Barbaric Self-Deification of the State

The Horror of Socialized Medicine

European Courts Sentence a Baby to Death

Matt Walsh
TheBlaze




There’s a horrific case over in the U.K. that hasn’t gotten a ton of attention here, but it should. If we look closely, we may see our future — and our present.

Charlie Gard is a 10-month-old baby who suffers from a rare genetic disorder called mitochondrial DNA depletion syndrome. It’s a horrendous condition that leads to organ malfunction, brain damage, and other symptoms. The hospital that had been treating the boy, Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London, made the determination that nothing more can be done for him and he must be taken off of life support. He should “die with dignity,” they said. The parents, Chris Gard and Connie Yates, disagreed.

This is the very crucial thing to understand: they are not insisting that GOSH be forced to keep Charlie on life support. Rather, they want to take him out of the hospital and to America to undergo a form of experimental therapy that a doctor here had already agreed to administer.

If It Disappears, Resurrect It

Obamacare Exchanges on Life Support

by Michelle Malkin 

May 15, 2015

National Review Online

At a recent White House science fair celebrating inventors, a Girl Scout who helped design a Lego-powered page-turning device asked President Obama what he had ever thought up or prototyped. Stumbling for an answer, he replied: “I came up with things like, you know, health care.” 

Ah, yes. “Health care.” Remember when the president’s signature Obamacare health-insurance exchanges were going to be the greatest thing since sliced bread, the remote control, jogger strollers, Siri, the Keurig coffee maker, driverless cars, and Legos all rolled into one? The miraculous, efficient, cost-saving, innovative 21st-century government-run “marketplaces” were supposed to put the “affordable” in Obama’s Affordable Care Act. 

Know-it-all bureaucrats were going to show private companies how to set up better websites (gigglesnort), implement better marketing and outreach (guffaw), provide superior customer service (belly laugh), and eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse (LOLOLOL).

Britain's National Health Service Creaking

Running Out of Other People's Money

NHS may be forced to abandon free healthcare for all, says Britain's top doctor as he warns service need

Tania Steere

The Daily Mail

20 January, 2015

The NHS is ‘not fit for the future’ and unless it undergoes radical change it may be forced to abandon free healthcare for all, in the future, the service's top doctor has warned. Medical director of NHS England Professor Sir Bruce Keogh said the NHS must become far less reliant on hospitals and needed a ‘complete transformation’ of the way it operates. Sir Bruce told the Guardian: ‘If the NHS continues to function as it does now, it’s going to really struggle to cope because the model of delivery and service that we have at the moment is not fit for the future.’ GP surgeries need to be given more resources to cope with the pressures of demand and tight budgets, he added.

Letter From America (About Nimbyism)

That's Not What We Meant, At All

The whole animation of Obamacare is that the wealthy end up paying more so as to subsidise the health care of those less wealthy than they.  The mechanism to achieve this would be the the socialisation of health insurance premiums.  The wealthy's premiums are rising in order to subsidise the premiums of those who are not so wealthy.   Obama and the Democrats "got away" with it by swearing black and blue that this was not so.  In other words, the lie was deliberately forged and propagated by cunning elites.  The rest of the Democrats remained ignorant and just parroted the official "talking points".  Silly "useful idiots"--they trusted their leaders.  How quaint.  

Now Harvard academics are "finding out what's in the Bill"--and they are mad--despite being strongly supportive of Obamacare, and, despite some of their colleagues having been donkey-deep in its design. "Not In My Back Yard" rules amongst the Harvard elites.

Deadly Official Dietary Advice, Part I

The Ministry of Food Propaganda

Almost everything the "authorities" have told you about bad food over the past forty years is wrong.  The assertion was made in The Guardian by  Joanna Blythman. There are at least two aspects to this story, equally important.  The first is to expose the errors, fallacies, and chicaneries for what they are.  The second is to expose the research methodologies, posing as scientific, for the sugar puffs they often are.

First, the exposure of the errors.

Could eating too much margarine be bad for your critical faculties? The "experts" who so confidently advised us to replace saturated fats, such as butter, with polyunsaturated spreads, people who presumably practise what they preach, have suddenly come over all uncertain and seem to be struggling through a mental fog to reformulate their script.

