Tag Archives: politics

Negotiating with Canadian Politicians

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Ontario Premier Doug Ford ran an ad pushing back on President Donald Trump’s (R) Canadian tariffs that deliberately, cynically, and dishonestly took sentences out of a Ronald Reagan speech and remixed them, shorn of their original context, into Doug Ford screed against Trump and those tariffs. This is the same Ontario Premier who earlier in the year, when trade negotiations with Canada were just getting underway, threatened to terminate the province’s energy shipments to the US.

In response to the Ford ad, Trump, last Thursday, called a halt to negotiations with Canada over trade. The Wall Street Journal‘s news writer mischaracterized the situation:

Trump threw the economic relationship with Canada into a tailspin late Thursday….

The news writer is no better than the Canadian provincial premier. Ford had thrown the economic relationship into a tailspin with his dishonestly distortionate ad; Trump was merely responding to the smear. Through his spokesperson, Kush Desai, Trump said,

Further talks are a futile effort if Canada can’t be serious.

After that, Ford said he’d “pause” his ad campaign effective today (Monday). He first ran his ad misquoting Reagan ‘way back on 16 October, fully a week before Trump acted. Now he’s magnanimously agreeing to “pause” his ad campaign after it’s run an additional four days. There’s no reason Ford couldn’t pull his distorting campaign last Thursday, whether “pausing” it or terminating it.

Trump is being uncharacteristically polite. Further talks with Canada are futile if Canadian senior politicians are going to lie about the situation.

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.”

A Solid Proposal

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John Early, of the Cato Institute and ex-Assistant Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (two times), has a thought on how to further remove unconstitutional race considerations from Federal government tolerance and behavior. Expanding on Chief Justice John Roberts’s observation that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race[,]” he offers this:

One simple way that the Trump administration can promote these objectives is by revising the Office of Management and Budget’s Statistical Policy Directive 15, which specifies the kind of data on race and ethnicity government agencies must collect. The current directive is unconstitutional, discriminatory, and scientifically unsound.
If OMB revised the directive to prohibit the collection of racial data, it would make it more difficult for regulators and attorneys to devise schemes for government to discriminate by race.

He’s mostly right on this. There is no need for the Federal government to collect race or ethnicity data under a couple of axes. One is that it’s barred by the 14th Amendment, which requires all of us to be treated equally under law. That makes race irrelevant. The other axis is that we’re all American citizens—see that 14th Amendment, again. We’re all the same in every way that matters to law.

There is, thus, no need for the Federal government to collect any data on persons present in our nation beyond the number of American citizens and the number of non-citizens actually present. I’d break that last into two categories, but not doing so wouldn’t be a deal breaker: the number of resident aliens and the number of illegal aliens. That last subcategory would, of necessity, be a guess, but DHS and Interior have the resources with which to make reasonably educated guesses.

“Mostly right:” there’s little need to collect ethnicity data either: the ethnicity of us American citizens is American. Full stop. There might be interest in collecting ethnicity data regarding non-citizens present in our nation, but that centers mostly on the illegal aliens so we know the first option regarding where to deport them. Ethnicity data regarding these, though, can be identified as the illegal aliens are caught; there’s no real need to collect the data as a matter of course.

Jews for Nazism?

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One Jew, anyway. The Progressive-Democratic Party candidate for Senator from Maine, Graham Platner, sports—has done for 18 or so years—a Nazi symbol tattooed onto his chest: a copy of the skull and crossbones as used by the SS Totenkopf (more formally, the SS-Totenkopfverbände and not to be confused with the 3rd SS Panzer Division Totenkopf), which operated the Nazis’ concentration and Jew extermination camps.

That’s all jake with Vermont’s “Independent” Senator Bernie Sanders (he enthusiastically caucuses with the Progressive-Democratic Party Senators).

…what he did was, he has expressed his darkness on the internet, probably not a brilliant thing to do, all right, and he said things that are stupid, things that were hurtful. He has apologized for it.

Sanders proceeded to profess his continued support for this fellow Party candidate.

Platner wore that despicable symbol of Jew hatred for the 18 years, but he apologized for it. That makes it all better. Never mind that he still wears it, albeit “disguised” with another tattoo overlaid on it.

Never mind, either, that tattoos can be removed with laser treatment.

A Jewish Senator supporting Nazism because Party. A Jewish Senator excusing Nazism in any guise.

Imagine that.

New Sanctions and some Thoughts

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President Donald Trump (R) has implemented new sanctions on Russia in response to the barbarian’s continued intransigence in its invasion of Ukraine—blacklisting Russia’s two biggest oil producers and a plethora of their subsidiaries. As The Wall Street Journal notes, how much the sanctions will impact Russia depends on three major factors:

  • how well they are enforced
  • the reaction of major markets in India and China
  • whether Moscow can circumvent the measures

Regarding the first, that depends on Europe, India, and the People’s Republic of China. In the short term, Europe will give a strong indication of how serious those nations are in supporting Ukraine and how serious they are in beefing up their defense establishments and industries so as to be able to face down the confrontation with Russia that will follow as the night does the day if Russia succeeds in conquering Ukraine. Carrots can be offered those nations, and a primary one would be tariff relief in exchange for strictly enforcing the sanctions. There even are ready to hand alternative sources for oil and natural gas to supply their current and buildup energy needs.

Tariff relief and improved mutual investment agreements, along with those readily available alternative oil and gas sources, would go a long way to weaning India off Russian oil.

Another carrot is essentially self-referential. By taking themselves completely off Russian energy, they would be proofing themselves against Russian economic blackmail.

The Indian markets can be drawn off Russian energy with tariff relief and mutual investment agreements centered on other matters important to India, Europe, and the US.

The PRC, though, is going to buy Russian oil and gas regardless. The two nations already have an economic arrangement in place that allows the PRC to develop Siberian hydrocarbon resources in return for first pick on the output of that development. When those distributing pipelines are built from Siberia into the PRC, the latter will get the former’s oil and gas functionally at no cost.

There’s more to this, though than just the blacklists. What’s also needed is better enforcement and strengthening of the existing bars against technology transfers and against equipment and maintenance supply transfers that are needed to develop wells and to maintain delivery pipelines to refineries, to (re)build and maintain refineries, and to build and maintain refined output pipelines delivering to end users.

The third factor centers on the black market, the Russian shadow fleet of oil tankers serving that black market, and the buyers’ shadow fleet of tankers as ships meeting the Russian ships for at-sea transfers. This is, perhaps, the most straightforward factor to handle, if the most difficult for the politically timid national managers. The shadow fleet ships could be—have been in the main—easily identified and seized, their cargo transferred to the seizing nation for its use (not resale) and the ships sent to the breakers for recouping the scrap metal and such other items as might be useful. Those shadow fleet ships whose captains resist seizure should simply have their ships sunk on the spot, without wasting much time arguing the matter: “Prepare to be boarded.” “No.” Sink the ship.

All of that is straightforward, only that first factor of widespread enforcement will take some political maneuverings among the relevant nations.