Tag Archives: culture

What Will She Do with that Intelligence?

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Mexico’s President Claudia Scheinbaum doesn’t want to deal with Mexico’s cartels (mostly drug, but they’re into sex- and child-trafficking, also, and a few other…industries) violently. Her predecessor also swore off hard-style confrontations, insisting on dealing with them with hugs. Scheinbaum wants to increase intelligence efforts in dealing with them, even including a willingness to receive intelligence from the US government. But no more help than that.

Sheinbaum said her government had accepted the US offer for help in obtaining information and intelligence, but she rejected US intervention in Mexico’s affairs. “Intervention isn’t justice,” she said.

That “intervention” was an offer to assist—not to do for or to do instead—Mexico in dealing with the cartels kinetically, which is to say, violently.

Last week, Carlos Manzo, the anti-cartel mayor of Uruapan, the largest city in the state of Michoachan, the state immediately west of Mexico City, was hugged several times, fatally so, by the cartels. Even so,

[Sheinbaum] pledged to continue with her policy of strengthening Mexico’s National Guard, concentrating on the use of police intelligence to take down violent criminals while addressing the social causes of crime.
Sheinbaum criticized political opponents who she said were taking advantage of Manzo’s killing to attack the government, and said she had ordered an investigation into the surge in antigovernment posts on social media.

When those violent criminals and/or their cartel supporters resist being “taken down?” Will she continue to answer their violence with her own hugs? So far, her response is limited to inflicting lawfare violence on those impudent enough to criticize her government’s handling of the cartels. Why not hug them, too, instead?

Scheinbaum apparently has no serious use for that intelligence, American or her own nation’s.

This is what a failing narco- and trafficking-centric nation looks like.

Hysteria

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It runs deep in the Progressive-Democratic Party, even if it is artificial and cynically constructed. The latest example is provided by Congressman Eric Swalwell (D, CA):

Don’t even think of seeking the Democratic nomination for president unless you pledge to take a wrecking ball to the Trump Ballroom on DAY ONE.

Not immigration reform differences, not Obamacare subsidies, not spending or taxing policy differences. Just whether a President is allowed to remodel a portion of the White House.

This is how far Progressive-Democrats’ focus on manufacturing hysteria about anything Trump has taken them from matters important to us average Americans.

More Whining and Bodice Ripping

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This time, it’s from a Wall Street Journal editor, Collin Levy.

President Donald Trump (R) is expanding the East Wing with a ballroom fit for its purpose—to entertain visiting numbers of national leaders, not just any dignitary, and to put on the welcome and entertainment that fits such large gatherings. The expansion is to replace convening those same large gatherings in a collection of tents out on the White House lawn. Levy objects, and she opened her cri de coeur with this:

It [the new ballroom] might have been be tacky, but the republic can withstand some nouveau riche architecture on federal property.

That’s typical journalistic arrogance; she’s masquerading her opinion as received fact. On the contrary, what’s tacky is entertaining foreign leaders outdoors in tents as though the White House lawn is home for trailer park trash.

She closed her tearful piece with this:

It [the White House] is a symbol of power, legacy, and national identity. Respect for the nation and all that it has built still matters. These aren’t trifles or overreactions. They are the foundations of the republic we built. That’s worth defending.

The White House as an edifice is, indeed, a symbol. The larger, more important symbols of our nation’s power, legacy, and national identity, though, are our respect for and rule of law, the integrity of our national borders, and our American culture centered on the idea of inalienable rights coming from our Creator, not any government, and of individual liberty along with liberty’s dual, individual responsibility. And that culture, ideal of law (including those borders), and culture are what the White House stands in symbol of.

Those symbols presently are threatened by domestic terrorism; politicians musing on and hoping for the murder of political opponents and their children; attempts at murdering a President by a Leftist; politicians’ threats of violence against Supreme Court Justices and attempts at murdering one of them; the actual murder by Leftists of a leading Conservative activist; and the divisive likening of political opponents to Hitler and fascism, followed by attempts at mass murder of Republican Congressmen.

Yet, all this WSJ editor can find—all she can think of—to worry about is a needed remodel and expansion of the White House’s East Wing, a modification that will add to the White House’s grandeur.

Schumer Shutdown Food Funds Cutoff

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The Department of Agriculture has run out of funds, due to the Schumer Shutdown, and as a result, food stamps will not be issued in November.

This is what Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) has said is good for Democrats. Cutting the needy off from badly needed nutrition resource support is what House Minority Whip Katherine Clark (D, MA) says is a legitimate thing to do because it produces leverage for Democrats.

This is the cynicism of the Progressive-Democratic Party.

All within the Party, nothing outside the Party, nothing against the Party.

Especially nothing from the Party for our nation, nothing from the Party for us average Americans.

A Medical Man Demands Slow Approvals

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In his letter to The Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section, Todd Lorenz, a Stanford University employee degreed as a Medical Doctor, pushed for FDA to continue to pass on the efficacy of a new drug as a condition for approving it, never minding that that would drastically slow approval and subsequent availability.

There is no way to know for certain if drugs work without doing efficacy studies in humans. Preclinical and animal studies, while helpful, can’t predict with confidence which drugs will be useful. Most investigational cancer drugs that go into the clinic have been shown to work in animal models. Most don’t work in patients.

In a truly competitive free market, those that don’t work won’t stay in the market for long. Delaying approval until efficacy can be “proven,” though, denies cancer patients access to those drugs that do work, unnecessarily—unconscionably—risking their lives. Lorenz closed with this:

The answer, then, is to approve drugs after they’ve been demonstrated to be safe. Yet no drug is completely safe; some can lead to substantial adverse reactions. It may be acceptable to prescribe drugs with such profiles if the diseases they are intended to treat are serious enough to warrant the risk. The choice to use any drug in a particular patient always depends on such a cost-benefit analysis. Without an objective assessment of efficacy, no such determination is possible.

No drug is ever completely efficacious, either. Even so, Lorenz contradicted his call for a cost-benefit analysis with that repeated demand for an objective assessment of efficacy. He ignores the simple fact that that cost-benefit analysis is best done—is most effectively done—by the patient and his doctor, not by Government. The benefits and costs of a particular drug treatment can only be assessed empirically by those two critical analyzers acting in a medical drug market that is competitively fed by safe drugs. Those empirically collected use and outcome data will determine efficacy, and they will do so far faster and far more thoroughly than can a government agency populated by bureaucrats who happen to have medical degrees of one sort or another, and who hold out for repeated trials with sample sizes that are miniscule relative to the target population, even if those sample sizes argued to be statistically significant.

UCLA Emeritus Professor James Meyer, also the proud possessor of a degree as a Medical Doctor, complemented Lorenz with his own non sequitur.

Messrs Hooper and Steiner [Deregulation Can Make Medications Cheaper] argue that the cost of new drugs could be greatly reduced if the FDA focused only on their safety. Maybe so. But this overlooks that the federal government has had a major and increasing interest in efficacy since the passage of Medicare (1965), the growing responsibility for veteran care since the Vietnam War (1965) and the passage of ObamaCare (2010).

You bet it does. Those agencies have burgeoning populations of bureaucrats to keep employed and to keep expanding. Never mind that bit about denying access to safe drugs by those who need them until a collection of bureaucrats gets around to approving “efficacy.”