Government Defends Itself

 Studies acknowledged by FDA officials show that the FDA’s various safety databases only collect an estimated 1 to 13 percent of all adverse eventsthat occur. Multiple FDA drug safety epidemiologists have stated during official FDA presentation that it only takes a single well-documented adverse event to justify a safety signal investigation and in turn to warn the American public of the potential risk.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/02/10/former-senior-fda-official-manufacturers-fda-negligent-in-not-investigating-covid-19-vaccine-risks-to-heart-health/

Dirty From Any Angle

They say Trump is rogue, a lawbreaker. Most presidents are and do, to some degree. That's we we're smart to fear them. "Power corrupts" and all of that.

They say the opposition party unlawfully used the power of the state to oppose a political opponent. There's more evidence to support that position than the other, but that doesn't the current president was clean or will stay clean.

Either way, the political establishment benefits when they force us to pick a side in self defense, no matter how repugnant.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/its-official-every-aspect-of-crossfire-hurricane-was-shady/

Too Obvious

This is a story of the obvious - authoritarians governments don't care about individuals and even if they did, they are constrained by acting in their behalf.

Not sure why this isn't obvious to all those who incessantly push for more government power and control.

https://outline.com/ynTxL4

The Appeal of Simplicity

I know many Americans are chomping at the bit to turn our entire economy over to a bunch of coastal blue city hipsters and college professors, along with all our money and our personal freedom, because of a dubious moral panic over future weather, but I’d like to suggest a better idea. I call it the Red, White and Blue New Deal, and it’s a little different than the proposed Green New Deal that seems to benefit only virtue signaling limo libs, crony capitalists, and aspiring commissars. The Red, White and Blue New Deal would, instead, be directed at benefiting Normal Americans – you know, those people who built our country, feed it, fuel it and defend it. People like you and me. So, here it is. All of it:

Support your own damn self and leave me the hell alone.

https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2019/02/11/how-about-a-red-white-and-blue-new-deal-n2541116

That kind of simplicity has appeal. I have been pondering of late, as I listen to some other empty headed animal food trough wiper bemoaning inequality, is what percentage of the US population is not capable of making their own way in the world.

One group might be the ones with the 10-20% lowest IQ. One group might be addicts. One group might be injured/ill or genetic anomaly.  One group might be the mentally ill. In the ideal these folks would be cared for by their families or a charitable effort, but most of us now think that's too much of a burden to place on so few.

How many of us are a net economic loss (we produce less than we consume)? What percent of us are carried by the wealthy?

Converting to Freedom?

To switch from music to economics might sound like moving from the sublime to the dismal. Yet as paradoxical as it seems, economics is what enabled me finally to deliver something like Bach’s answer about my own work. As a Catholic dedicated to the welfare of those at the periphery of society, I am an expert witness to the fact that there has never been a better system than free enterprise for empowering real people to pull themselves out of poverty. There has never been a better system to allow people to unlock the unique sense of dignity that comes with earning their own way, deploying their talents to serve their community, colleagues or customers, and taking home justifiable pride in—and rewards for—their efforts. And there is no reason, if we are serious about our Christian apostolate, that free enterprise should become an idol in itself, impoverish anyone or capture our souls.
http://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2017/02/06/confessions-catholic-convert-capitalism

Wouldn't It Suck If We Made Our President Into A King ... And Then The Other Guys Regained Power?

In one way, it’s not surprising that Democrats are beside themselves at the possibility of a Trump presidency. They’ve spent the last 100 years expanding the scope of executive authority, granting the federal administrative agencies the power of judge, jury, and executioner over their ever-widening dominion. If liberals and progressives didn’t want that awesome, intrusive power to fall into the wrong hands, perhaps they should have heeded the warnings of small-government conservatives, who railed for a century against the bloat, rot, and corruption they saw metastasizing within the District of Columbia. Perhaps they shouldn’t have declared the U.S. Constitution—with its bill of rights and enumerated powers—to be an antiquated relic.
http://city-journal.org/html/normalize-14753.html

I don't think the progressives get the irony, yet.

Not that there's any reason to think Trump would be a worse king than another Clinton.

