Just as the Supreme Court of America is poised to make a historic decision that could potentially eliminate affirmative action from the university admissions process, contextual admissions promoting inclusivity are gaining traction in universities across the United Kingdom. The Telegraph has the story.
Any day now, America’s Supreme Court will rule in one of the country’s biggest cases since the pro-choice decision of Roe vs Wade. This time the issue is affirmative action, with positive discrimination in favour of African-American, Hispanic-American and Native American candidates likely to be banished from the university admissions process.
If the Supreme Court justices do rule against affirmative action it will mark the end of a 60-year campaign. The ruling comes just as “contextual admissions”, which aim to promote “inclusivity”, take off in U.K. universities.
The U.S. case is the work of Edward Blum, an investor turned legal strategist who believes that racial diversity quotas have fostered injustice, not equality. Using race as a tool by which to judge student admissions “harms everyone”, Blum, 71, says. “You cannot cure the racism of the past with new racism.”
Blum’s case is against Harvard (an Ivy League private university) and the University of North Carolina (which is state-funded), and claims that preferential treatment given to students of African-American, Hispanic-American or Native American heritage over those who are white or Asian-American violates the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection clause, and also appears to go against the 1964 civil rights act introduced by Lyndon B Johnson, which prohibits race-based discrimination.
One plaintiff is Jon Wang, an 18- year-old with exemplary test scores who was rejected by every elite university he applied to on what he believes are racial grounds. According to Students for Fair Admissions, the campaign group Blum set up in 2014, Wang would have had a 95% likelihood of getting into his chosen universities had he been African-American; those chances were slashed five-fold due to his Asian heritage. “Race in America is one of the most polarising issues we face,” Blum says. “It has no place in the admissions process.”
It is an argument which has a personal resonance for Blum, who is Jewish. Criteria for entry to Harvard were rewritten in 1922 to limit numbers of Jewish students, who then accounted for 21% of the institution’s intake – a group who, like Asian-American students today, received high grades yet suffered “demerits” in their face-to-face interviews.
“There is a straight line running from the anti-Semitism of the 1920s to the anti-Asian bias that we see at Harvard now,” Blum believes. Many of those losing out today are from working-class families, says Blum. They are not privileged candidates, he insists, but have parents who have laboured as hotel maids, or handymen.
Affirmative action is disrupting the university selection process in Britain, too. Here, however, the division lies along class, rather than race, lines, with the rebalancing act – known as “contextual admissions” – focusing on state school vs privately educated pupils.
In 2022, 68% of places at Oxford and 72.5% at Cambridge were awarded to state-school pupils – up from 57% and 61% in 2013 (93% of children in England and Wales are state-educated). Last summer, every place for law at Edinburgh University was awarded to students from deprived areas or disadvantaged schools: of 400 applicants living in the country’s poorest postcodes, 168 won a place, while the 555 hopefuls applying from the wealthiest 60% of areas failed to score a single one.
“There’s so much pressure to be able to say, ‘This year we’ve admitted 70% from state schools rather than 55,’” says David Abulafia, historian and life fellow at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. This criteria “is not useful if it results in people who are less capable and less well-qualified being admitted, rather than people who are real high-fliers.”
Worth reading in full.
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For a start, the Pharmaceutical companies must never again be indemnified by Governments against claims for damages for one of their products. The potential penalties for marketing a poorly tested, dangerous product must be prohibitive.
As we are currently seeing, the families of those who have been killed by the gene therapies and those who have been permanently disabled or injured, have no recourse to the Pharmaceutical companies and the Government’s which coerced the population to take the product are basically refusing to admit they have caused any harm, even as their own monitoring systems are sky-rocketing with deaths and injuries and Coroners are recording that death was caused by the “vaccine.”
I’m assuming our friend making the one and only thumbs down is one of the executives of big Pharma.
A good article, which sets things out ‘fairly’…and that’s the problem…that fairness goes one way..and in my opinion the wrong way…..
Like many people I have probably thought, or never given much thought in the past, to pharmaceuticals.. believing my doctor when they said I needed something.
