THIS IS NOT THE 21ST CENTURY I WAS HOPING FOR: How Stale Is Innovation in Drug Discovery? Think: 5-Year-Old Yogurt.

Nearly all of Big Pharma is riding on fumes, it seems.

On average, the 30 large and small pharmaceutical and biotech companies IDEA Pharma examined got just 11% of their 2017 revenue from drugs developed within the past five years, says Mike Rea, the firm’s CEO and one of the most insightful people I’ve met—no exaggeration—when it comes to pinpointing innovation choke points in the drug industry. Take out Gilead and Biogen from the mix and the group average drops to 8.1%. Nineteen of these 30 companies, meanwhile, got less than 7% of sales in the last calendar year from “new” products, says Rea.

“I’ve heard several arguments over the years about how this doesn’t really matter, but I believe it does,” writes Rae in his LinkedIn post. “One of the issues we face, as an industry, is the familiar reputation/ pricing issue. But the real issue on pricing is the year-on-year rises on old drugs—the deflection is to talk about new drug prices, but the sleight of hand is on the double digit rises taken every year on the portfolio staples. Without those rises, however, just imagine how those companies with no new blood to talk about would be doing…?

Maybe we need to look at shortening the 20-year patent on new drugs, which might be encouraging complacency instead of innovation.

OY: Leftist Rabbi Says Jacob, Deborah, King David, Apostle Paul Were All Transgender, Gender Non-Conforming. “The patriarch Jacob, for example, is clearly gendered female.”

TRUMP SAYS “THE U.S. IS READY TO GO HARD IN EITHER DIRECTION” WITH NORTH KOREA: My latest Creators Syndicate column. (bumped)

VERY RELATED, AS IN HALF-BROTHER RELATED: U.S. government sanctions North Korea for Kim Jong Un’s nerve agent assassination of his half-brother, Kim Jong Nam. This is called “maintaining the pressure.” The assassins used VX liquid chemical nerve agent — a banned WMD. The assassination took place in Malaysia in February 2017.

ALLIES: Turkey will clear Syria’s Afrin of terror elements, says Erdoğan.

Change “terror elements” to “armed Kurds” and you’ll get a better idea of what Erdoğan is up to.

SAD: THE REAL FALLOUT FROM HIGH SCHOOL WALKOUTS:

Walking out elevates a feeling of moral urgency above respect for education and the rights of fellow students. Walking out during regular school hours is meant to dramatize how deeply students are touched by the latest school massacre and how strongly they support legislative remedies. The walkouts, of course, won’t change the surrounding debate over Second Amendment rights. The students may hope to persuade elected officials to “do something” to stop the scourge of mass killings in schools. But what they are really doing is mistaking moral vanity for genuine “participation in democracy.”

That’s what being “woke” is about.

THEN YOU’RE GOING TO HAVE TO COME UP WITH A BETTER WORD FOR IT THAN “BLUSTER”: What If Trump’s North Korea Bluster Actually Worked?

BLUE WAVE?

HAVE YOU NO DECENCY? Vandals deface photo of pro-Trump admin’s deceased father. “Mike Goldstein recently arrived at his office to find that unidentified vandals had scrawled anti-Semitic and anti-Trump messages across a photo of his late father that was displayed near the door.”

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LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: DOJ Sues CA, Another Special Counsel and Much, Much More. “The lawsuit targets three California laws that specifically interfere with the federal responsibility to deal with immigration. The laws prevent corporations and prisons from cooperating with federal authorities. Another law allows the state to monitor federal DHS facilities. California is protecting criminals, some violent, at the expense of public safety. How can any resident of the state support this?”

Forget it, Liz — it’s Calitown.

WHY DO DEMOCRATS IN ALBANY WANT CHILDREN TO DIE???!!?!???!!! Democrats in Albany Try to Block Arming Teachers.

ISIS COMES TO UTAH: Teen attempted to detonate explosive device at Pine View, researched ISIS.

Police said a homemade explosive device was the item discovered in a backpack at Pine View High School Monday, that forced the evacuation of the school. Police said if the device had detonated, it would have caused significant injury or death. Police have a suspect in custody.

A warrant served at the home of a male juvenile, found materials consistent with the materials used to build the device. Police also said the suspect had been researching information and expressing interest in ISIS and promoting the organization.
The boy has not been identified but police said he was attending a class at Pine View.

During the interview with investigators, the suspect admitted to taking the American flag down and replacing it with an ISIS flag at Hurricane High School.
The suspect also admitted to spray painting “ISIS IS COMI” on the school that same morning, police say.

Plus:

Damning, but true.

AS WITH “MANSPLAINING,” LEFTIES HATE “GUNSPLAINING” BECAUSE THE ‘SPLAINERS ARE GENERALLY KNOWLEDGEABLE AND RIGHT: In Defense of “Gunsplaining:”

Pointing out inaccuracies in your opponent’s arguments is a cynical ploy to stop discussion. Or so I gather from Adam Weinstein, who just published a Washington Post op-ed taking gun control critics to task for “gunsplaining”—Weinstein’s name for when one is “harangued with the pedantry of the more-credible-than-thou firearms owner” after one makes some incidental factual error about guns, such as calling AR-15s “high-powered” or confusing clips with magazines.