In Theory

As it happens, Clinton’s agenda, as my colleague Adam Davidson also wrote the other day, does have a unifying theme. It’s the same one that Democrats have been running on for twenty-five years, a period in which they have won the popular vote in five out of six Presidential elections, and it involves using the power of the government to tilt the economy in favor of working people. Trump, although he talks like a populist, has largely adopted the regressive economic policies of the Republican establishment. 

http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/the-presidential-debate-is-clintons-chance-to-outfox-trump?intcid=mod-latest

They have been running on for 25 years?  More like 100 years.  More federal government power, more pretense that the federal government pulling strings will give us the predicted results without the negative unintended consequences.  Giving more power to an already over-reaching federal government is just giving more booze and faster cars to teens.  I would say only idiots could think this will work, but I know too many smart people who are still caught in this fantasy.

Ugliness at the University (Another Institution Tarnished)

Then Potts-Kant's troubles got worse. Duke officials took a closer look at her work and didn't like what they saw. Fifteen of her papers, mostly dealing with pulmonary biology, have now been retracted, with many notices citing "unreliable" data. Several others have been modified with either partial retractions, expressions of concern, or corrections. And last month, a U.S. district court unsealed a whistleblower lawsuit filed by a former colleague of Potts-Kant. It accuses the researcher, her former supervisor, and the university of including fraudulent data in applications and reports involving more than 60 grants worth some $200 million. If successful, the suit—brought under the federal False Claims Act (FCA)—could force Duke to return to the government up to three times the amount of any ill-gotten funds, and produce a multimillion-dollar payout to the whistleblower.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/09/whistleblower-sues-duke-claims-doctored-data-helped-win-200-million-grants

Cause and Effect - Don't Trust the Experts

In 1960, well before large welfare states had been created in Nordic countries, Swedes lived 3.2 years longer than Americans, while Norwegians lived 3.8 years longer and Danes 2.4 years longer. Today, after the Nordic countries have introduced universal health care, the difference has shrunk to 2.9 years in Sweden, 2.6 years in Norway, and 1.5 years in Denmark. The differences in life span have actually shrunk as Nordic countries moved from a small public sector to a democratic-socialist model with universal health coverage. Moreover, the longest average life spans among Nordic peoples are found in Iceland — the small Nordic cousin that has the most distinctly Nordic culture, but also the most limited welfare system. It is equally interesting to look at Nordic Americans, a group that combines the Nordic success culture with U.S.-style capitalism. It was mainly the impoverished people in the Nordic countries who sailed across the Atlantic to found new lives. And yet, as I write in my book, Danish Americans today have fully 55 percent higher living standard than Danes. Similarly, Swedish Americans have a 53 percent higher living standard than Swedes. The gap is even greater, 59 percent, between Finnish Americans and Finns. Even though Norwegian Americans lack the oil wealth of Norway, they have a 3 percent higher living standard than their cousins overseas. Perhaps even more astonishing is that Nordic Americans are more socially successful than their cousins in Scandinavia. They have much lower high-school-dropout rates, much lower unemployment rates, and even slightly lower poverty rates. Similarly, immigrants to the Nordic countries fare worse than those to the U.S. with regard to employment, self-reported health, and the school results of their children. In short: What the American Left admires about the Nordic countries clearly has less to do with their social-democratic welfare states than with the exceptional culture in these historically Protestant societies.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/438331/nordic-democratic-socialist-model-exposing-lefts-myth

#EasyPredictions: The VA, and Medicare/Medicaid, Won't Be "Fixed" - Ever

This seems to be an issue of how many vets are where - in Maine I see folks relatively quickly, in Memphis it was a four month proposition just to get in for a first appointment.

http://theweek.com/articles/626239/obamas-va-scandal-much-bigger-than-callous-disney-analogy

Power Corrupts, Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, Version Infinity

A populist government not limited significantly in power is going bad ... who could have seen that coming ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/how-brazil-the-darling-of-the-developing-world-came-undone/2016/04/14/40ee9356-fab4-11e5-813a-90ab563f0dde_story.html?wpmm=1&wpisrc=nl_most-draw5

The riches flowing from Brazil’s mines, oil fields and farms fueled a consumer spending binge, but they patched over the structural problems that made Brazil a creaky, onerous place to do business.

A privatization plan to build much-needed roads and railways faltered. Productivity remained low because the workforce was badly trained and poorly educated. Companies wasted thousands of hours deciphering a greedy tax system. And all the while, the old way of making deals — lubricating them with graft — went unchanged.

Big construction and energy companies grew fat on state contracts and government loans under Lula and Rousseff, and the opportunities for illegal enrichment were infinite. Slush money poured into political campaigns.