But I now honestly believe ‘fairness and honesty’ just isn’t in their lexicon….they will do anything…and I do mean anything to make money and to push their products, and if it maims injures and kills…so what? They genuinely don’t care…that much is obvious, both from the history you’ve mentioned to the Covid fiasco…The collusion with Governmental bodies is now so intertwined that there isn’t a chance of it ever being fair or independent.
(The TV programme ‘Dopesick’ shows this brilliantly)…
In light of the Pfizer papers one might think eyes had been opened, that ‘fairness’ might have crept in…that they might take a break to assess things….hahaha…but they are still jabbing with gusto….any day now from six months old for goodness sake…and in light of evidence to the contrary they are still telling pregnant women it’s safe!!
It’s like asking Nazzis to take a minute to reflect on their policies…They are liars, untrustworthy, and don’t give a fig who they harm and kill…it really is that plain to see.
but if you don’t want to see it you won’t….
I have no intention now or ever of giving them a ‘pass’…and I’m afraid when ALL snouts are so firmly in the trough they don’t see the problem or want a solution either..everything from their perspective is hunky-dory.
There is no question now that Bozo and his comrades are wholly complicit. They knew these injections were unsafe but still allowed, and continue to allow, indeed push their use. Bozo and Co should be first in the dock.
The charge street will be the longest in British history.
“There is no question now that Bozo and his comrades are wholly complicit.”
His comrades include those in allegedly ‘opposition’ parties who have fully supported the government in this crime against the people…and then we have the despicable actions of the ‘caring’ NHS which has wantonly taken on the key role in the massive indefensible charade…
To reminisce
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/news/response-to-the-british-government-proposal-to-roll-out-a-covd-19-vaccine-before-christmas/
1) There should be executive criminal liability ie people should go to jail for life
2) Penalties and fines for companies should be large enough to affect their ability to trade
3) In the UK companies are effectively protected from legal suits by the politicised Legal Aid Agency – this should stop. In the UK citizens were unable even to sue Merck over the notorious Vioxx
4) If we are going to have licensing agencies they should do a proper independent job not the present sham which confuses the public about safety
5) Otherwise get rid of licensing and make suing the companies easy if they misrepresent things.
A wise article. A major problem now is the fact that at the governmental level, there is no independent organisation acting in the public interest. Instead, they seem to be operating on the commercial side of the field, encouraging the use of trial products, from “free” advertising to insurance (via granting financial immunity) for any damage done.
Excellent article. Thank you.
It’s very hard to suggest how to reform a system that is so completely broken.
Change is only likely to happen from the bottom up. So reforming medical training has to be an important element. Medical training needs to completely independent of the pharmaceutical industry. And that training needs to emphasise the importance of extreme sceptism of the pharmaceutical industry with all it’s corruption, perverse incentives and conflicts of interest. The training needs to emphasise the importance of identifying the root cause of chronic illnesses rather than identifying pharmaceutical interventions to mask symptoms. The training for chronic illness needs to concentrate on lifestyle interventions such as nutrition as a much better alternative to pharmaceutical drugs for chronic illness. And that nutrition training must be independent of the arguably equally corrupt processed food industry. At the moment clinicians are largely trained representatives of the pharmaceutical industry. As I understand it doctors get next to no training on nutrition.
Incidentally this video covering statins by Maryanne Demasi is a good case study that shows everything that is wrong with the pharmaceutical industry and the whole eco system that relies on them.
Great link, thanks. My scepticism is spreading to all aspects of healthcare.
Also thought this was an excellent article.Having worked in the NHS for over 30 years as a clinician & trainer before retiring, I have seen numerous treatments and interventions be introduced with high expectations, only to lose favour as the side effects and lower than anticipated outcomes emerge. This was really brought home to me working in the management of long-term pain and being clinically involved with people experiencing dependency and addiction problems after being prescribed opioids. I know this has been said numerous times but I have found it hard to understand the lack of critical thinking when it comes to the vaccine rollout & the levels of coercion involved. It is sites like this that have provided some sort of balance amongst the mayhem. I do have concerns about the new format and already feel that the flow of information has been reduced now a donation is required to comment. Can appreciated the need to generate income but for me the comments were as least as important as the articles.
