They who have put out the people's eyes
reproach them of their blindness.
-John Milton.


Know your enemy or Know thy enemy is a saying derived from Sun Tzu's The Art of War Part III, 'Act Of Strategum' the English translation being "So it is said that if you know others and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know others but know yourself, you win one and lose one; if you do not know others and do not know yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle".
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http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/050310b.html

2). Big Pharma Fraud. Remember that scene early in Fight Club, when Edward Norton explained his job, when it was more profitable to let a car defect go and pay whatever lawsuit settlements come from the deaths, and when it’s better to recall the cars because the number of deaths will result in too many lawsuits?

This is humanitarian do-gooder stuff compared to the savage real-world fraud-for-profit model that drives America’s drug companies.

It’s really simple and it goes like this: the more fraud a drug company commits, so long as it’s off-the-scale fraud with the most horrible consequences for the victims, the drug company’s profits always outdo the criminal fines and lawsuits by factors of 20, 30, 100… It’s as simple as that.

Because the billion in penalties here or the two billion in class action lawsuit settlements there are always far less than the tens of billions you earn from pushing harmful drugs on unsuspecting idiots.

To wit: Between May 2004 and March 2010, a handful of top drug companies like Pfizer, Eli Lilly and Bristol-Myers paid over $7 billion in criminal penalties for bribing doctors to prescribe drugs for unapproved uses, with sometimes deadly consequences.

However, as a Bloomberg News report noted, the fines are always a fraction of the profits — Pfizer alone paid almost $3 billion in criminal fines since 2004, yet that was just one percent of their total revenues; Eli Lilly got busted bribing doctors to prescribe a schizophrenia drug, Zyprexa, to elderly patients suffering from dementia, even though company-run clinical trials showed an alarming death rate of 31 people out of 1,184 participants (double the placebo rate).

Whatever — the market for elderly dementia patients meant billions in extra revenues. So Eli Lilly continued pushing Zyprexa on the elderly for another four years until the Feds busted them. Eli Lilly got hit with $1.42 billion fine, but that was peanuts compared to the $36 billion it earned on Zyprexa sales from 2000-2008.

To make it happen, the drug companies buy off all the checks and balances: lawsuits revealed the enormous bribes they pay to doctors, and even America’s medical journals are so corrupted by drug company influence that they’re no longer reliable as much more than hidden advertisements, according to a recent UCSF study.

Medical journals are five times more likely to publish “positive” drug reviews than negative reviews, and one-quarter of all clinical trials are never published at all, leading doctors to prescribe drugs assuming they have all the information.

The result: prescription drugs kill one American every five minutes …while Americans pay more for drugs than anyone in the world, spending a total of $12 billion on drugs in 1980 to spending $291 billion in 2008 — a 1,700 percent increase. America is ranked only 17th in the world in life expectancy




Smoke On The Water


It might mean you're listening to a song of that name by a popular '70's group, "Deep Purple".

Here's the inspiration for the lyrics:
The lyrics of the song tell a true story: on December 7, 1971, Deep Purple had set up camp at Montreux, Switzerland to record an album using a mobile recording studio (rented from the Rolling Stones and known as the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio) at the entertainment complex that was part of the Montreux Casino (referred to as "the gambling house" in the song lyric). On the eve of the recording session a concert featuring Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention was held in the casino's theatre; during the concert a fire broke out (said to be caused by a Swiss fan shooting a flare gun in the ceiling, as mentioned in the "some stupid with a flare gun" line) that eventually destroyed the entire casino complex, along with all the Mothers' equipment. The "smoke on the water" that became the title of the song (credited to bass player Roger Glover, who related how the title occurred to him when he suddenly woke from a dream a few days later) referred to the smoke from the fire spreading over Lake Geneva from the burning casino as the members of Deep Purple watched the fire from their hotel across the lake. The "funky Claude" running in and out is referring to Claude Nobs, the director of the Montreux Jazz Festival who helped some of the audience to escape the fire.
Source(s):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_on_th…