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Clayton Cramer's BLOG |
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Clayton's commentary on news and events of the day. Broadly speaking, I'm a conservative with libertarian sympathies (getting more conservative as my children get older).
 Never forget! I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page). Relocating to Boise? Use my realtor, neighbor, and friend, Cindy Smith csmith@1realtyone.com.
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Saturday, September 22, 2007
Which James Hansen Was Right? The 1971 version? Or the 2007 version? From September 21, 2007 Investors Business Daily: Climate Change: Did NASA scientist James Hansen, the global warming alarmist in chief, once believe we were headed for . . . an ice age? An old Washington Post story indicates he did.And I guess you could ask the question: why should we assume that the guy that had it wrong in 1971 has it right today? Labels: global warming Friday, September 21, 2007
This Might Seem a Bit Extreme At First Convicted felons may not possess firearms or ammunition--even a single round. The theory is that if you find a convicted felon with ammunition, he's probably not in possession of it for old times sake, or as a good luck charm, but as evidence that he has been in possession of a firearm recently, and is too careless to do a proper search of himself for ammo. From the September 21, 2007 Idaho Statesman: A former Northside street gang member was sentenced Thursday in federal court to 32 months in prison for being a convicted felon in possession of a single .45 caliber round of ammunition.This being Idaho, the first comment was complaining about the light sentence! I have a few misgivings about the failure of federal law to distinguish between violent felonies and federal felonies such as turning back a car odometer, but Mendoza doesn't sound like someone who deserves much sympathy. Labels: gun rights Preparing for President Nut Job's Address to Columbia Great poster that you really should click here to see. Don't worry, it's worksafe, unless you work for Nazis, or some universities in the U.S. Labels: terrorism Jewish, Maybe? Or Atheist? Best of the Web also points out to this article that either identifies a reporter too stupid to be trusted with a pen, or too wickedly satirical to stay in that job for long. From the September 19, 2007 New York Post: September 19, 2007 -- A Queens teen was arrested yesterday after placing fliers in his teachers' mailboxes asking them to convert to Islam - then made threats once he was caught, authorities said.What's your guess for why he was trying to get them to convert to Islam? Was he Jewish? Catholic? Atheist? Maybe Buddhist. Labels: humor Do You Remember the Rupert Holmes Song "Escape"? You remember--the guy who is bored "with his old lady" and responds to a personal ad--and guess who it turns out to be? Well, it actually happened. And the results were not anywhere near as romantic or sweet as the song. The tragic details are here. Best of the Web pointed me to this tragic little soap opera gone bad. Why We Should Stop Electing Congresscritters I occasionally find myself wondering, "Is the average American as crooked and sleazy as the average member of the House and Senate?" It seems hard to imagine. There are aspects to the political process that either favor the morally handicapped, or that cause these deficiencies. There are days that I lean towards one explanation or the other. Many years ago, a member of the California legislature, State Senator Alan Robbins, wrote an eloquent and powerful essay from his prison cell about the corrupting effects of raising money for campaigns. I wish that I could find that essay; he talked about how very few members of the California legislature survived their first re-election campaign without being either corrupted by the need to raise huge amounts of money (bribes disguised as campaign contributions), or find themselves supporting measures of which they disapproved, because they had to make to get that money. (Here's a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that explains a little of the background on the bribes that sent Robbins to the federal slammer.) A few years earlier, the FBI had attempted to bribe a number of members of the California legislature and had no problem getting enough evidence to prosecute a number of them. Another member of the State Senate was tried (name escapes me at the moment), and some of his remarks to the undercover agents were played. "We'll have to run this through while Rose [Vuich] is out of the Capitol. She actually reads the bills!" and "Vuich isn't for sale." This was considered a remarkable situation--that a member of the state senate was not corrupt. The shame of being revealed as an incorruptible member of the State Senate may have been too much for he; within a few weeks of these damning comments coming out, Vuich announced that she wasn't running for re-election. (After all, who is going to contribute to your campaign once they find out that they aren't getting anything for it?) Anyway, here's the thought: instead of electing members of Congress and the state legislatures--which creates this enormous problem of bribes that pretend to be campaign contributions--why not just pick members at random from the registered voters of the district? (If anyone was randomly picked twice in a lifetime, I would demand an audit of the random selection process--and perhaps have that person start buying lottery tickets.) It's rather like being on a jury--except the pay is better. Yes, we would probably end up with some people that aren't too smart, or too rational. Of course, we have that already. Rep. Lynne Woolsey (D-CA), for example. But I am pretty sure we couldn't do any worse than the