President Donald J. Trump is right. Too many pharmaceuticals are too damn high, especially compared to the flea-market prices that foreign patients pay for the same drugs. Dr. Wayne Winegarden, a senior fellow with the Pacific Research Institute, estimated last month that a 30-day supply of the weight-loss drug Ozempic costs $418.98 in the USA. But it’s a mere $95.30 in the UK—a 77.25% discount. Jardiance, for cardiovascular diseases $256.66 per month here. In Canada: $57.65. That’s roughly 77.5% off.  Trump’s new Most Favored Nation policy aims to bring U.S. drug bills closer to those overseas. Simply put, this initiative demands that these manufacturers sell “all brand products” at their lowest prices among major Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries. This illusionary bargain would karate chop the revenues of American drug companies. They typically spend $2.9 billion to bring each new drug to market. These firms also try to recoup losses fueled by the countless once-promising potential therapies that die anonymously in their test tubes. Most Favored Nation is like telling Hewlett-Packard that its $1,500 laptops must sell for just $200— the price that MS-13 quotes for such a freshly stolen computer.  Great Britain’s National Health Service, Health Canada, France’s l’Assurance Maladie, Germany’s Gesetzliche Krankenversicherung, and similar socialized medical systems are more dapper, less tattooed versions of this notorious Salvadoran prison gang. Rather than pay what Pfizer or Gilead ask for their drugs, bureaucrats at these government-run medical monopolies dictate take-it-or-leave-it prices to these companies. To avoid total exclusion from these markets, U.S. laboratories say: “Thank you, sir. I’ll have another!” These labs then? charge U.S. patients and insurers higher prices to compensate for the artificially low prices extorted by these rip-off countries. Lower revenues—due to foreign drug thieves and Most Favored Nation’s attempt to undo their economic distortions—will discourage U.S. pharmaceutical companies from creating costly new treatments and cures.  In 2018, per the National Academies Press, “Two-thirds of new drugs in the past decade and more than 80% of the drugs in the world’s biopharmaceutical pipeline today emerge from the United States.” Tragically, Earth’s entitled free riders will not step up if the American miracle-drug machine sputters, wheezes, and dies. For starters, Trump should call British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Canadian PM Mark Carney, and French President Emmanuel Macron. He should tell them: “Stop robbing American drug companies. U.S. drugs sell for U.S. prices.”  What should be done here at home, to make drug prices more reasonable? Aside from the teachers unions, Pharmacy Benefit Managers are the biggest parasites in America. Leeches feasting on lampreys have nothing on these value-destroying middlemen. Imagine ordering a New York Strip at your favorite steakhouse. Suddenly, a Meat Benefits Manager steps forth and plants himself among you, your waiter, the chef, and the butcher. After mind-numbing discussions and a tornado of paperwork, your $58 steak now costs $100. And the Meat Benefits Manager pockets the difference, via the higher tab that he finagled. Tomorrow night, you think a percentage of the higher tab that he finagled. Tomorrow night, you think, “Why not Campbell’s Soup?” Invading the personal space of patients, employers, insurers, and druggists, ?America’s Pharmacy Benefit Manager cabal raked in $557.5 billion in 2024, IBISWorld estimates. That might be admirable if these companies merely offered advice or just looked handsome. Instead, they collect a share of the drug prices that they oversee. Naturally, they hike these expenses, so they can drain more blood from their increasingly anemic hosts. “PBM operations are opaque, their revenues streams complex and perhaps most importantly, their operations obscure the actual market price for medicines,” Winegarden wrote on May 22. “Due to these flaws, prices for innovative medicines in the U.S. are inflated.” Trump could help pry Pharmacy Benefit Manager fangs out of the drug industry’s collective neck by insisting on pharmaceutical price transparency. Citing a September 2023 Nephron Research study, Winegarden reported that “$0.42 of every $1 spent on brand medicines for commercially insured patients in the U.S. goes straight to these companies.” Consumers should see drugstore receipts along these lines: “Drug X: $58 + Pharmacy Benefit Manager fees: $42 = $100.” Such transparency would let the sunshine disinfect the Pharmacy Benefit Managers right out of drug prices.  We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Pharmacy Benefit Manager Parasites Drive Drug Costs Ever Higher appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. At Oxford University’s Brazil Forum UK 2025, Brazil’s Supreme Court President Luís Roberto Barroso renewed his call for tighter control over online content, advocating for judicial involvement in shaping digital speech regulations in Brazil. Speaking to an audience brought together by Brazilian students in the UK, Barroso argued that the spread of what he labeled as “misinformation” demands urgent regulatory responses, including punitive action against digital platforms. More: US Warns Brazil’s Justice de Moraes Over Rumble Censorship Orders Targeting Americans Barroso’s key message revolved around the perceived dangers of unchecked online discourse, framing his position around the idea that “it’s important to make lying wrong again.” However, this stance has raised serious concerns among free expression advocates, who warn that equating misinformation with criminal behavior could set a dangerous precedent for censorship and governmental overreach. With the Supreme Federal Court poised to revisit Brazil’s Internet Bill of Rights, Barroso defended the judiciary’s growing role in content regulation, saying, “We waited quite a while to see if Congress would legislate, but the legislation never came.” He maintained that the court is simply “ruling on specific cases,” yet his broader comments signal a push for the courts to fill in where elected lawmakers have so far declined to act. Barroso pressed for holding tech companies accountable for user-generated content, citing the failure of Congress to pass comprehensive digital regulation. His argument positions judicial intervention not as a last resort, but as a necessary corrective, despite the risk this poses to long-standing protections for open online discourse. The forum also addressed artificial intelligence regulation in a panel featuring Google Brazil’s legal director, Daniel Arbix, and data scientist Kizzy Terra. Barroso took aim at the engagement-driven algorithms powering today’s platforms, declaring, “It’s a human condition: insults, offenses, and lies generate more engagement than moderate speech.” Yet, blaming platform design risks overlooking users’ agency and may pave the way for sweeping restrictions on lawful speech. Under the current legal structure, Brazil’s Internet Bill of Rights limits the liability of platforms unless they refuse a court order to remove content deemed harmful. Exceptions exist for cases such as copyright violations and non-consensual nudity. Nonetheless, Barroso and like-minded justices are pushing for a more aggressive “duty of care” model inspired by European regulations, which would compel platforms to act on flagged content or face legal repercussions. This proposal, if implemented, would drastically alter the country’s digital legal landscape and potentially undermine the principles enshrined in Article 19, whose constitutionality remains staunchly defended by Justice André Mendonça. In an even more extreme direction, Justices Dias Toffoli and Luiz Fux have proposed penalizing platforms that fail to remove harmful content, even in the absence of judicial orders or user complaints, raising alarms about unchecked regulatory authority. Barroso did acknowledge the delicate balance between civil liberties and regulatory aims. “Freedom of expression is essential for democracy,” he stated, while contending that it must be “balanced” against so-called threats like “disinformation, hate speech, and conspiracy theories.” His insistence on moderation came with a warning about the internet becoming “a pit of incivility,” but free speech defenders remain wary of any move that empowers the state to determine the boundaries of acceptable dialogue. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Brazil Supreme Court Chief Barroso Advocates Stricter Online Speech Regulation appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