Last week it fell to a floundering professor, Jeremy Pearson, from the British Heart Foundation to explain why it still adheres to the nutrition establishment's anti-saturated fat doctrine when evidence is stacking up to refute it. After examining 72 academic studies involving more than 600,000 participants, the study, funded by the foundation, found that saturated fat consumption was not associated with coronary disease risk. This assessment echoed a review in 2010 that concluded "there is no convincing evidence that saturated fat causes heart disease".

No convincing evidence.  None.  Nada.

Letter From Australia (About the United States)

World-class Fakery on Show

TIM BLAIR
The Daily Telegraph
December 16, 2013 12:00AM

 A RIDICULOUS and under-qualified faker took to the stage last week during Nelson Mandela's memorial service. And next to Barack Obama was some guy who hasn't quite mastered sign language. 
 
Thamsanqa Jantjie's erratic performance has drawn international ridicule, but all he really did was turn the failed president's words into a disappointing jumble of incomprehensible nonsense. As is now apparent, Obama is quite capable of achieving this by himself.

Many Australians were puzzled by American resistance to Obama's universal healthcare plan, back when it was first proposed in 2008. They couldn't understand why the US would not embrace an Australian-style system of health coverage.  One reason is that the system in the US was proposed by Obama and his hopeless administration. If you thought Labor's attempts in Australia to install home insulation and run grocery price websites were lame, they have nothing on Obama's bid to reshape the massive US health sector.

The Annals of Soft-Despotism

It's Unique, So It's Gotta Be Good

A government which sets forth to care for everybody becomes an inevitable soft-despotic monster.  But the monster is incompetent, bumbling, and stupid.  Irremediably so.  The only solution the monster can proffer to overcome its bumbling failures is to throw millions more of "good money" after bad.  It's only solution is to double down on folly. 

Now this is not to say that private (non-state) enterprise is always efficient.  Far from it.  But private enterprise has an enforcer, a ruthless, take-no-prisoners punisher of business incompetence and failures.  Mr Competition is relentless in punishing and driving the bumbling incompetent out of business.  But the soft-despot has no competitors.  It is a despot after all, protected by law. 

We offer yet another illustration of the follies and self-destructive pathogens of a bumbling  soft-despotic government: the Obamacare website.

Obamacare: 500M Lines of Code, $500M, 60% Complete, No Surprise

by John J. Xenakis  

30 Nov 2013, 9:59 PM

Breitbart

The historic IT disaster known as the Obamacare web site has been of intense interest to me, since I've been a Senior Software Engineer for decades, and I have personally participated in, witnessed, and reported on (as a technology reporter) a number of IT disasters. But even so, the size of the Obamacare web site catastrophe on October 1 still takes my breath away.

When I first heard, shortly after October 1, that there was 500 million lines of code in Healthcare.gov, I quickly rejected that figure, because it's impossible.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Obamamandias

Posted on Sunday, November 17, 2013  

By Douglas Wilson 

Blog and Mablog

With apologies to P.B. Shelley . . .

I met a traveler from bankrupt land
Who said: ‘One vast and hapless head of stone
Lies in the desert. Near it, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered website lies, still down.
That haughty look, and sneer of cold command,
And photo-op poses, a myriad!
Still cannot get it, overwhelmed by “things”
Like “If you like it, you can keep it. Period.”
And on the teleprompt these words appear—
“My name is Obamamandias, king of kings:
Look on my work, ye uninsured, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
A once great health care system stretches far away.’

Letter From America (About the US Monarch)

Thus Spake Obama

The incompetence of our neo-monarchy

By Mark Steyn

National Review Online

November 15, 2013 3:30 PM 

 

 It is a condition of my admission to this great land that I am not allowed to foment the overthrow of the United States government. Oh, I signed it airily enough, but you’d be surprised, as the years go by, how often the urge to foment starts to rise in one’s gullet. Fortunately, at least as far as constitutional government goes, the president of the United States is doing a grand job of overthrowing it all by himself.