current crop of corrupt and stupid sorts that tend to represent us in Congress. Random selection doesn't prevent outright bribery, of course, but neither does the current system. The only good news is that outright bribery--especially if it involves people without a lot of experience being politicians--is a lot easier to spot and prosecute than "campaign contributions" being used to buy votes. If special interests want to persuade Congress to support some cause, they either have to start with a fresh batch of House members every two years (and 1/3 of the Senators every two years), or they have to persuade the entire population, in the hopes that they will be persuading the next year's Congresscritters. My guess is that for at least some special interests, the costs of mass persuasion will be so high that some special interests may just give up. For others, they will keep up the effort, but they will be much less successful. I'll take my chances with random selection of Congresscritters--at least the moral caliber of our representatives will be improved. Everything is For Sale on eBay An amusing remark from Kevin Richert's blog: In the eBay economy, it seems, everything is up for bid. Labels: humor, Idaho politics A Couple Where Both Are Members of Congress... in different countries! The September 21, 2007 Idaho Statesman has this article about how Rep. Jerry Weller (R-IL) is not running for re-election: Republican U.S. Rep. Jerry Weller, recently named one of the most corrupt members of Congress by a watchdog group, will announce he will not seek an eighth term, a spokesman said Friday.Well, good, he's giving some other Republican enough time to make a serious run for the seat. But here's where the story gets weird: The Tribune then reported that Weller's wife, Guatemalan congresswoman Zury Rios de Weller, had set up a nonprofit corporation in Illinois whose board also included Jerry Weller's mother, brother and business associate.Is that weird, or what? A member of our Congress is married to a member of the Guatemalan Congress. I suppose it could be worse--he could be married to a member of the Iranian Parliament. Declining Support For Al-Qaeda Simon over at Classical Values points to this September 18, 2007 New York Sun article about an al-Qaeda backer who has backed away: A prominent Saudi cleric once praised by Osama bin Laden has published an open letter condemning Al Qaeda's violence.The article goes on to quote the editor of international Arabic publication: "Sheikh Salman al Ouda's distancing himself from Bin Laden at a time when those absolving themselves of Al Qaeda's leader have nothing to lose and no price to pay." Mr. Alhomayed wrote in an editorial published yesterday. "This comes at a time when no one is shedding any tears for the leader of Al Qaeda organization."So perhaps al-Awdah is simply recognizing that al-Qaeda is in deep trouble, and is jumping off a sinking ship. Labels: terrorism HR 2640 Amendments It's in the Senate now, and as some worried, there are attempts being made to amend it--but not by the Democrats to add antigun stuff on it--but by Democrats adding stuff to make it easier for some people to carry guns. The Bitch Girls pointed me to this September 21, 2007 Wall Street Journal article that reminds us of the famous saying by Will Rogers, "I am not a member of an organized political party. I am a Democrat." In the Virginia Tech case, the shooter was able to buy firearms in part because relevant court records weren't forwarded to the National Instant Criminal Background System, the data center that helps conduct background checks. Labels: deinstitutionalization, gun rights Why Isn't This Freedom of Speech? I just saw on CNN that in a town near where the Jena 6 controversy is going on, the police pulled over a red pickup truck with nooses on it. Nooses in a tree was part of the racist provocation that liberals over here are now using to justify the racially-motivated beating of a white student that is why the Jena 6 were prosecuted. My first reaction to someone doing something like this is: In a town currently filled with angry black people? That's crazy. I notice that the driver was charged with DUI--about the high level of intelligence that I would expect of someone who would drive a pickup truck around town with nooses on it. Will the ACLU be defending the driver's right to freedom of expression? I mean, if nude dancing is protected, and burning the American flag is protected--why not nooses on your car? Or will liberals decide that racism trumps freedom of expression? Of course, you know my take on it: freedom of speech (which is what the Constitution protects) is not the same as freedom of expression. There is a good pragmatic argument against laws that ban burning of the American flag. People that burn the American flag tend to reduce their political influence on others. But this does not mean that flag burning is protected speech within the meaning the Framers intended. UPDATE: Oh yes, the ACLU is now arguing that the charges against Senator Larry "Happy Feet" Craig violate his freedom of speech. According to this September 20, 2007 Idaho Statesman article: The ACLU filed its brief Monday, saying Minneapolis airport police violated Craig's constitutional right of free speech by charging him with disorderly conduct after arresting him in an airport men's room, where police say he solicited sex from an undercover officer.So, does freedom of speech cover all solicitations to perform some action, no matter how crude or vulgar, or where it takes place, as long as the action itself is lawful? It is completely lawful to have sex with a complete stranger. If you walk down the street, asking every person you meet to have sex, I suspect that you will find yourself arrested for disorderly conduct. Perhaps the ACLU would prefer