“Gunsplaining,” Weinstein declares, “is always done in bad faith. Like mansplaining, it’s less about adding to the discourse than smothering it.” Were it not for those condescending gun snobs picking apart every rhetorical misstep, we would spend less time arguing over little details and more time having reasoned discussions over just which firearms restrictions we should implement next.

Weinstein does mention that gun control advocates sometimes get their facts wrong, and that they’ll even exploit their supporters’ lack of knowledge to build support for gun control legislation. Yet this phenomenon seems almost incidental to him; he saves his real fire for Second Amendment fans on Facebook and for inflammatory quotes from Joe the Plumber (remember him?).

But sloppy language doesn’t just turn up in Facebook debates. It exercises a heavy influence on actual gun control proposals. In that context, pushing back on sloppy terminology isn’t just legitimate; it’s essential to the wider debate about gun ownership.

When your entire rhetorical strategy is based on fact-free emotion, you don’t want to let anyone inject facts into the discussion.

MICHAEL BARONE: The collapse of the Italian center-left.

Italy has a population roughly the size of Britain and France and is the fourth largest economy in the European Union — one that has still not recovered from the 2008 economic crisis. It’s big enough to matter, even to inattentive Americans.

And the results were something of a surprise, and rather different from the polls. The leading single party was the Movimento Cinque Stelle (Five Star Movement, abbreviated as M5S), but with only 33 percent of the vote for the Chamber of Deputies. (The small differences with the results for the Senate, for which the minimum voting age is 25, can be set aside.) . . .

One might have thought that negative or very sluggish economic growth might spur increases for a center-left party; as in so much of Europe, it seems to have had the opposite effect.

Rather, Italian voters seem eager not for redistribution, but for stopping the flow of Muslim and African immigrants across the Mediterranean and into Italian cities and villages. The pro-EU Centrosinistra is suffering, according to this theory, for its support of the EU nations, and especially Germany, which encouraged rather than stanched this flow; the more critical Centrodestra and the M5S seem to have benefited.

It’s another example of how German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s incomprehensible decision in 2015 to admit more than 1 million “refugees” and “asylum seekers” to Germany — which of course encouraged people to cross the Mediterranean into Italy — has produced results she must deeply regret, not only in her country but across the continent.

Indeed.

ELIZABETH BRUENIG: It’s time to give socialism a try.

Not to be confused for a totalitarian nostalgist, I would support a kind of socialism that would be democratic and aimed primarily at decommodifying labor, reducing the vast inequality brought about by capitalism, and breaking capital’s stranglehold over politics and culture.

I don’t think that every problem can be traced back to capitalism: There were calamities and injustices long before capital, and I’ll venture to say there will be after. But it seems to me that it’s time for those who expected to enjoy the end of history to accept that, though they’re linked in certain respects, capitalism seems to be at odds with the harmonious, peaceful, stable liberalism of midcentury dreams.

This ahistorical pablum is what passes for deep thought on today’s WaPo op-ed page.

DEMOCRACY DIES IN DEDUCTIONS: “In 2017, Amazon paid $0 In U.S. Taxes Despite Making $5.6 BN.”  Remember this, Jeff?

JUSTICE: Goodlatte & Gowdy Call for Special Counsel to Investigate Crimes Involving Bias and FISA Abuse at DOJ.

21ST CENTURY PROBLEMS: Plattsburgh mulls bitcoin moratorium.

The City of Plattsburgh is moving toward installing a moratorium on energy-sucking commercial cryptocurrency mining operations.

Such a moratorium may be the first of its kind in the nation, Mayor Colin Read said.
“This would give us some time and allow us to explore this more,” he said.

“This has increased our power usage and put us over our threshold, and it is affecting our ratepayers.”

The problem is that mining for cryptocurrency, such as Bitcoin, absorbs a tremendous amount of energy in generating the virtual currency, explained Municipal Lighting Department Manager Bill Treacy.

The miners identify cryptocurrency using computer banks that run complex algorythims [sic] for hours on end.

The computer banks use so much energy that they throw off massive amounts of heat.
Treacy says there are two mining farms in the city that they know of — one in the former Imperial Mill and one in Skyway Plaza.

There may be some smaller private mining operations in households in the city, he said.

Super-escalating utility rates would solve the problem — either on the demand side or on the supply side — without having to snoop on anyone’s computers.

“THE U.S. IS READY TO GO HARD IN EITHER DIRECTION” TRUMP SAID: He was responding to North Korea’s new willingness to discuss denuclearization. “Denuclearization” is diplo-speak for getting rid of North Korean nukes.

HUH:

MARINE LIGHTNING IN THE EAST CHINA SEA: Very cool photo of a USMC F-35B Lightning II landing on the assault ship USS Wasp. (bumped)

ORGANIZED GANGS USING VIOLENCE TO DEPRIVE PEOPLE OF THEIR HOUSING RIGHTS. SOUNDS LIKE A CRIMINAL CIVIL RIGHTS CONSPIRACY. A new generation of anti-gentrification radicals are on the march in Los Angeles – and around the country. I hope that the Department of Justice will investigate and prosecute.