Tag Archives: responsibilities

Homicide Rates

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These data are from USAFacts, and they’re at the county level, since that’s the maximum data fineness that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, USAFacts‘ source, publishes.

The top 10 homicide rates—homicides per 100,000 population—were in these counties as of 2023 (the latest data available from CDC):

The closest major city is for context; the rates are for the indicated county.

Every single one of these counties is run by Progressive-Democratic Party politicians.

The 10 counties with the largest increase in homicide rates, 2023 over 2018, are these:

Again, the closest major city is for context; the rates are for the indicated county. All of these counties are Party run, also. Given the overlap between high rates and rising rates, it shouldn’t be surprising that at least most of these are Party run.

One item of note here, while acknowledging that these data are a year and a half-ish old, is DC. That county had the third highest homicide rate and the ninth highest rate of increase in its homicide rate. It seems true that DC’s homicide rate is lower today than in 2023, but it’s still among the highest in the nation.

No less a light than PBS cited a Rochester Institute of Technology report that indicated that DC’s homicide rate per 100,000 had fallen in 2024 to 27.3. What those “fact checkers” chose to ignore was that even in the RIT report, DC’s rate was the fourth highest of the 24 cities that RIT looked at, and it’s still higher than that 2018 starting figure by 33%. That last, though, is my calculation from comparing RIT‘s 2024 value with the starting value in the second figure above. The RIT report did not look at rates of increase of homicide rates.

Yet this is the poor performance of DC’s governance that Party is so desperate to defend as they zealously oppose President Donald Trump’s (R) concerted effort to clean the place up.

No, It’s Not

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On the matter of an organization’s cybersecurity responsibilities, Kurt Knutsson opened with this in a Fox News article:

When a hospital or nonprofit falls victim to a cyberattack, it’s hard to place blame. Cybersecurity isn’t their strength, and many lack the budget for a dedicated security team, let alone a chief technology officer.

It’s completely straightforward to fix blame in such a case, as in all other cases. Knutsson identified the culprits even while denying the difficulty of identifying them. The lack of sufficient budget and (not or) the lack of security-capable IT personnel is directly the fault of the hospital or nonprofit’s management team, who refused to provide the budget necessary to have proper security against cyberattacks.

Especially for hospitals, which maintain so much personal and personally identifying medical data, such conscious decisions to not perform are inexcusable. Cybersecurity needn’t be an organization’s strength, but cybersecurity—and the personnel and resources needed to achieve and maintain it—most assuredly need to be a serious undertaking.

“Security” and “Guarantee”

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US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff says that in return for an end to the Russian invasion of Ukraine Russia would accept a US-led security guarantee.

Witkoff suggested the guarantees could be modeled on NATO’s principle of collective defense, which is codified in Article 5 of the NATO treaty, which says that an enemy attack against one member would be viewed as an attack against all.

But then the question becomes, what is the response to this attack against all? This is the text of that Article 5 [emphasis added]:

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.
Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security.

Such action does not mandate use of armed force; it easily could be simply firm finger-wagging, stern speeches, and strong letters. All while the barbarian rolls on.

Keep in mind, too, that in the present invasion, the invader sits on the UN’s Security Council and so can block entirely any meaningful UN (leaving aside the contradiction internal to that phrase) response.

This is a guarantee without teeth. It seems Russian President Vladimir Putin has a better understanding of Article 5 than anyone in the West. That’s a mismatch as dangerous as the mismatch of wills between the barbarian and the West.

Disingenuous

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The Canadian government has ordered binding arbitration in the dispute between Air Canada and its flight attendants union, the latter which struck the airline a week ago last Saturday. The union is crying foul over not having gotten its way, accusing the airline, in typical union fashion, of sandbagging (the union’s term) the negotiations.

On the other hand, there’s this, also, from the union regarding those negotiations.

The airline said it offered its flight attendants a 38% increase in total compensation over a four-year period. The proposal also offered a 12% to 16% rise in hourly pay in the first year. The union said the pay offers failed to help its members recover after historically-high inflation this decade.

Leave aside the minor fact that the airline didn’t cause the inflation, the Canadian government’s response to economic factors did, so the union’s beef regarding the effects of inflation is properly between it and the government.

What the union is choosing to ignore in its inflation beef is that the airline suffers just as much from that historically-high inflation and must also deal with the resulting price increases and current elevated price levels.

Yes and No

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Just one example on the matter of drug approvals.

A case in point is Replimune’s melanoma treatment, which the FDA rejected last month. About a third of patients who hadn’t responded to prior immunotherapy showed a strong response to Replimune’s in a clinical trial.
Tumors shrank in nearly all patients, and responses proved durable over three years. Serious side effects were rare. Oncologists who treated patients in the trial hailed the results.

These are responses in absolute terms. The drug was safe, and it worked.

The FDA blocked its release into the market though:

[T]he FDA said the trial was “not considered to be an adequate and well-controlled clinical investigation that provides substantial evidence of effectiveness.”
Its quibble is that the trial lacked a control group.

This is a demand for a relative outcome—whether the drug worked better or worse, and whether it was safer or less so, than the status quo. The status quo is what a control group presents.

The answer, though, is not to stop “quibbling” about control groups when assessing drug trial efficacy. Instead, it’s necessary for the FDA to get out of the business of requiring, as a condition of approval, that a drug work. FDA’s role should hold out only for assessing a drug’s safety. The market, formed by patients and their doctors, will do a perfectly fine job of assessing the drug’s effectiveness, with no more exceptions than are extant in any other market. That Replimune’s drug was shown to work in absolute terms is a happy additional outcome and should not represent even this much of an acceptance criterion.

This is where FDA Commissioner and medical doctor Marty Makary can—and should—make the changes to the FDA’s approval processes. A doctor’s primary injunction is “first, do no harm.” So it should be with the FDA. A doctor continues, with his patient, actively to treat the medical problem. The FDA, on the other hand, should stop at the do no harm part. Let the practicing doctors and their patients do the rest.