to live in that kind of a world, where the last attempts at maintaining civility are gone. Labels: freedom of speech Who Are The Jena 6? I haven't looked carefully into this case, which I was led to believe reflected some sort of To Kill a Mockingbird expression of Southern racism. The few news accounts that I have seen showed a bunch of nooses hung in a tree--with the implication that these were part of how the white power structure was terrorizing blacks in this little town. But now I see this summary of the case by a black columnist with the Kansas City Star, and I am disappointed (but not surprised) at how the mainstream news media have played this one: Reed Walters, the Jena district attorney, is being accused of racism because he didn’t show Bell compassion when the teenager was brought before the court for the third time on assault charges in a two-year span. Labels: low standards of journalism Al-Qaeda's Sexual Morality Al-Qaeda spends a lot of time contrasting what they stand for with the decadent West. And yet, there's a rather long history of al-Qaeda and its allies showing that their notion of sexual morality is "rape is okay." Most recently, one of al-Qaeda in Iraq operatives confessed to something that seems to be policy. After discussing al-Qaeda's severe enforcement of its notions of morality with respect to smoking, women being insufficiently covered, and so on, this article in the September 20, 2007 Human Events reports: Enforcement of these laws -- which can perhaps be described as Shari’a taken to the greatest extreme -- has included taking measures to brutally punish people who commit the slightest offense, from smoking, to a woman failing to cover her head in public, to a man not growing a long enough beard. The strictest social mores are to be observed and any deviation from the standard can result in a punishment consisting of torture, mutilation, or death -- including, as the western world has seen on a few occasions (though not enough to grasp the extent of its use), beheading.This doesn't appear to be just a one-time quirk of this particular cell. Rape was a widely used weapon of war in East Timor--and al-Qaeda specifically targeted Australian tourists with the Bali bombing because Australian forces were part of what ended this reign of terror in East Timor. See this November 12, 2002 CNN report: Further possible evidence of the al Qaeda connection to the Bali blasts is contained in a tape released Wednesday by the Al Jazeera TV network, purportedly of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. (Bin Laden praises attacks)Similarly, when Chechnyan terrorists took hostages at a school in Russia, leading to hundreds of deaths--these proud warriors for the higher morality of the Koran raped many of the children. (See also here.) Of course, rape is a fundamental part of the process by which Sudanese militias--who al-Qaeda praises--commit the crimes of Darfur. As this article from the September 24, 2004 Front Page points out: What does rape, then, have to do with these religious conflicts? Unfortunately, everything. The Islamic legal manual ‘Umdat al-Salik, which carries the endorsement of Al-Azhar University, the most respected authority in Sunni Islam, stipulates: “When a child or a woman is taken captive, they become slaves by the fact of capture, and the woman’s previous marriage is immediately annulled.” Why? So that they are free to become the concubines of their captors. The Qur’an permits Muslim men to have intercourse with their wives and their slave girls: “Forbidden to you are ... married women, except those whom you own as slaves” (Sura 4:23-24).Something that isn't widely known in the West (because it might present a poor picture of Islam) is that a number of Islamic countries use the Koranic standard for rape convictions: there must be four eyewitnesses to a rape confirming the victim's account. If she can't produce four eyewitnesses at trial, she is convicted of prostitution. For practical purposes, this makes rape legal. How would there be four eyewitnesses to a rape who didn't stop it, unless they were participants? This is the law in Iran, and attempts to reform this law in Pakistan are being fought by--who else?--the Islamist parties that are allies of al-Qaeda. The only reference I could find was at the bottom of this other story from November 13, 2006 Reuters: Supporters of opposition Islamic alliance Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) hold placards during a rally in Multan November 28, 2006. The rally was held to protest against amendments to Pakistan's Islamic laws that will allow rape victims to seek justice without the need for four male witnesses while alliance leaders have threatened to resign from the parliament saying amendments are un-Islamic.Not surprisingly, this ugly little detail isn't getting much attention, because the left wants to imagine that al-Qaeda and friends are on the same side, since the left and al-Qaeda have the same enemy: George Bush. Thursday, September 20, 2007