The dirt from those years is now being unearthed by a hard-charging team of prosecutors and a tough lower-court federal judge, Sérgio Moro, who is overseeing the investigation of a bribery scheme at national oil company Petrobras. Through wiretaps, raids, arrests and plea deals, the probe has exposed spider webs of corruption throughout Brazil’s elite.

The Irony of "Public Health"

Obesity researchers then were eying sugary drinks with great suspicion. For decades, dietary guidelines had told Americans to cut back on fat. When it came to weight gain, most experts thought, a calorie is a calorie, no matter the source. Because fat has more than twice as many calories per gram as carbohydrates or protein, people should avoid fat. Then in the 1990s, some nutrition experts—watching obesity rates surge despite that advice—started rethinking carbohydrates.

Some scientists argued that eating carbs floods the bloodstream with sugar, which triggers a sharp release in the hormone insulin. Insulin brings blood sugar down and also tells the body’s cells to store fat rather than burning it. After a carb-led surge in blood sugar, the scientists argued, the outpouring of insulin is so great that within about two hours the blood sugar level crashes down to below normal. That low blood sugar makes people feel hungry, prompting them to eat more. By this line of thinking, a calorie wasn’t just a calorie.

At around the same time, Dr. Robert Lustig was arguing that sugar is not just another carbohydrate but is uniquely bad—he called it toxic. When the fructose in sugar hits the liver, he said, it sets off a hormonal chain reaction causing chronically high insulin levels that, over years, lead to obesity and diabetes.

Yet another group of researchers was showing that calories in beverages are not nearly as filling as calories in food. In one study, when people ate calories in food they compensated by eating less later in the day, but when they drank their calories they actually ate more food later.

In the end, it didn’t matter much to the health department whether soda leads to weight gain because it delivers unnecessary calories, or because those calories come from carbohydrates, or because those carbohydrates are sugar, or because the sugar is in liquid form. Sugary drinks make people fat.

http://www.salon.com/2015/10/17/coca_colas_sneaky_evil_politics_how_big_soda_twisted_race_and_used_the_koch_brothers_to_fight_a_tax/

The irony here - a public health advocate, cheering for the latest round of government manipulation, who won't tell the rest of the story:  government manipulation pushed the population towards sugar, and was the cause of the obesity epidemic and the resulting costs to the national health care coffers.  All those "life saving medications" we are paying for are largely those that treat hypertension, vascular diseases and the diabetes that causes them (and probably causes many cancers too).

The Koch brothers work to their own self interest by opposing government over reach, and make enemies in the process because so many love government over-reach.  Coke exists to sell a toxic product and probably cannot face up to that fact and survive.  Coke and the sugar industry did a fabulous job using the idiots in federal government to manipulate the public's perception of the risks of sugar ingestion whilst those same federal government idiots were telling the public to avoid fat. Neither Coke or any other citizen or business entity on their own did even a fraction of the damage in human health and suffering that our government has.

Will the government lovers ever acknowledge the shortened lives and suffering on their hands?  

Tenterhooks of Tyranny

Colleges have been "discovering" for a long time about the perils of getting in bed with the government, for example, the requirement to admit females into military, and traditionally all male colleges/universities. Gordon, you made the bed, better get horizontal and try to enjoy it.

http://thefederalist.com/2014/07/18/whats-happening-to-gordon-college-is-just-the-beginning/

A Christian college in Massachusetts requested the freedom to live out its ideals, and since some powerful people don't share those ideals they're set to destroy Gordon College—unless it agrees to retreat to the closet.

In June, Gordon's president added his name to a public letter asking President Obama to not force religious organizations into hypocrisy. Obama plans an executive order that would be the equivalent to many organizations of forcing Human Rights Campaign to hire adherents of Westboro Baptist Church. It would force anyone who receives federal funds to hire people whose sexual conduct disgraces all the world's major religions.