Duffy Tells Blue City Mayors, 'You Let Them Break It? You Bought It'

NEW: Vance Warns Trump May 'Take Further Action To End Iranian Enrichment'

The indignity of being chundered to death.

A study of different calcium atoms suggests we are missing something.

It doesn't even live in saltwater.

If it did work, it would break a few important laws of the universe.

A study of large language models (LLM) has shown that popular AI systems from OpenAI and Google organize information on their own and in unexpected ways, even though they were not trained to do so, The Independent reports. The authors of the paper, experts from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the South China University of Technology, concluded that such models “have deep similarities with how humans construct concepts.” This challenges the common belief that artificial intelligence only reproduces answers by recognizing patterns. In the experiment, OpenAI’s ChatGPT-3.5 and Google’s Gemini Pro Vision were asked to perform a task to find the odd object out. As a result, the models created 66 conceptual dimensions for classifying objects. “These dimensions could be understood and described, indicating that large language models and multimodal LLMs form human-like representations of objects,” the researchers noted. “This provides a strong argument that although these representations are not identical to human ones, they share common foundations and reflect key features of human knowledge of the world.” The authors hope that these results will help create artificial intelligence with more “human” cognitive abilities – one that can collaborate better with people. At the same time, systems even closer to human nature are already being developed around the world. For example, a startup from Australia recently presented the world’s first commercial biological computer based on living brain cells. The Cortical Labs system is a “body in a box”: it is based on lab-grown neurons located on a silicon wafer that can receive and transmit electrical signals. According to the developers, this combination of biology and electronics allows them to learn and adapt much faster than conventional computers. Even at an early stage, 800 thousand neurons in humans and mice were able to independently master the game Pong. As reported in a paper in the journal Cell, the neurons showed signs of consciousness when interacting with the game environment. “We combine biology with classical computing to create a universal learning engine,” the company’s website says. “The neuron is self-tuning, has nearly infinite flexibility, and is the product of four billion years of evolution.” The study detailing the research, titled ‘Human-like object concept representations emerge naturally in multimodal large language models’, appears in the scientific journal Nature Machine Intelligence. The post Artificial Intelligence Can Think Like Humans: Scientists Find First Evidence appeared first on Anomalien.com.