On Thursday, he passed a new law at a press conference. George III never did that. But, having ordered America’s insurance companies to comply with Obamacare, the president announced that he is now ordering them not to comply with Obamacare. The legislative branch (as it’s still quaintly known) passed a law purporting to grandfather your existing health plan. The regulatory bureaucracy then interpreted the law so as to un-grandfather your health plan. So His Most Excellent Majesty has commanded that your health plan be de-un-grandfathered. That seems likely to work. The insurance industry had three years to prepare for the introduction of Obamacare. Now the King has given them six weeks to de-introduce Obamacare.

“I wonder if he has the legal authority to do this,” mused former Vermont governor Howard Dean. But he’s obviously some kind of right-wing wacko.

Letter From Australia (About Pain in the US)

No Cure as Obamacare Gets Worse 

James Morrow
The Daily Telegraph
November 15, 2013 12:00AM

IN politics, leaders live and die by their promises. Julia Gillard effectively wrote her government into the history books when she went back on her assurance that "there will be no carbon tax under a government I lead". 

In the US, President Barack Obama is in similar strife over an oft-repeated promise that under his plan to overhaul health care - the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare for short - Americans who liked their GPs and their health care plans would be able to keep seeing their GPs and using those same plans.  Or as he put it in various forms to the American public more than two dozen times: "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan."

The only thing is, it turned out not to be true.

Letter From America (About Presidential Prevarications)

A Phalanx of Lies

Remember that health insurance you could keep?

By Mark Steyn

November 1,  2013 8:30 PM

National Review Online

 

CNN has been pondering what they call “a particularly tough few days at the White House.” “Four out of five Americans have little or no trust in their government to do anything right,” says chief political analyst Gloria Borger. “And now Obama probably feels the same way.” Our hearts go out to him, poor wee disillusioned thing.

We are assured by the headline writers that the president was “unaware” of Obamacare’s website defects, and the NSA spying, and the IRS targeting of his political enemies, and the Justice Department bugging the Associated Press, and pretty much anything else you ask him about. But, as he put it, “nobody’s madder than me” at this shadowy rogue entity called the “Government of the United States” that’s running around pulling all this stuff. And, once he finds out who’s running this Government of the United States rogue entity, he’s gonna come down as hard on him as he did on that videomaker in California; he’s gonna send round the National Park Service SWAT team to teach that punk a lesson he won’t forget.

Gloria Borger and CNN seem inclined to swallow the line that the president of the United States is not aware that he is president of the United States.

Annals of Soft Depostism

Worthy Mockery

In the Annals of Soft-Despotism we lampoon the pathetic works of the all-nannying-state.  This, we remind our readers, is the dominant idolatry of the post-Christian West.  Whereas once men looked to God and His providence to sustain their lives and provide for them, sophisticated moderns now look to the State, as their vaunted secular deity.  The Living God is so passe, so medieval, so primitive.  We are all moderns now and we worship a new shiny god--one we have made ourselves, in our own image.

God, however, sits in the heavens and mocks the rebellious kings of the earth.  This includes Western secular governments, due to their vain attempts to shake of the bonds and cords of God, their Creator.

He who sits in the heavens laughs;
the Lord holds them in derision.
Then he will speak to them in his wrath
and terrify them in his fury. (Psalm 2: 4,5)

Behold the wonders of the vast realms of the secularists and their idol.  John Stewart, himself a public acolyte of secularism and statism,  leads us in a hymn of adoration--in this case, to the demi-god Obama and the idolatrous realm of the Federal Government.  The problem: the god is trying to provide health care.  Will the wonders never cease?  Stewart and his followers are miffed because their god has disappointed them, failed them. 

Let the derisive lampooning proceed:

Death Panels, Anyone?

Dehumanising and Unjust

When Sarah Palin came out criticising President Obama's socialising of the health system in the United States, saying the system would set up "death panels" of bureaucrats deciding who lived and who died she was dumped on from a great height. 

She was right, prophetically so.  But this gift did not require a special prophetic gift--only some clear thinking on her part.  Health care resources and services, like everything else in this life, are not infinite.  They are limited.  Therefore, rationing of some sort is inevitable.  In a socialised heath care system the government does the rationing.  It is the government which will ultimately decide--bureaucratically--who gets treatment and who does not.  Put bluntly that makes the government a convener of death panels--and that is the fundamental objection, not to rationing per se which in one form or another is inevitable and necessary.   

Fast forward just  a few short months.  HHS Secretary Kathleen Sibelius has become a one man death panel.  This from Politico.

Stakes in the Heart

Limitations of Public Health Exposed

A debate is taking place in the UK about public health.  The cold hard reality is that the UK government has run out of money and its debt levels are worrying.  It has consequently put the squeeze on the public health system.  It now has a duty to raise more money by providing health services to the more wealthy, to those who can pay for medical services and procedures. 

This from The Guardian:

Hospitals are seeking a radical increase in revenue from the treatment of private patients as their budgets come under pressure from the needs of an ageing population, according to new figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.  Great Ormond Street children's hospital has budgeted for an extra £11m from treating private patients in the financial year ending in 2013 compared with 2010 – a 34% increase. The Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust is also expecting to boost revenues by £9m over the same period – a 42% rise. The Royal Marsden is expecting an extra 28% increase on 2010 revenues, equating to about £12.7m. Across all trusts an 8% increase in revenues from private patients is expected to be posted for 2012-13 compared with 2010-11.

Previously, successive governments have decried and rejected the idea that state funded health services should generate any money from the more wealthy.  It was a rationing system that was a bridge too far for socialists.

Ben Carson for President!

Two Big Un-PC Ideas

Further to our recent post on Dr Ben Carson speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast, a columnist in the Wall Street Journal is calling out a new slogan: "Ben Carson for President".

Ben Carson for President 

The Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon has two big ideas for America.

The Wall Street Journal 
REVIEW & OUTLOOK
February 8, 2013, 6:03 p.m. ET

Whether this weekend finds you blowing two feet of snow off the driveway or counting the hours until "Downton Abbey," make time to watch the video of Dr. Ben Carson speaking to the White House prayer breakfast this week.

Seated in view to his right are Senator Jeff Sessions and President Obama. One doesn't look happy. You know something's coming when Dr. Carson says, "It's not my intention to offend anyone. But it's hard not to. The PC police are out in force everywhere."

Dr. Carson tossed over the PC police years ago.

Clash of Light Sabres

Ancient Battle Rejoined

In the Star Wars movies epic fight scenes were conducted with light sabres.  Everyone remembers the clash of the sabres and the sound of electric current arcing through the atmosphere.  In the great contest between Christ and the Devil, between Belief and Unbelief there emerge points of conflict which are so representative of the respective world-views that the clash is like two light sabres meeting in deadly battle. 

The issue of abortion is one such clash of the light sabres.  When Obamacare was legislated in the United States it contained a provision that forced businesses to provide health insurance coverage for their employees.  Wrapped up in that little package was the implicit requirement that employers provide coverage that would fund abortifacient drugs for their employees.  Now the implicit has become explicit.  Businesses that refuse will effectively be driven out of business. 

Hobby Lobby is a US retail business selling supplies for home hobbies.  Its owners are Christians.  They have declared that they cannot comply with the government's strictures.  Ken Klukowski, writing in Breitbart News, describes that is going down.

Death Panels

Bureaucrats With the Power of Life and Death

Theodore Dalrymple, writing in City Journal, analyzes the UK's National Health Service (NHS).   He discusses the strange phenomenon of the UK public believing that the NHS delivers high quality health care, despite a steadily growing number of horror stories about its practice.  It's almost as if the public is in denial, not daring to face the truth lest their god appear before them naked and puny. 

But eventually truth will out.  Dalrymple describes how the devastating effects of nationalised health in the beginning are often subtle and not obvious.  By the time the cracks start to show up the first response of governments is to throw more money at it, thereby contributing to the general fiscal debt crisis. 

The end game of socialised medicine is bureaucratic rationing of healthcare--which is to say the government and its functionaries decide who will live and who will die.  Not a pleasant thought.  But if you believe the government is a demi-god it's an inevitable outcome.  Soft despotism in the end is just as crushing and destructive as hard despotism. 