The lack of critical thinking isn’t that strange, most people don’t care to think too hard, just makes life more difficult. Certainly when the so-called regulatory bodies that are supposedly there to protect us from the profit seekers keep maintaining that the vaxx is safe and effective. Even a fool can see that the claim of safety is extremely dubious and the claim of effectiveness starting to sound like a bad joke, but as long as responsibility can be placed with the regulatory agency, most people refuse to think beyond that. At this point I’m not sure who I despise more, the profit seeking pharma companies or the shameless sell-outs that call themselves regulatory bodies.
As for your latter point, I wholeheartedly agree. The comments BTL are a big draw to this site, even for people who don’t comment – or, more likely, take a while before getting around to commenting – I was lurking on the site for about 3 months before I got an account.
Some people commenting had made the point that they had lost jobs / businesses during the lockdowns, perhaps for some 5 pounds may still be more than they can afford. I too understand that income is necessary, but is there not a better way? I know I felt this seemed to be dropped on us, it might have helped to say this was coming (if it was stated somewhere beforehand and I missed it, my apologies). It might also be an idea to provide an option of paying a 3 month or 6 month amount? Maybe an option to donate on someone else’s behalf? I read of someone doing that on one of the substacks.
I don’t think it’s always about the money. Donating to a website involves identifying yourself, so maybe some people are concerned about privacy. But we need to be bold.
An annual payment option (as on many substack accounts) would be good, and it would bring in money up front.
Yes, I agree with the privacy issue and donations. This raises the issue of things like privacy policies etc. The downside is that levels of bureaucracy get higher & higher & regulation increases. Something of a double-edged sword with the sense that something important has been lost. I do think there needs to be an option to delete account information. I for one, don’t like my details being held ad-infinitum.
This site is so important it needs to be sustainable. It also needs to expand and add even more smart journalists and researchers. There are very few sites in the world providing the service as this site. Its mission is going to become even more important going forward (when increasing censorship will try to stifle all debate).
As such, IMO, it is imperative that this site has some kind of financial security.
I do agree that the loss of comments is lamentable, but I don’t know how the site can continue indefinitely – at a high quality – absent some steady revenue streams.
Maybe the subscription or donation minimum could be reduced?
I’ve noted that many mainstream news organizations have inflated their “paid subscriber” numbers by offering $1/month subscriptions for, say, four months. This seems to have worked. I mean $1/month is the same as 50 cents/month a couple of years ago – which would be about a penny a day.
People need to have some “skin in the game” if even it’s just a few cells of skin .. because “the game” ain’t no game anymore.
Cerezyme at $200K a year is not actually a particularly extreme example. There’s a common protein folding disorder ATTR amyloidosis for which there are I think 3 official treatments costing between $215K and $450K annually. Alternatively, there’s green tea extract or curcumin (turmeric), both of which showed considerable promise for halting and reversing the underlying pathology in shoestring preclinical studies a few years back; of course in the current system they won’t be investigated further. Were we ever to abolish pharmaceutical patents and the perverse incentives they create, there are a lot of potential low cost treatments out there.
That would be my idea as well: Abolish patents on so-called intellectual property. The term is already a misnomer as property is always something physcial no two people can own at the same time. Ideas are not physical, they can be shared freely without diminuishing their value to each individual.
The ideal way to reform the pharma industry would just be to abolish pharmaceutical patents, which are a relatively recent invention, with some European countries such as Italy only recognising them in the 1970s. With the exception of trade marks, disrespect of which is a form of identity fraud, “intellectual property” is not required for free markets to flourish, indeed it often stifles the very innovation it is claimed to promote. See for example the book Against Intellectual Monopoly, available here for free: http://dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstnew.htm
The problem is bigger than this.
Our entire financial system is based around sales and profit and ‘short termism’.
We have had housing bubbles, off-shoring, wars, tech bubbles, gyms, health emergencies, space, year 2000 etc etc (feel free to add your own). The pharma financial complex is integral to pension funds and making the money go round.
I worked with a pharmacist years ago and he had worked in development and said that they were finding new chemicals almost on a weekly basis. The expectation was that would continue, but it didn’t. Since the 1980’s new drugs which actually do some good have become a bit of a rarity. Patents for slightly modified line extensions of existing drugs prolonged sales as did marking up prices for generics (Shkreli is out of prison now BTW).
The drugs that have been ‘invented’ have often been shown to have limited efficacy and lots of side effects and are becoming increasingly more expensive to produce (a bit like digging up coal).
The governments are forced to support the activities that generate money and quash any that don’t.
I think they have justified it to themselves for the following reasons:
So we get:
Specifically on the question above in relation to Pharma, my suggestions are:
1.Disband NICE. Provide information to doctors not guidance and allow comments so that doctors can get a range of opinions on treatments and then decide what is best for the patient. Such comments to be uncensored.
2.Halt the vax schedules for all injections and carry out studies to look at the difference between injected and not injected (without placebo at all).
3.Change the way that the vax efficacy calculations are done so that the absolute value is used not the relative value.
4.Set up a government production unit for generics.
5.Review all funding programmes currently ongoing in universities and ensure that where funding is given that it is not subject to external influence. Where funding is given half of that must be given free of any controls for research institutions to us as they see fit on their own projects.
6.Where research institutions have carried out research or development work of a product they must be legally entitled to a percentage share in any later sales. Where the work is government funded it must come back to the government.
7.Liability has to be held by manufacturers.
8.Holistic and naturopath practices to be supported.
9.Ban all research on human gene therapy products.
10.Research programme must state clearly who is providing funding, donors must not be permitted to fund projects that compete against each other (this is just a form of hedge funding).
11.Immediately pull all NGO’s into regulatory control and if turnover exceeds 1m tax them as a company. That these huge organisations have no real oversight is appalling.
I can dream….
With this development in Australia, pharma & governments will be committing further crimes against humanity.
Bodily autonomy? Forget it!
Nuremburg Code for Doctors Ethics re experimental medicine? What code???
https://worldtruth.tv/australia-to-forcibly-vaccinate-citizens-via-chemtrails/?amp=1
Suppression of alternative treatments, but especially silencing of preventative measures, by big pharma for disease ensures that they always have a ready supply of profitable customers. Interesting article on some of those cheaper alternatives
https://greenmedinfo.com/blog/6-bodily-tissues-can-be-regenerated-through-nutrition1?utm_campaign=Daily%20Newsletter%3A%206%20Bodily%20Tissues%20That%20Can%20Be%20Regenerated%20Through%20Nutrition%20%28QWVteb%29&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Daily%20Newsletter%20Sends-%20Updated&_kx=wjclBKoUFUBPS9g773etL09PHMLiMauxjdDIFTdRYnM%3D.K2vXAy
My Father used to maintain that the cure for cancer is already locked in a cupboard somewhere. There’s no money in curing diseases, only in treating them…
It’s actually worse: Imagine someone could cure cancer. Would the non-smoker and teetotaller lobbying organizations who are both politically powerful and very well connected be amused about that? Or would they rather try to to bury this disinformation together with the person who dared spread it as quickly as possible?
Cancer is the universal bogeyman everyone with a health-chip on his shoulders uses to justify his set of lifestyle commandments. Many of the people who are adamant about this work in the medical sector or rather, in the public health sector. They wouldn’t want to let go of their settled science. Certainly not if it meant people doing things they despise would nevertheless be living longer and in better health.
The MHRA stepped in to protect the best interests of their cronies in this instance:
https://www.ukcolumn.org/article/gcmaf-and-persecution-david-noakes-lyn-thyer-immuno-biotech
In my opinion, the pharma industry is a bunch of vultures feeding of a carcass someone else put in place. A cure or effective treatment (in the sense of manageing it) or even just serious research into cancer is politically undesired. Cancer is the just punishment for people making the wrong lifestyle choices, smoking, consuming alcoholic drinks and eating wrong things (like bacon). As these sinners must be forced to repent, there are ever increasing sin taxes supposed to effect that. That the government makes a handy sum from these is certainly just coincidence.
If the NHS (a government agency) was interested in curing cancer (instead of using it to browbeat sinners into submission), the pharma industry would provide a (doubtlessly patented and very expensive) cure. The government would make sure that it can be patented, even if it was stuff from undergraduate biology books which has been known for centuries.
“My Father used to maintain that the cure for cancer is already locked in a cupboard somewhere.”
I have been reliably informed that is indeed the case.
Still, if your “company” has an income of £640 million tax free and your head honcho takes home a very relaxing £240 k per year there isn’t really much point in spoiling the jamboree by announcing that cures for cancer have been known about for decades.
Cancer Research UK. My apologies.
We should remember that big pharma only get away with their crimes because governments and government agencies turn a blind eye, while much of the media has been bought off too. Read Robert Kennedy Jr’s book “The Real Anthony Fauci” to get a better picture of the corruption in the world of the pharma mafia. Money talks, and Fauci and Gates have together been involved in many highly dubious activities to say the least. The covid clot shots are the culmination of years spent perfecting their double act to dupe the entire world into believing in the existential threat of covid and that their “vaccines” are the only way back to normality. That these two men aren’t behind bars for life is disturbing in itself.
I think Horton says such things to enhance his own credibility but doesn’t remotely care. You think because he’s said it that Lancet is a good brand!
A lot of this one sided commentary applies to the USA, not the UK. There are errors over HERE, the MHRA approving the poisonous and useless Covid ‘vaccines’, but the Government controls prices and price gouging is not as common as is made out in the article.
What happens in the UK is that NICE, which vets treatments for the NHS, doesn’t approve the $400K a year treatment so you are still left to pay the $400K; I’ve contributed to a number of crowdfunding campaigns to fund expensive medication. But yes, the US has its own unique anti-competition laws that enable their healthcare system to charge absurd prices even for standard medicines. At least the UK has a more or less free market in standard medicines.
Some discussion here: https://lowdownnhs.info/drugs/billions-are-spent-by-the-nhs-on-drugs-every-year-but-how-does-it-work/ on the NHS’s purchasing power and how it helps to keep drug costs down.
The considerable purchasing power of the NHS can somewhat reduce the cost of a given expensive drug but what it doesn’t address is the bias of the drug development process itself towards expensive, dangerous and ineffective drugs that can be patented, and away from cheap, safe and effective drugs and non-drug treatments that cannot be patented. In fact as we’ve seen from the response to COVID, the NHS colludes with and promotes that bias.
Medicines take up around 14% of the NHS budget, just as they have since the late 1960s. Also, marketing excesses have been brought under control by the ABPI
Most manufactured items have become far cheaper since the late 1960s, even after massive innovation and improvement. There’s something very wrong with a system that approves Remdesivir for COVID and doesn’t approve fluvoxamine.
https://expose-news.com/2022/06/15/vaccinated-4-in-5-covid-deaths-canada-since-feb/
It is now quite evident from the covid panicdema that the goals of big pharma are: to get all vaccines mandated, to be protected against all liability and to have them all funded directly from government treasuries. The sums of money involved are staggering and so the funds available for influencing public health officials and politicians is enormous. Sadly IMO this will have a very negative outcome on the whole vaccine industry and trust in the Medicall Profession generally. I am not sure trust in politicians can get much lower.
This generation’s Thalidomide
This is an excellent article. There is so much evidence that the public are being harmed but what I find most alarming is how the Government and pharmaceutical companies get away with all this evidence being covered up. I believe (maybe naively) that the vast majority of humans are well-meaning and wish to do no harm to others, so how can there not be enough of these human beings in the world wealthy and powerful enough to bring successful legal action within a reasonably quick time frame? We have irrefutable, damning evidence against those responsible for hiding all this information from the public. This is what puzzles me the most. I’m an optimist, please help me.