Identity Theft & Background Checks A reader pointed me to this worrisome hole in the national firearms background check system. Remember the four police officers shot in Florida a few days ago? From September 14, 2007 channel 4 in Jacksonville, Florida: First reports were that the person responsible for the shootings was a man named Kevin Wehner, a Jacksonville resident with no criminal record.It turns out that Labeet used Wehner's stolen identity for more than registering cars. From the September 15, 2007 South Florida Sun-Sentinel: Long before Shawn Labeet took the life of a Miami-Dade police officer, he stole a Jacksonville man's identity, used the alias to buy an arsenal of weapons, and disappeared into the South Florida landscape despite having an outstanding warrant on charges of shooting and injuring his girlfriend, officials said Friday.My first thought is: shouldn't identity thefts be reported the national firearms background check system? Wehner had a clean record; that's why Labeet, using Wehner's identity, didn't get flagged when buying guns. Maybe it is time for the national background check system to get identity theft reports as well. It may be a little more complex for the victim of identity theft to buy a gun--but it would also slow down guys like Labeet, who were wanted. Labels: gun rights Another Cute Rube Goldberg Device Although I'm not all that sure that this one really works as shown. One odd aspect of this: it's a Honda ad from the United Kindgdom--but why is the announcer an American? Is this common in Britain, to use an American announcer? UPDATE: Amazingly enough, according to Snopes.com, this was not computer graphics--it was real. Even the part that seemed most unlikely to me was done with a weight inside each of the tires, so that when the tire moved, the weight moved as well, causing the upward motion on the ramp. Labels: humor Not Good News In One Sense But maybe okay news for the likely consequences. From the September 19, 2007 Financial Times: Fresh economic shocks on the scale of the current credit squeeze will occur if US house prices continue to fall, one of the country’s leading housing experts warned on Wednesday.Now, before you start hyperventilating, keep in mind that this is one of those, "if nothing happens" scenarios. Do you remember when the Fed kept raising interest rates in the 1990s to deal with what Alan Greenspan called "excessive exuberance"? Well, each time the Fed raised interest rates, they managed to inject a little reality into the stock market. I suspect that Tuesday's 1/2 point drop in interest rates--larger than many analysts expected--was the first of several such efforts by the Fed to deal with "unnecessary gloom." The reason is simple: if you want to lift housing prices, dropping interest rates will do it. The good inflation numbers gave the Fed the room to drop interest rates. The gloom of falling housing prices has really negative effects on the rest of the economy, such as construction and appliance sales. Falling housing prices also interfere with people using their house equity to buy really important necessities like vacations to Hawaii, speedboats, breast implants, and Jumbotrons for the living room. My guess is that as long as there's some risk of these worrisome housing price drops, the Fed will keep cutting interest rates. Hint: this is probably not the time to lock in a 30 year fixed mortgage. I am expecting to see continued cuts in interest rates--maybe another 1/2 point, maybe another full point. And that should get the housing prices to stabilize, maybe even start to rise, and put the breast implant surgeons and Jumbotron salesmen back in business. Labels: economics Why The Right of Conscience Is At Risk We've had a long history in the U.S. of struggling over the question of what constitutes the right of individuals to disagree. Thomas Jefferson's famous saying that: The error seems not sufficiently eradicated that the operations of the mind as well as the acts of the body are subject to the coercion of the laws. But our rulers can have authority over such natural rights only as we have submitted to them. The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God. The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.applies to this case, where homosexuals are intent on forcing their will on those who do not agree. From the September 18, 2007 New York Times: A boardwalk pavilion in the seaside town of Ocean Grove, N.J., that has been at the center of a battle over gay civil union ceremonies has lost its tax-exempt status because the state ruled it no longer met the requirements as a place open to all members of the public.Imagine if, during the 1960s, the U.S. government had revoked the tax exempt status of the Mennonite or Quaker Churches because they were morally opposed to war, and refused to allow military recruiters into their churches. Here is an example of a group (and United Methodists are a very, very liberal denomination) that has a moral objection to homosexuality that is being blackmailed into smiling and pretending that everything is okay. It is for this reason, and because it violates federalism, that I oppose the Employment Non-Discrimination Act that is currently before Congress. It seeks to add sexual orientation to the list of protected groups under federal law. At least the version that I have seen is unlikely to impair the right of conscience--but if there is any lesson to be learned from watching the very creative laws demanding the courts impose same-sex marriage around the country, it is that homosexual activists will take any opportunity to twist the laws far and above what they were intended to do. Why make it easier for them by passing ENDA? If you live in Idaho, you need to email Rep. Mike Simpson and let him know that ENDA needs to come to an end, and to vote no on it. Labels: freedom of religion, homosexuality Will The Remaining Non-Corrupt Members of Our Government Please Raise Your Hands? An investigation into the actions of someone who apparently bribed Rep Cunningham (R-CA) has subpoenaed records of 13 other members of Congress--who are refusing to comply: Acting on advice of the House general counsel, all 13 members of Congress who have been subpoenaed for documents and testimony by the lawyer for a man accused of bribing jailed former Congressman Rep. Duke Cunningham will refuse to comply.Four Democrats, nine Republicans--about what I would expect, considering Republicans were in the majority, and therefore chairs of various committees and subcommittees (where it really helps most to have a good friend when contracts are being disbursed). Of course, this is relatively minor compared to the big scandal--one that is beginning to dwarf the Jack Abramoff scandal. From the September 20, 2007 Bloomberg.com: Democratic fundraiser Norman Hsu was charged with defrauding investors of $60 million in ``a massive Ponzi scheme'' and violating the federal campaign-finance law.You know, I think someone could make that an important campaign slogan in the coming election, something like: We pledge to make this the most honest, ethical, and open Congress in history.There's just one problem: Nancy Pelosi's friends in the Democratic Party, people like Hillary Clinton, are at the core of this corruption. It doesn't do any good to say, "We're no more corrupt than Republicans," when it doesn't appear to be even close to true. But more importantly, Republican corruption seems to be at least American, red-white-and-blue corruption (just about money and unfair contract awards)--and not tainted with serious suspicions that the Chinese government has bought a big part of the Democratic Party. Labels: politicians behaving badly The Horror! The Horror! Free Market Capitalism! From the September 20, 2007 Inside Higher Education: Supporters describe it as a fund created by alumni to support interests they have at the university, in this case the study of Western civilization and free market economics.Almost? No, I'm afraid that it is way beyond "almost a disdain." The new program will sponsor educational programs (the development of new courses or new curriculum for courses), lectures, conferences, research and more. The programs will all be based on “free market capitalism,” Vermette said, citing the ideas of Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand and the Austrian economics school of such libertarian thinkers at Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Vermette said that the founders of the center “very much want to work with faculty” at Illinois to support these programs. “We’ll work within the system,” he said.The left is upset because the values that they are trying to promote might not survive a serious academic challenge--and there's little or no chance of that in most public universities today. Labels: political correctness Where Immoral Behavior Takes You I almost feel sorry for the guy. Doubtless, he didn't think that what he was doing would become publicly known. Doubtless, he thought that what he was doing was his business, and no one else's. And I'm sure that he is now filled with shame about what happened, and upset because his career is in shambles, with no one to defend him. If only Michael Vick had solicited sex in a men's room, instead of organizing dogfights! It says quite a bit about how rapidly the definition of "immoral" has changed in our society that Michael Vick probably wishes that he and Senator Larry "Happy Feet" Craig could change places. Labels: decline and fall of Western civilization Ohio's Concealed Carry Law The Ohio Attorney General's office has a very good booklet explaining their concealed carry law, along with a discussion of the legal limits of use of deadly force here. I am pleased to see that the requirement that concealed carry licensees could only drive with the gun exposed have been dropped. I am also pleased to see that Ohio and Idaho have signed a reciprocity agreement. (I'm headed to Ohio next month.) It's also kind of cool that there's an M1911 on the cover of that booklet! Labels: concealed carry, gun rights Gun Control Advocates Prescribe A New Model This appears to be from a University of Pennsylvania publication, the September 7, 2007 Gazette. First they explain that gun control has become something of a dead end politically: “This society has chosen to live with guns,” Dr. William Schwab was saying in July, as he stood before a roomful of reporters in a Penn Law classroom. “There are over 220 million guns in circulation in the United States of America. There is nothing that’s going to take those guns away.”It starts off well, discussing that the problem of gun violence is related to the culture: Of course, the environments in which most gun homicides take place are typically urban and poor. A high proportion of the young men in such neighborhoods are unemployed, giving them ample leisure time to become involved in contests of honor and personal disputes. And there is evidence to suggest that gun ownership is attractive even to law-abiding citizens in such areas, who may reason that police protection is an insufficient guarantor of their safety. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how this feedback loop can take on the contour of an arms race.At this point, I was hoping to see some serious discussion of what can be done to solve the unemployment problem, or deal with the honor culture that drives much of the violence. No, the solution is a police state: High gun density is a good predictor of elevated gun violence, according to Dr. Lawrence Sherman, director of the Jerry Lee Center of Criminology and professor of sociology at Penn. But there’s also a substantial level of spontaneity in gun-mediated arguments, he added, and the large majority of disputes don’t last long enough to allow someone without a firearm to go home and fetch one.Why is it so painful to look at the economic and cultural problems that are driving this that these doubtless very liberal academics would rather authorize the police to stop and frisk everyone walking down the street? Labels: gun rights The International Association of Chiefs of Police This item by Dave Hardy at Of Arms and the Law makes it sound as though the Joyce Foundation just bought the IACP: A while back, the antigun Joyce Foundation made a hefty grant to fund a gun summit meeting by some members of the International Assn of Chiefs of Police. Here's the pdf file.My recollection, however, is that the IACP has long been on the gun ban bandwagon. Maybe it isn't so much that the Joyce Foundation bought the IACP, as that the Joyce Foundation funded an event by a group that already believed the same way. Labels: gun rights Giuliani Sure Has Chutzpah From the September 20, 2007 Washington Post: Rudolph W. Giuliani will go before the rank and file of the National Rifle Association on Friday, seeking support for his Republican presidential campaign from a group he once likened to "extremists" for its efforts to repeal the ban on assault weapons.My guess is that the reason Giuliani has been getting a pass from NRA leadership is: 1. They perceive him as someone that can defeat Clinton in the general election. 2. He's not a social conservative. I get the impression from who NRA leadership favors that they are libertarian, not conservative. Maybe Giuliani has really changed his mind on this. But call me skeptical. Labels: 2008 presidential candidates, gun rights What Makes Canadian Health Care Work? The same thing that makes their tiny military spending possible--living next door to the United States. From September 14, 2007 Canadian Television: Liberal MP Belinda Stronach, who is battling breast cancer, travelled to California last June for an operation that was recommended as part of her treatment, says a report.I know that this isn't that unusual for ordinary Canadians. I blogged a few weeks back about a mother who was about to give birth in Calgary--and had to be flown to Great Falls, Montana, because there weren't enough neonatal ICU beds available in one hospital in all of Canada. It makes you wonder: could the Canadian system that Michael Moore thinks so highly of work if Canada was in Australia, and they didn't have a less fair but overall better health care system available an hour's flight away? Some of the comments on the Canadian Television story from Canadians are very revealing. A lot of the liberals are basically saying that it is an invasion of Stronach's privacy to discuss what seems to be a failure of the Canadian health care system. Other comments by Canadians reveal some deep disgust with what is going on: If I had her money, I'd receive my primary care in the States too. We have been saddled with a Stalinist, second-rate system.and: I had cancer and am now 'cured'... and thankful for the treatment I received in Toronto.and: Sure she should get her treatment where she can if she is able to pay for it.and: 9,000 Canadian-trained doctors in the US. Why should we be surprised if some of the patients head there too? It's time for the Liberal Party to acknowledge the gorilla at the dinner table and work with the Conservatives in a non-partisan way to start thinking about fundamental changes to our health care system. This means either raising taxes to Scandinavian levels, or openly allowing privatization instead of operating in the shadows and slowly cutting services one a a time. Let the NDP scream about zero compromise on socialized medicine, time for the mainstream parties to get a grip on this.and: While living in the USA several years ago I found a lump in my breast. I went to the doctor the next day, she had me in for a ultrasound and mam the very next day. We are now living in Canada again, this time my doctor here found a lump, she sent me to a specialist ( 10 1/2 weeks it took), still haven't had a mam. This Canadian system is scary, and needs to be fixed! I too if I had the money would seek treatment in the USA.Something that doesn't get discussed enough in the debate about universal health care is that the cost of health care is huge. Yes, there are some efficiencies that having everyone insured will bring to the table. If we are prepared to accept the Big Brother approach of John Edwards of forced preventative health care, we can probably save a bit more money. If we are prepared to accept doctors telling us we have to eat healthy, can't smoke, can't drink to excess, how and with whom to have sex, and how much exercise to get, we can probably save a lot of money. But not only will most Americans balk at this level of government intrusion, I'm sure the ACLU would file suit the instant that the federal health care nazis started to wag their fingers about unprotected casual sex (just homophobia, is what they will say). If we can't make a big difference in the costs--and I don't think we can--then we have the face up to the fact that medical care for everyone at the level that most Americans have come to expect is very, very expensive. Canada has opted to go cheap, rather than raise taxes to the level required to provide American levels of medical care. Will Americans be willing to raise taxes enough to provide medical care for the uninsured? If those caring and compassionate Canadians won't, why would we expect that Americans will? Labels: health care Wednesday, September 19, 2007
HilaryCare 2.0 Senator Clinton has unveiled her new universal health insurance plan--and I must say, it's progress from the disaster she tried to impose in 1993. Of course, there wasn't much direction but up from that. Part of the improvement is that she won't require everyone to give up their current health insurance plan. The goal is to only cover the uninsured, by giving them the option of joining the current federal health plan for Congresscritters. The downside is that it will require $110 billion in subsidies, supposedly by raising taxes on those who make more than $250,000 a year. (Somehow, I suspect that it will drop down into my bracket along the way, since these are Senator Clinton's big supporters.) The other downside is that it will force every American to buy health insurance. I think health insurance is a good idea--but I have acquaintances who are so obscenely rich that they really don't need health insurance. There is literally nothing bad that can happen to them, for any length of time, that would make a significant dent in their wealth. (Of course, they vote Democrat.) Clinton wants to eventually make this requirement to show health insurance a condition of employment: "At this point, we don't have anything punitive that we have proposed," the presidential candidate said in an interview with The Associated Press. "We're providing incentives and tax credits which we think will be very attractive to the vast majority of Americans."And the current requirement for proof of legal residency here works so well! Groan. The leftist cheerleaders, like Joe Klein at Time, are already screaming when Drudge Report described this statement as "Health Insurance Proof Required for Work": I know this is old news, but this guy is shameless. The headline, with a photo of a three-quarters crazed Hillary, is HEALTH INSURANCE PROOF REQUIRED FOR WORKSo Hilary says that the long-term goal is requiring proof of health insurance for work. And to point this out is misleading or dishonest? In what way? Labels: health care Maryland High Court Rules Against Same-Sex Marriage Suit The Maryland Court of Appeals (which is Maryland's highest court) has ruled against a lawsuit that claimed that "one man, one woman" violates the Maryland Constitution's equal rights regardless of sex provision. To my surprise, the Court of Appeals examined the evidence from contemporary documents to demonstrate that (surprise, surprise) in 1972, there is simply no evidence that this provision was intended to give women a right to marry women. No surprise; if anyone had claimed that this was the purpose, and been taken seriously, it would have gone down to defeat. The objective of the clause was to prohibit discrimination against women as a class that gave them less legal rights than men--and incidentally, guaranteed the reverse as well--that men could not be given less legal rights than women. I'm glad to see the Court of Appeals decision deals with the Loving case, in which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Virginia law that punished interracial marriages contracted elsewhere, pointing out that the Virginia law was intended to promote white racial superiority, as evidenced by how it only prohibited whites from marrying non-whites; blacks could marry Asians, for example, without breaking the law. Most importantly, the Court of Appeals concluded that there was no fundamental right to marry members of the same sex, and that such a law only has to pass the rational basis standard of review. Unfortunately, the Court of Appeals repeats the falsehoods of Lawrence v. Texas (2003) that For a significant period of American history, homosexual persons generally were not the object of regulatory focus because sexual and gender orientations differing from “traditional” sexual preferences were not well conceptualized by the public until after the Civil War.This is clearly false--not even open to serious argument, since a number of Colonial statutes did specifically prohibit homosexual conduct. The concept certainly existed, even though the word itself did not. As an example, consider this New Haven statute published in a 1656 law book: If any man lyeth with mankinde, as a man lyeth with a woman, both of them have Committed abomination, they both shall surely be put to death. Levit. 20. 13. Labels: constitutional history, homosexuality Driving State Highway 55 At 600 MPH Have you ever wanted to travel up Idaho state highway 55 from Summit Ridge Road in Boise County to Valley County at 600 miles per hour? Click here. (It's about a 30 MB download--I wouldn't try this on dialup.) I took this film on a clear blue day, but rather late in the afternoon. I was hoping that the sun angle would give me lots of very dramatic shadows--but mostly, it gave me direct sun in the lens when headed southwest, and great accentuated visible water spot stains when traveling south. I should either film when the sun is high in the sky, or when I am only driving away. I toyed with the idea of putting up the higher resolution versions of this video, but they are like 370 MB and 555 MB. Nope! They look better (crisper), but unless you are watching this on a TV, it won't justify the download time. Lerach Pleading Guilty I mentioned early this year a federal criminal investigation that was leading to William Lerach, a prominent California lawyer who sues companies when their stock goes down--and not surprisingly, was good buddies with Democrats like Clinton. Now Lerach is pleading guilty: It took seven years, but L.A. federal prosecutors are finally on the verge of putting famed plaintiff lawyer William Lerach in federal prison.Because Lerach is a criminal, he is also a large contributor to the Democratic Party--and John Edwards apparently has been doing his best to help Lerach. (You remember John Edwards, the candidate who talks a lot about the two Americas: the fatcats who are under criminal investigation and contribute to his campaign, and those of us who aren't.) Lerach is, of course a strong contributor to many Democrats, including Hilary Clinton, Joseph Biden, and the aforementioned John "$400 haircut" Edwards. Labels: politicians behaving badly Mental Health Parity There's a bill working its way through Congress to require private insurers to cover mental illness identically to physical illness. You can read the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill press release about it here. I am very sympathetic to the motives of the backers of the bill. They want insurance companies to stop ducking the problem of mental illness--which doubtless plays some part in why a lot of mentally ill people end up homeless on the streets. But I am also not comfortable with the federal government telling insurance companies