Dalrymple summarises the inequities and the iniquities of the system:

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Make the Rubble Bounce

Culture and Politics - Politics
Written by Douglas Wilson
Tuesday, 14 February 2012

In his essay on membership in The Weight of Glory, C.S. Lewis says this: "in the first place, when the modern world says to us aloud, 'You may be religious when you are alone,' it adds under it's breath, 'and I will see to it that you are never alone.'" I thought of this when I was pondering the outrageous behavior of the Obama administration, continuing down to the present, with regard to Catholic institutions having to make the payments for contraception. "You may have religious freedom in every area where the federal government does not have jurisdiction, and by the way, the federal government has jurisdiction everywhere and in everything."

Before getting to a brief analysis, let me make just a few focused observations on the behavior of these bureaucratic miscreants, trying to avoid, as I proceed, a descent to personalities.

Evolution, Science, and Urban Legends

Superstitions of the Age

The current age thinks itself the best and the brightest. This is an effect, in part, of the reigning paradigm of the current scientific community: evolutionism. This scientific meta-theory propounds that things develop by natural order and law: that is, they evolve to higher and higher planes of existence, from the simple to the more complex and advanced.  

Under the influence of evolutionism, each generation tends to consider itself superior and more advanced than those that have gone before. One upshot is the denigration of history to irrelevance. Why study primitives--except to set a backdrop for our comparatively advanced and sophisticated state?

One manifestation of this self-claimed superiority is medical science. Pop-medicine regales us with accounts of how superstitious and primitive the medical knowledge and treatments of former generations was. Implication: we are so much better and smarter now. One example of a medical procedure once widely practised in the West is bleeding. There are many others.  "How stupid and ignorant those doctors and medical scientists were," is the overriding discourse.

Conveniently, we overlook the embarrassing implication that generations to come will look back at us and likewise chortle with amusement at the ignorance and stupidity of the medical profession at the "turn of the century". This is not to deny that knowledge via the hard sciences does increase and grow. There is a very important sense in which we now know far more than the "bleeders". The Christian attributes this to the coming of the Kingdom of God upon earth, as man fulfils the commands of subduing the earth and making it bring forth and bud, on the one hand, and makes disciples of Christ of every nation, on the other. This is gradual, developmental process is the fruit of God's unfolding human history for His glory and the blessing of His people. It is not the result of the "law" of randomness, as the evolutionist propounds.

The Christian also knows through rigorous historical research that cultures and ages do not necessarily retain the knowledge they acquire. Things known now can be lost to future generations, through wars, famines, plagues, earthquakes and other calamities. It can also result from civilisations crumbling from with--partially at times as a result of scientific and technological error. The Roman's proclivity to use lead pipes almost certainly contributed to the decline of that civilisation.

This raises the possibility that current prevailing medical consensuses may turn out to be profoundly ignorant and damaging to society. Take for example diet. We are threatened, we are told, by a plague of obesity. A new term has entered the lexicon: morbidly obese. Nutritionists, funded by the state, lecture us on what we should eat, and not eat--to escape the scourge. But obesity is just the latest food-related plague. Prior to that it was heart disease.

But what if the dietary preventatives for heart disease (high carb, low-fat diets) actually helped produce an epidemic of obesity? One gets an inkling that future generations will look back at us and conclude that we really were an ignorant lot.

One risk we are very clear about: when science gets married to government campaigns or programmes, the first thing to fly out the window is scientific rigour. The thing is that rigorous scientific research, particularly when dealing with human beings, is inevitably tenuous. It has to end up talking about probabilities and possibilities. Moreover, much current research is statistically based, trying to establish correlations and, from there, causality. For instance: 62% of people with bigger than average eye teeth contract gangrene in rest homes. Ergo, eye teeth size is a likely causal factor for gangrene.

Such research methodology, unless rigorously constrained, is readily subject to fallacious reasoning. But governments require certainty for public health programmes. "Large eye teeth are a danger: get your dentist to reduce their size."  Actually, this rapidly translates into state funding of eye-teeth reduction procedures.  This food is "bad"; that food is "good". Don't do this; do that. When government, who pay, require emphatic certainty, scientists readily comply. But rigour and integrity have long since flown out the window. The upshot: urban myths substitute for effective cures.

