Category Archives: ethics

Drug Price…Foolishness

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President Joe Biden (D) and his associates over in Medicare have identified the drugs of which he’s willing to pretend to negotiate the price. The particular drugs aren’t important; what matters is the precedent being set regarding the Progressive-Democrat-run administration’s view of what constitutes negotiation in Party’s lexicon. Readers interested in which drugs are targeted for now can find the list at the end of the linked-to article.

What’s important here is this.

The naming of the 10 drugs subject to price negotiations kicks off a lengthy process. Drugmakers have until October 1 to say whether they will join in the negotiations.
If they don’t negotiate or accept the price resulting from it, companies face a tax of up to 95% on a medicine’s US sales, or they can pull all of their drugs from Medicare and Medicaid coverage.

And this:

Drug makers that don’t participate or reject the government’s price will incur a crippling daily excise tax that starts at 186% and eventually climbs to 1,900% of the drug’s daily revenues. This is extortion, not a negotiation.

That’s not negotiation, that’s “Take our price, or pay even more through our usurious, if not confiscatory, taxes.” The outcome will be a stifling of medical (not just for medicinal) innovation in the US. Instead, innovation, such as might remain, will be pushed overseas, in large part to nations that don’t themselves innovate very much, having come to rely on American developments which they then heavily subsidize for their own citizens.

Some of those drugs, too, will be pulled from Medicare/Medicaid coverage, along with all of the other drugs a company makes available through those programs, which will price them out of reach of those most in need—those with the ailments being treated by those medicines and who lack the money to pay the full price.

That is, until Party takes the next obvious step and taxes those medicines’ sales revenues earned outside of Medicare/Medicaid, to be followed by Party’s diktat that those medicines must be offered through Medicare/Medicaid.

Which will result in those medicines no longer being manufactured in the US at all and no longer being sold at all in the US, regardless of their manufacture.

“Let Ukraine Direct Its Own Counteroffensive”

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US Army General Jack Keane (ret), once Army Vice Chief of Staff and current Institute for the Study of War Chairman, thinks US military personnel criticizing the way Ukraine is conducting its offensive should (my paraphrase) sit down and shut up.

Keane’s characterization of those sideline inhabitants’ behavior, chirping from the sidelines, is being generous. Whatever their own combat experience, if any, it has no relevance to the realized combat environment the Ukrainians are facing with the Russian up-armored barbarians.

No one in the American military today has designed large-scale mechanized operations against a serious and capable enemy that is employing a comprehensive defense. The last time was the Metz campaign in France in 1944, led by General George S Patton.

But in all their woke awesomeness, the Pentagon’s armchair junior high quarterbacks Know So Much Better. If these wonders truly want to help Ukraine, they’ll push President Joe Biden (D) to stop slow-walking and outright denying the weapons Ukraine needs to effectively and efficiently prosecute its offensive, and they’ll get their own bureaucrats out of the way of actual delivery.

AI to Teach Cops to be Politically Correct?

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The Los Angeles Police Department—yes, that one, of “violent extremist views” infamy regarding its cops displaying the Thin Blue Line flag anywhere in public—now is going to use Artificial Intelligence to teach cops how to be politically correct and suitably social justice-y when they make traffic stops and potentially in other, even more tension-filled, encounters.

The headline says it all:

AI to binge LAPD bodycam footage to weed out rude tone, aggressive language

Because rudeness is so terrible, and never mind the occasional—the often—need for cops to be aggressive during an encounter with an individual of the public, even on a traffic stop.

The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) on Tuesday announced the research initiative during the Board of Police Commissioners meeting. LAPD Cmdr Marla Ciuffetelli said at the meeting the study will be used to help train future officers on how to best interact with the public while also promoting accountability, according to the Los Angeles Times.
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Researchers at the University of Southern California will review [body camera] footage from about 1,000 traffic stops over the next three years and establish parameters on interactions deemed appropriate by department policies and public feedback, and inappropriate interactions.
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The researchers will take into account the location of the traffic stop, the driver’s race, and the officer’s rank and age when analyzing their findings.

What could go wrong?

One major problem is that every stop is a unique encounter and those factors have greater or lesser influence depending on the individual cop and the individual person being stopped—and the degree of influence will vary from time to time for both the cop and the person being stopped.

