The current US Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK Jr) was involved in litigation against Merck over its Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, Gardasil, alleging marketing fraud and undisclosed side effects, and stood to earn significant referral fees from the lawsuit, which raised ethics concerns as he was considered for his current government role.
While most people are guilty of some level of hypocrisy, the hypocrisy afoot in today’s world takes some beating. Unfortunately, the worst hypocrites are in power in numerous countries and many, like me, seem relatively impotent in trying to at least highlight this hypocrisy, let alone remedy it.
The first rant I ever posted on this blog all the way back in early 2017 was entitled Gun Nuts and it referred to data from 2013 on general gun deaths in the US. At that time 33,534 people were killed by guns, at a rate of 10.35 per 100,000 people. In Australia in the same year 225 people were killed by guns, at a rate of 0.94 per 100,000 people1.
So, what is Australia doing for the future? Cutting funding to science, that’s what. Since the beginning of 2024, 800 staff have been cut from Australia’s leading scientific research agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), and another 350 are to be cut in 2026, which brings the total cuts to over 16% of the organisation’s staff. The Labor government has dealt the CSIRO some of the largest job cuts in the organisation’s history.
I read an article a day or so ago, mostly about the development of a new type of battery in China, which it was said could give your average electric vehicle (EV) a range of about 1,000 kilometres1.
I bumped into a quote by Frank Zappa on Sunday. It was: “The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theatre”1.
China has a population of just over 1.4 billion people with a density of 151 people per square kilometre, while the United States has a population of just over 347 million people with a density of 38 people per square kilometre1. Given the recent relatively rapid growth of the Chinese economy and its huge population it is likely that it will surpass the size of the US economy in the near future. There are several ways of measuring the size of an economy. They include: