Another example of how our current drug-regulatory process may be killing people. I may start taking metformin. Since everyone has diabetes these days, I should be able to get a prescription for it.
Category Archives: Law
This Week’s Vandenberg Launch
Even though they have enough performance for a return to launch site, they’ll still be landing downrange on the ship (or perhaps closer to the site). Chris G. explains why.
Regulating Commercial Space Companies
Laura Montgomery says that Congress and/or the White House could ease the burden of Article VI of the Outer Space Treaty. Some at the COPUOS and UNOOSA will bitch, but Washington should team up with Luxembourg, who is taking the lead in Europe, on this.
Hill Republicans To Trump
“It’s just frustrating to be constantly reacting to his sh*t,” a GOP Senate aide explained.
And growing discord between the White House and Capitol Hill won’t prove helpful when lawmakers return in September with a lengthy to-do list.
“The president has torched whatever political capital or moral authority he ever had,” a GOP aide told IJR. “He is uniquely incapable of political leadership. If we get tax reform done, it won’t be with his help. It’ll be in spite of him and his vortex of incompetence and destruction.”
“The more distracted [Trump] is tweeting about Mika [Brzezinski] or his historic victory or the 4 million illegal votes, the better the odds are that we get tax reform. If he gets interested in tax reform, it will probably die just like everything else he touches,” he added.
When it comes to legislation, like Obama, he has the reverse Midas touch.
Johnny Has “The Talk”
Beware
…the ObamaCare Industrial Complex:
You can call this a bailout or just a swindle of taxpayers who were fed a litany of lies about Obamacare’s virtues from the very start. Either way taxpayers get shafted (again) and the Obamacare industrial complex gets fat and happy. If Republicans are partners to this fiscal crime, they are as culpable as the Democrats who passed this turkey in the first place and they certainly don’t deserve to be the governing party.
John McCain can rot in Hell.
The Price Of Power
An expose of the corrupt extraconstitutional political party system. Not sure what the solution to this is, but I’m sure the Founders would have found it toxic.
Google’s CEO
Given that the full text of the memo is public, that it is the subject of a national debate on an important subject, that many educated people disagree with one another about what claims it made, and that clarity can only help Google employees adhere to the company’s rules going forward, would you be willing to highlight the memo using green to indicate the “much” that you identified as “fair to debate” and red to flag the “portions” that you deemed Code-of-Conduct violations?
He can’t do that, because a) he doesn’t know himself and b) maintaining uncertainty is a key element of totalitarian thought control.
[Update a couple minutes later]
The Google Archipelago: A nice round up of links from Ed Driscoll.
[Updatea a while later]
This whole thing is so rife with irony. Google may regret being a California company:
Dan Eaton, an employment lawyer, in San Diego wrote on CNBC: “Federal labour law bars even non-union employers like Google from punishing an employee for communicating with fellow employees about improving working conditions … California law prohibits employers from threatening to fire employees to get them to adopt or refrain from adopting a particular political course of action.”
He also said” “It is unlawful for an employer to discipline an employee for challenging conduct that the employee reasonably believed to be discriminatory, even when a court later determines the conduct was not actually prohibited by the discrimination laws.”
Oh, what a tangled web we weave…
[Monday-morning update]
Cathy Young has an interview with Damore, in which he provides his influencers. I’m probably going to write up something on this myself at some point. There are so many issues to unpack.
[Update early afternoon]
Yes, Pichai should go, but that’s not enough:
When you use Facebook or Google (or Twitter, or Amazon, or Netflix) you’re sharing a lot of data with a company that you have to trust won’t abuse that. It’s much harder to trust a company that has decided to aggressively pursue thoughtcrime. And it doesn’t matter where you are on the political spectrum – Damore describes himself as a centrist. But it only takes one politically incorrect utterance, as so many in academia have learned, to achieve Enemy Of The People status. And then, apparently, you’re fair game.
Can you trust a self-driving car from Google, if some new company policy might reprogram it to avoid events Google doesn’t approve? Can you trust Google to prevent its (apparently many) “social-justice warrior” employees from trawling through your personal data looking for dirt, and then leaking it?
As Robert Tracinski writes, this is the big danger for Google: “The most dangerous part is that they are now beginning to be seen by the public (or revealed, depending on how you look at it) as politicized entities. Politicized entities to whom we are giving enormous amounts of data on our lives, thoughts and interests.”
There should, at a minimum, be Congressional hearings.
From College Indoctrination
It is no surprise, then, that corporations are increasingly populated with young adults who do not know how to handle political views or scientific claims they have been taught are out of bounds of public discussion. When Google’s diversity officer replied to James Damore’s email, it was an incoherent affirmation of the company’s diversity policy, coupled with an accusation of sexism. It didn’t even attempt to cite reasons why the science Damore mentioned was wrong, or why his political views about diversity policy were misguided. It just asserted they were, and then used that assertion the next day as a pretext to fire him. This is what we get when university professors abuse their power and attempt to turn students into pawns in their political game, rather than autonomous agents with the capacity (but not yet ability) to think for themselves.
Combined with the problems of journalism, which are also discussed, this is a societal disaster.
[Update a while later]
Straight talk about sex differences in the workplace.
[Update mid-morning]
No one expects the Google Inquisition.
[Late-morning update]
By firing the memo author, Google validated his thesis.
[Update a few minutes later]
I don’t often agree with David Brooks, but yes, the Google CEO should resign.
[Update early afternoon]
Google is run like a religious cult:
“Conform and carry out the rituals, and you’ll be rewarded and praised; ask any uncomfortable questions or offend the wrong people, and the threats and public shaming will be swift and ruthless. The religion in this case is a kind of intersectional feminism, its central tenets are Diversity and Inclusion, its demonic enemy is Bias, and its purifying rituals include humiliating forms of ‘training’ that resemble Maoist struggle sessions.”
“This might sound crazy to a lot of your readers, but college students should understand, since it’s a similar culture.”
This is just awful.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Apparently, Damore wasn’t sufficiently afraid. He didn’t see that this was the unacknowledged rule. Google is a safe space, muffling the fear. That in itself is something to be afraid of. When sparing everyone fear is the order of the day, you need to fear you will be deemed the embodiment of the fear that others must be spared. Then you’re completely unsafe. And gone. No man, no fear.
And as Stalin would have said, “No problem.”
[Update a while later]
Obstruction Of Justice In The Clinton “Matter”
We now know that the White House was involved.
We need congressional hearings on this. Competent ones, though that’s a lot harder.
[Update a few minutes later]
The real story of that tarmac meeting gets stranger.
My question is, where is Jeff Sessions? Why is he letting this happen? He didn’t recuse himself from this.
[Afternoon update]
Lynch’s attorney now on Congressional committee investigating Lynch. It seems to be standard operating procedure for Democrats to be allowed to investigate themselves.
[Update a while later]
Related, in that it’s about more Clinton/Obama corruption: A judge orders the State Department to find more missing Benghazi emails.
We still don’t know where Obama was that night.