When all this takes place within the prevailing discourse of evolutionism, flattering the age with the idea that we are the best and the brightest thus far, superstition and easy credulity can rapidly become the order of the day.

An American's Take on Britain's Malaise

The British Try to Climb Out of the Ditch
The U.S. would be wise not to follow Britain’s example.
October 8, 2010 12:00 A.M.

Mona Charen
Reprinted from National Review Online

Three and a half weeks from now, Americans will decide whether to pull the emergency brake on a train that is headed to bankruptcy. Across the pond in Great Britain, which got aboard that train following World War II, the sparks are flying as the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government attempts a very tardy — and accordingly, much more painful — reversal.

The nation that built the most far-flung empire in the history of the world — not primarily through conquest, but through trade and colonization — is now convulsed by protests as the coalition government imposes austerity. “Tory scum!” shouted protesters outside the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham last week. Half a dozen nearly naked, portly, middle-aged pensioners unfurled a banner (held strategically at waist level) proclaiming “Stripped of Our Pensions.” They were part of a massive rally (7,000 strong) of teachers, health-care workers, and other public-sector employees who swore to “fight back” against the cuts proposed by the Cameron/Clegg government. Even the queen has been told to accept reductions to her generous yearly stipend — though her response has thus far been more temperate

When a society has become as socialized as Great Britain, it becomes difficult to say where the public sector leaves off and the private sector begins. Take the arts. We squabble about public funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. And certainly there is a good libertarian case to be made that these are not the proper province of government at all, and certainly not of the federal government. But in any case, government subventions amount to only about 10 percent of total arts funding in the U.S.

In the U.K., on the other hand, government contributes 50 percent. So when the Cameron/Clegg government announced that it may cut subsidies to the arts by as much as 25 percent, the howls were piercing. Alistair Spalding, artistic director of the Sadler’s Wells dance theater in London, sorrowfully complained to the Washington Post that if forced to seek private donations, he might not be able to stage such groundbreaking work as last year’s interpretative dance “in which the pope sexually abuses an altar boy.”

Socialists dislike programs for the poor. They prefer that everyone receive welfare because they calculate, so far correctly, that it’s much harder for governments to cut subsidies to everyone than to the poor. That’s why, in the U.S., liberals go rigid at the idea of cutting Social Security benefits to the affluent. In Britain, Labour is incensed at the proposal by the coalition government to reduce the annual child subsidy that all Britons, regardless of income, receive. “No more open-ended chequebook,” Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne explained. “No family should get more from living on benefits than the average family gets from going out to work.” These are the “same old Tories,” a Labour leader complained, “hitting hardest at those who can least afford it.”

What? The government is proposing to cut benefits principally for the better-off. Cuts to programs for the poor will be slight.

The British government, deeply in debt, is scrambling to avoid the fate of Greece, whose unsustainable obligations brought it to the brink of default until it was rescued by the European Union. Though full details of the budget will not be published until October 20, leaks in the British press have suggested that the VAT will increase from 17.5 to 20 percent; that banks will be assessed added taxes; and that military spending will be reduced by 10 to 20 percent. While Prime Minister David Cameron sought to quiet fears that drastic cuts in the military budget would compromise Britain’s commitment to Afghanistan, he was less than convincing.

Though the coalition government has shied from suggesting cuts to the Great White Elephant, the National Health Service, it has proposed to restructure the program. Britain spends more on the NHS than on any other line item — more than on pensions, social security, education, defense, transport, public safety, or interest on the debt. Under the previous Labour government, spending on the NHS tripled in just twelve years. It’s the great black hole in the center of Britain’s debt vortex. And yet the quality of care and efficiency of delivery are dismal compared with other European countries — and far inferior to the United States.

Or at least to the pre-Obamacare United States. The pain Britain is enduring should be instructive. They are trying to climb out of a ditch. If we grab that emergency brake now, we may avoid falling in.

– Mona Charen is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2010 Creators Syndicate.