC News: Cancer Drug Shortage Is Forcing Doctors To Decide Which Patients Get Treatment  Just six weeks ago, Greg DeStefano began a new chemotherapy combination. The 50-year-old, from Northbrook, Illinois, had recently been diagnosed with his fourth round of cancer and doctors were hopeful the medication would treat the tumors growing in his neck. DeStefano was responding well, but then, in late May, he got a call from his doctor and was told one of the three drugs he was receiving — carboplatin — was under a global shortage and because of the way the hospital had to prioritize treatments, he wouldn’t be qualified to receive it anymore. (Kekatos, 6/2)

Those Who Oppose Capitalism Are The Enemies Of Freedom

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/06/06/those-who-oppose-capitalism-are-the-enemies-of-freedom/

By now, much of the country has heard or read about the City University of New York law school graduate who was allowed to unspool a spiteful tirade as the school’s commencement speaker. She made a number of vile statements, but her call to “fight against capitalism” stood out to us. She and her fellow travelers know what few casual observers are aware of, that is, an attack on capitalism is an attack on liberty.

Condemning capitalism is nothing new in this country. We’ve heard the angry criticisms all of our lives, and they weren’t novel when we were young. It’s tragic, really, that so many in the West see the tension between “capitalists” and their ideological opponents as merely a conflict between ideas about which economic system we should have.

But it’s more than that. It’s a battle between freedom and subjugation.

Capitalism is not an economic system imposed by government in the way socialism or communism or any form of Marxism or planned economy is imposed on people against their will. Capitalism is merely the economic activity that men will engage in when left alone, when they are free to act as they wish. It is spontaneous, ordered and entirely organic. 

When men are free to trade with each other without government intrusion, they will inevitably seek and sell capital. And why wouldn’t they? It is their nature. Innovators and entrepreneurs hungry to make their ideas flesh need capital to fund their ventures. Those who have capital see opportunities to reap profits, so they trade their capital in an open market for profits to be realized later.

This is not exploitation but the manifestation of liberty. Ludwig von Mises wrote in his 1952 “Planning for Freedom” essay that “planning and capitalism are utterly incompatible.” The former is “conducted according to the government’s orders” while the latter follows the plans of entrepreneurs “eager to profit by best filling the wants of consumers.”

Von Mises also noted in the same essay that “the idea that political freedom can be preserved in the absence of economic freedom, and vice versa, is an illusion.”

Palestinians’ Preferred Candidates: Terrorists Who Want To Kill Jews by Bassam Tawil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19700/palestinians-prefer-terrorist-candidates

For the 87-year-old Abbas and his Fatah faction, the victory of the Hamas supporters was not only humiliating, but also a reminder that when it comes to dealing with Israel, many Palestinians prefer terrorism over diplomacy.

The Hamas-affiliated students also condemned the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority for conducting security coordination with Israeli security forces in the West Bank. Any form of cooperation with Israel, they argued, is tantamount to treason.

The underlying message the Hamas-affiliated lists sent to the thousands of students at the two campuses was: Vote for us because we explicitly and unreservedly uphold the armed struggle against Israel and promise to continue the Jihad (holy war) to murder Jews and replace Israel with a genocidal Islamist state, free of non-Muslims.

It also would not be a particularly good idea to hold general elections in the West Bank and Gaza Strip at a time when a majority of Palestinians are voicing support for an “armed intifada” (uprising) against Israel.

Article 13 of the Hamas covenant urges Muslims to wage Jihad on Israel and reject any peace initiatives: “There is no solution for the Palestinian issue expect through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors.”

The victory of the Hamas-affiliated lists at the two Palestinian universities in the West Bank should serve as a warning not only to Mahmoud Abbas, but also to the international community, especially the Biden administration, whose representatives continue to promote the delusional and dangerous idea of a “two-state solution” between the Palestinians and Israel.

The university students who voted for Hamas have endorsed Hamas’s call for Jihad and terrorism against Israel. They have endorsed Hamas’s argument that Israel has no right to exist. They have also endorsed the argument that no Palestinian or Arab leader is entitled to make any concessions to Israel.

The officials in the Biden administration, European Union and United Nations who continue to talk about the need for a “two-state solution” are actually advocating the creation of another Hamas-led state, like ISIS, this time in the West Bank and east Jerusalem. A similar state already exists in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, used a launching pad to fire rockets into Israel.

By voting for Hamas once again, Palestinians… are also sending a warning to Abbas and other Palestinian leaders not to make peace with Israel or work with it in any way, or else they will be treated as traitors — further proof, as if it were needed, that the Palestinians have yet again chosen violence, terrorism and misery rather than a bright, promising future, a better economy, and prosperity for their young.

Palestinians have once again shown that their real heroes, sadly, are those who carry out terrorist attacks against Jews and seek the elimination of Israel.

What if Putin Loses His War in Ukraine? Victory over Russia would recast Europe’s politics as well as the U.S.-China rivalry. Walter Russell Mead

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-if-putin-loses-his-war-ukraine-russia-nationalism-slavs-china-defense-e1864e09?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

Nobody this side of paradise knows how Vladimir Putin’s war will end, but Zbigniew Brzezinski identified the stakes in 1994. “Without Ukraine,” he wrote in Foreign Affairs, “Russia ceases to be an empire.”

Mr. Putin couldn’t agree more, and for him and the Russian nationalists clinging to his coattails, Russia is an empire or it is nothing at all.

A Ukrainian victory—which we can describe as an end to the conflict that leaves Ukraine with all or most of its original territory, independent of Moscow and aligned with the West—would be a geopolitical earthquake. The Russia that Europe has known and feared since the 18th century, an immense and looming presence relentlessly bent on expanding westward, will be gone. The consequences would reshape the politics of Europe and the Middle East and define a new era in U.S.-China competition.

Many in the West hoped that the fall of the Soviet Union would have ended the threat of Russian imperialism, but Mr. Putin’s regime was bent on defying the odds. After all, czarist Russia collapsed in World War I and the Communists had to sign the punitive treaty of Brest-Litovsk with imperial Germany, giving up swathes of land and acknowledging the independence of former imperial territories, including Ukraine. Taking advantage of Western divisions and weakness, Lenin reassembled almost the entire empire of Nicholas II, and Stalin seized still more territory to make Moscow a global superpower.