We regret to inform you that MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow had another normal one. During an interminable “No Kings” rant to open her eponymous show, she thought she was making fun of Brevard County, Florida Sheriff Wayne Ivey. Instead, she further embarrassed herself in front of her audience. Consider the fundamental lack of self-awareness needed to vomit this hot take out: WATCH: Rachel Maddow tries to mock Brevard County, FL Sheriff Wayne Ivey after protest warnings, ends up beclowning herself with B-roll of protesters standing on the curb and not obstructing traffic: exactly as Ivey intended. pic.twitter.com/j5LOCnAtuH — Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) June 17, 2025 MSNBC THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 6/16/25 9:03 PM RACHEL MADDOW: You might have seen headlines last week about the Brevard County, Florida, sheriff last week who called a press conference to threaten that he would sic dogs on people and his officers would not just put people in jail, they would put people in the hospital. He literally got up at a press conference and said, “We will kill you”, talking about violence he expected at any anti-Trump protests in Brevard county, Florida. After that bizarre show of intimidation from that sheriff in Brevard County, Florida, turns out people in Brevard County, Florida were not at all intimidated by what he said. As you can see from local headlines like this one, quote: “‘ No Kings’ anti-Trump protests draw thousands”, in Brevard County and Cocoa and Palm Bay. I mean, the sheriff gets out there and says, we will kill you and Brevard County, Florida is like, “You know what? We’ve got a right to protest. We have a right to make protest signs of any kind, including ones that show Donald Trump in a big wig made up like Marie Antoinette, saying, let them eat cake and you are not going to stop us from doing it. We are Americans, we have the right to do this, we will protest.” Some of the most unintentionally funny content on MSNBC invariably ends up being Maddow reaching for the smelling salts (or perhaps bath salts) upon discovering some iteration of masculine expression from law enforcement. Whether it is HSI agents in tactical gear or a Florida county sheriff issuing a plainspoken warning to would-be rioters, Maddow predictably overreacts with weak mockery meant to mask her fear and dread.  Perhaps Maddow would prefer the sort of handcuffed law enforcement that stands back as vandals destroy cities under the guise of protest and allow the human feces to flow in our big city streets. But America rejected that sort of thing this past November.  In order to make her dopey point Maddow misrepresents Ivey’s warnings, which were clearly directed to those who would direct deadly force towards law enforcement. Per USA Today: A Florida sheriff warned immigration enforcement protesters that law enforcement would "kill you, graveyard dead" if they become violent toward deputies. "If you hit one of us, you're going to the hospital and jail, and most likely get bitten by one of our big, beautiful dogs that we have here," Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivey said at a June 12 news conference. "If you throw a brick, a fire bomb or point a gun at one of our deputies, we will be notifying your family where to collect your remains, because we will kill you, graveyard dead. We're not going to play." Unsurprisingly, the Russia Hoax promoter saw the opportunity to further disinform her viewing public, stretching the narrow warning into a threat against all protesters and a directive not to turn out at all. And this is where Maddow really beclowned herself. Note the b-roll of protesters standing on the curb and not obstructing Florida traffic, as was the case in other states. In other words, doing exactly as they were told by Sheriff Ivey and Governor Ron DeSantis, among many others. People exercised their right to protest, largely without incident because clear boundaries were set. The facts, rather than validate Maddow’s rant, end up making her look like a fool. A fool who is the face of her soon-to-be-spun-off network. We watched MSNBC so you don’t have to. Resist the urge to feel empathy for us, though. As Hyman Roth famously said to Don Michael Corleone: this is the business we’ve chosen.