What’s the difference between rude talk and banter? How do they differ from time to time? Even the most PC remark by the cop can be taken amiss by the stoppee, ranging from being viewed as condescending to not being PC enough to the stoppee simply feeling like taking offense because he woke up in an owly mood. Or because cop. Never mind that every traffic stop, and many other types of encounters, start out with the cop needing to be aggressive. “Kindly to stop doing that, Sir/Madam/Zir, and let’s chat for a bit” just isn’t going to cut it.

The “training” the LAPD line officers will be forced to undergo will, also, simply add to the tension any LA cop will feel when beginning an encounter—not over the encounter itself or the person’s reaction to the stop and to the cop, but over how LAPD…managers…will perceive the cop’s behavior when they review the encounter.

I have a problem with the proposed methodology, too.

LAPD has 150 cops and civilians for traffic enforcement. Those thousand traffic stops over three years works out to a bit over 2 stops per traffic enforcer per year. That’s not a big sample, even for something as supposedly magic as AI.

Maybe the city should leave off this kind of claptrap and use the money instead for hiring more cops, putting more cops on the street, and training cops how to be cops rather than everybody’s best friend out for a nice chat.

Making Joe Biden Testify

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It’s been suggested in the press that early on when Federal prosecutors let slip that they had enough evidence on which to base serious indictments of Hunter Biden, Biden’s lawyer Chris Clark “threatened” David Weiss, the US Attorney for Delaware with this:

President Biden now unquestionably would be a fact witness for the defense in any criminal trial. This of all cases justifies neither the spectacle of a sitting President testifying at a criminal trial nor the potential for a resulting Constitutional crisis.

Weiss promptly folded, spent some more years pretending to work the case, and then agreed a plea deal that gave sweetheart plea deals a bad name. Only the acumen of the presiding Federal judge prevented the white wash from going through.

Weiss should have called Clark’s bluff. President Joe Biden’s (D) pretrial depositions and Biden-related discovery would have been highly illuminating. That Weiss consciously chose to back down from the threat calls into question the legitimacy of his overall investigation, and whether he really is that timid, or he’s not really on the side of serious investigative lawyering.

The bleat about Constitutional crisis from making a sitting President testify in open court about anything is idiotic, and I’ll deal with it briefly: then-President Bill Clinton tested in court—in front of a grand jury as the subject of that grand jury’s investigation. Of course, Weiss knew this, and he knew that if Clark called Joe Biden, Biden would be testifying as a witness, not as a subject.

That Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Weiss to be a special counsel in the Hunter Biden investigation charade after Weiss had so cravenly folded is a clear illustration of the Biden DoJ’s effort to white wash anything related to Little Biden and the Big Guy.

Go Ahead On

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IBM was interested in buying the Israeli chip maker, Tower Semiconductor, and the acquisition might have raised antitrust concerns in Israel, the US, the EU, and elsewhere around the world. Each of those antitrust concerns, if acted on, would have had effect only inside the nation raising the concern, however, making the matter purely a business decision whether to go through with the merger and simply not do business in the objection nation. Nobody objected, though, except the People’s Republic of China.

The PRC’s State Administration for Market Regulation balked and withheld approval, so IBM meekly quit the deal altogether, apparently in order to appease the PRC and preserve—IBM hoped—its other business concerns there.

Slow walking or outright blocking tech and other mergers with, or acquisitions by, American companies is part of the PRC’s economic aggression against us as that nation objects to our objecting to the PRC’s economic aggressions and to its tech and intellectual property extortion and theft. IBM is working, it seems, at cross-purposes with our struggle against the PRC.

Other moves by the PRC have included blocking

  • Qualcomm‘s acquisition of Netherland’s chip maker NXP Semiconductors
  • DuPont‘s acquisition of electronics-materials specialist Rogers Corp, an Arizona-headquartered company
  • certain PRC domiciled companies from buying memory chips from US chip giant Micron

It would have been better for IBM—and those other companies, too; IBM‘s managers don’t have a lock on timidity—to proceed with the acquisition and to eliminate the PRC’s antitrust concerns by not doing business associated with the acquisition’s chips inside the PRC or with businesses domiciled inside the PRC. Or for IBM, et al., to stop doing business with the PRC altogether.

It would have been a beneficial twofer had IBM gone ahead on with the acquisition: IBM and Tower merge, Israel, the US, the EU, and most of the rest of the world would reap the benefits of the merging, and IBM and Tower would be out from under the PRC’s regulatory thumb.

It would be beneficial for our nation, too, if the managers of our businesses had the courage to stand up to our enemies and walk away from them.