A Lack of Funding Isn't the VA's Problem | RealClearPolitics

The author's main point is that the VA should be run with more skill, or competence or something like "better oversight" vice getting more money.  That has worked when with regard to government bureaucracies? The DoD for years could even account for its spending.  More oversight?  What a joke.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/07/25/a_lack_of_funding_isnt_the_vas_problem_123447.html

As VA reform continues to languish in Congress pressure is growing on members to solve the problem with Washington's oldest solution – more funding.
As Garry Augustine, Executive Director of Disabled American Veterans Disabled Veterans, argued recently in the Wall Street Journal, the VA needs "more money – and a predictable funding stream – to do its job." Augustine and others are right to fault Congress for not doing its job of setting priorities but a lack of funding is not the VA's main problem.
The numbers show the VA has hardly been strapped for cash. Funding for the VA has gone up 57 percent since 2008. And at facilities where the worst abuses occurred, such as Phoenix, funding was ample enough to finance to lavish bonuses for the very officials who should have been held accountable for harming veterans. Across the country, the problem has not been a lack of funds but terrible misuses of taxpayer funds that were already directed to help veterans get the care they need.
Moreover, the problems at the VA are not understaffed and overburdened hospitals as much as much as poor management and a lack of accountability and oversight. While funding increased 57 percent since 2008 the number of patients treated at VA facilities went up only 13.8 percent. In other words, funding growth outpaced the growth in patient load by a more than four to one margin.
Also during this time period, the number of full-time physicians at the VA went up 40 percent – again, far more than the patient load. And these significant funding increases went through even though VA doctors, on average, see half as many patients as their private sector counterparts. Poor management is a problem more funding won't solve.
Members and outside lobbyists are also arguing that the VA needs not only more funding but more earmarks. But the earmark era itself caused congressional oversight to atrophy and abuses to grow unchecked. For decades, Congress ignored repeated warning about delays and dysfunction at the VA while it occupied itself with funding Bridges to Nowhere and Woodstock Museums.
Plus, Congress has already tried – and failed – to fix this problem with "directed" or earmarked funds. In Nevada, taxpayers funded a $600 million "state of the art" medical facility in North Las Vegas, yet Nevada continues to be the state with the longest disability claim backlog in the country. Incidentally, the facility is now costing taxpayers almost $1 billion due to cost overruns and mismanagement. The VA built an emergency room that was too small and the facility was missing an ambulance drop-off ramp. I detailed this example and many others in my recent report, "Death, Delay and Dismay at the VA."
Returning to the era earmark would guarantee that the systematic problems at the VA go unresolved. The sad fact is politicians don't do attention-getting ribbon-cutting ceremonies around unceremonious but essential tasks like reducing wait times or filling potholes. Yet, this is the very kind of tedious, difficult work members are paid to do and will be rewarded for doing by a public that is desperately awaiting results and action.
The benchmark of real reform at the VA is an effort to solve the real problem, which is Congress' failure to empower VA officials to manage, and Congress' failure to give veterans real choices. Both of those problems can be solved by making it easier for VA officials to fire bad actors and by giving veterans real choices and spending power when they face long wait times.
Congress' lack of oversight and unwillingness to tackle real problems with real solutions contributed to the deaths of more than 1,000 veterans. Solving this problem is not as difficult as Congress makes it seem. But falling back on more funding as our default solution is the surest way to cause more veterans to fall through the cracks. 

Big Gubment and IT - Not So Grand

The State Department's visa system is currently offline for weeks, keeping businessmen, tourists and exchange students from entering the country. The FBI had to abandon a massive IT project after spending hundreds of millions of dollars.

These bureaucracies did a good job of delivering passports and maintaining files in the industrial age. But they can't keep up in the information age. Moore's Law says that computer capacity doubles in two years or less. Government procurement cycles are a lot longer than that.

Governors and legislators had reason to fear that state health exchange IT wouldn't work well (as it hasn't in about half the states that tried), and they would get blamed. And blamed for being associated with an unpopular law.

All of which suggests a broader lesson. Government was reasonably good at replicating the bureaucratic processes of large corporations in the industrial age. But it's not very good -- it's often downright incompetent -- at replicating the IT processes of firms such as Walmart and Amazon.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/08/05/big_government_worked_better_in_the_industrial_age_not_so_much_in_digital_era_123566.html
I saw this in person.  Complex, integrated solutions were so difficult to develop that we (in the USN) almost never had them.  We developed local, work around solutions to make our IT problems manageable. But these solutions were always subject to human error.  Much pain resulted.

VA Scandal - Predictable (Sigh)

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/under-fire-for-va-scandal-eric-shinseki-faces-grilling-from-congress/

Shinseki, a retired four-star Army general who has led the VA since 2009, is prepared to tell the committee about the VA's response so far to reports that at least 40 veterans died while waiting for care at the Phoenix VA Health Care system. The Phoenix facility reportedly worked to cover up patients' long wait times by creating a secret waiting list and later destroying the evidence.
"If these allegations are true, they are completely unacceptable--to Veterans, to me, and to our dedicated VHA employees," Shinseki's prepared opening statement says. If they are substantiated by the VA Office of Inspector General (OIG), the agency's independent watchdog, Shinseki says that "responsible and timely action will be taken."

Totally predictable - and still outrageous.  Of course the VA is a disaster of efficiency and truthfulness, the relationship between client and payer is broken.

Nothing More Harmful that Crop Farming

"I know many ranchers who are excellent — they want to know how to manage lands to improve the chances of many of these species with high conservation value," says Pague. "I would say fully a third of land out there is in pretty good condition, supporting wildlife and plant communities."

And Pague notes that the conversation around how to produce beef in a "sustainable" way is evolving fast. "Meat buyers and packers, land managers, government agencies, McDonald's — a lot of people are interested. This topic is really hot." (See Dan Charles' post from earlier this week on how this conversation is playing out globally, too.)

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2014/03/27/293904644/can-the-meat-industry-help-protect-wildlife-some-say-yes 

Nothing is more harmful to the environment that annual mono crop farming on an industrial scale.  Sure, that's a bad way to feed animals, too, but the underlying issue is industrial mono crop production.

The Revolt of the Cities

It will be great if these initiative "work".  I doubt they will.

1.  Do gooder ism will become cronyism, a la Detroit and all the rest

2.  Meddling will create problems which will require more meddling until there are so many rules and it is so expensive to do anything good, that it won't be possible.  Employers will leave, again, for the same reasons they left before.  Taxpayers will too.

3.  The drug war rules everything.  Until the perverse incentives of the criminalization of drugs sales are removed or reduced, the inner cities will controlled by the drug trade just as they were by alcohol prohibition.  

4.  The cities will run out of money to do anything at all, a la Detroit and the others.http://prospect.org/article/revolt-cities

Uncle Sam Wants You - To Pay for Their Mistakes

Now, Social Security claims it overpaid someone in the Grice family — it’s not sure who — in 1977. After 37 years of silence, four years after Sadie Grice died, the government is coming after her daughter. Why the feds chose to take Mary’s money, rather than her surviving siblings’, is a mystery.

Across the nation, hundreds of thousands of taxpayers who are expecting refunds this month are instead getting letters like the one Grice got, informing them that because of a debt they never knew about — often a debt incurred by their parents — the government has confiscated their check.

The Treasury Department has intercepted $1.9 billion in tax refunds already this year — $75 million of that on debts delinquent for more than 10 years, said Jeffrey Schramek, assistant commissioner of the department’s debt management service. The aggressive effort to collect old debts started three years ago — the result of a single sentence tucked into the farm bill lifting the 10-year statute of limitations on old debts to Uncle Sam.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/social-security-treasury-target-hundreds-of-thousands-of-taxpayers-for-parents-old-debts/2014/04/10/74ac8eae-bf4d-11e3-bcec-b71ee10e9bc3_story.html Arbitrary and capricious is the word that comes to mind.

He's Hell on Straw Men

Coded in that statement is the disclaimer Obama has affixed to almost every major speech he has ever given on the economy, that he inherited a train wreck (or a car was driven into a ditch, among other metaphors) and that his efforts to turn things around have been stymied at every turn by those who couldn't see their way clear to support him. As National Journal noted earlier this week, Obama was more explicitly critical of the forces buffeting him in his extended interview with The New Yorker, complaining that Johnson, for all of his legislative success, didn't have the problems with Republicans that he does.

Thursday, Obama fully embraced Johnson's vision of the Great Society as his own, placing both their presidencies on a continuum of change and suggesting that it may take years, if not decades, for the current chief executive to be fully appreciated, even as a critical reassessment of LBJ's work continues.

"Today we remain locked in this same great debate about equality and opportunity, and the role of government in ensuring each. As was true 50 years ago, there are those who dismiss the Great Society as a failed experiment and an encroachment on liberty; who argue that government has become the true source of all that ails us, and that poverty is due to the moral failings of those who suffer from it," Obama said. "There are also those who argue ... that nothing has changed; that racism is so embedded in our DNA that there is no use trying politics—the game is rigged. But such theories ignore history."

http://www.nationaljournal.com/politics/obama-begins-to-say-good-bye-20140411