how to run this, and there are three reasons why. Unnecessary Tying Of Hands For a very long time, insurance companies paid vast sums of money out, without asking too many questions, for psychoanalysis. In the 1980s, the government threatened to "do something" if insurers didn't get rising medical care premiums under control. Well, they did. The insurers started doing cost-benefit analyses on various procedures and lengths of stay. They start pressuring hospitals to send new mothers home the day after, or in some cases, the day of delivery, based on evidence that longer stays weren't really needed. And then the same bunch of activists that whined about high medical costs started whining that the insurance companies were doing something about it. Similarly, in the 1980s, insurance companies started noticing that the evidence for the effectiveness of psychoanalysis was missing. (And no surprise--psychoanalysis seems to be built on false premises.) So they started limiting what they would pay for--no more of paying for twice a week visits for years on end. I won't call psychoanalysis fraud--I think many of the psychiatrists who do it actually believe in what they are doing, and it probably does provide some benefit to some. But I'm a bit suspicious that more than a few doctors became psychiatrists so that they could be paid well without having to get blood and pus on their clothes. And now, psychiatry is no longer such a well-paid specialty. I think there's a lot of merit to what non-psychoanalytic psychiatrists do, and I would like to see more insurance companies provide mental illness coverage. But I am a bit reluctant to tie insurers' hands with a law mandating this. Federalism Issues This particular bill originally preempted state laws on this subject, so that a state that already had a mental health parity law (as several do) might actually have that law wiped out by a federal law. In some cases, this could have reduced the mental illness coverage that some states currently mandate. The bigger issue, however, is that as much as possible, laws need to be done at the state level. If something truly involves interstate matters (and some things clearly do), then the federal government has to take action. But it isn't clear to me that such laws necessarily need to operate at the federal level. I might oppose an individual state passing a particular law like this, but at least with 50 laboratories, there's a chance to see what works, and what doesn't. More importantly, 50 different states are likely to have 50 different circumstances. What might be necessary in one state might not be necessary in another. Why Doesn't Medicare and Medicaid Have This Requirement? Perhaps I am mistaken on this, but I believe that Medicare (and probably Medicaid) still treats mental illness in an inferior manner to physical illness. At least, that was the state of the law in 1965, when Congress created Medicare, and this statement from this year suggests that this hasn't been changed: As you know, Medicare has perhaps the out of date and discriminatory benefit for mental illness and substance abuse treatment of any public or private sector program. The most widely recognized restrictions are the discriminatory limit of 190 lifetime days on inpatient care under Part A and the 50% cost sharing requirement for outpatient services under Part B. These restrictions – which apply only to mental illness treatment – were unacceptable intolerable in 1965, and are even more troubling in 2007.If this law forcing mental illness parity on private insurance companies is such a good idea--why is that Medicare doesn't have the same requirement imposed on it? At least if Congress forces Medicare to do this, they have the legal authority to do so, and no one would question that this is the case. But I see no reason why a private insurer should be forced to do something that the federal government won't force Medicare to do. Labels: deinstitutionalization Monday, September 17, 2007
Fascism in America? Maybe I Was Wrong! At least the video of an antiwar protester being dragged from a microphone and Tasered by the police looks real bad. What's even worse is that the person who answers his question--and ignores this fracas going in with the student screaming in pain--is John Kerry. RoboSenator seems to be either completely and utterly unaware of this amazing sequence of events taking place in front of him--or completely and utterly unconcerned about it. Either way, it doesn't say much for John Kerry. UPDATE: Other accounts suggest that, like the Rodney King video, what happened before the tape started rolling makes this look a little less absurd. I am still not happy with the police using a Taser on this kid--they should have been able to manhandle him out of there--but it does look like the punk was doing his best to get arrested, grabbing a microphone from someone else, and refusing to give it up. Labels: freedom of speech, politicians behaving badly The War Protest The Media Doesn't Show You Michelle Malkin has some video of the war protesters in Washington, DC. As you might expect, the language is coarse and vulgar. America, of course, is a fascist society. That's why all of these people will disappear into the federal gulag or be executed without trial before the week is over. (Oh, they won't?) My father opposed the Vietnam War--and at a time when it wasn't a particularly popular stand. (He also seemed to think quite a lot of Ayn Rand, at a time when no one had even heard of her.) But I also recall that he thought the antiwar protesters were doing their cause great harm because of their countercultural baggage. In the case of the current crop of antiwar protesters--maybe that's a good thing. As the saying goes, "Never offend with style when you can offend with substance." Another Victory for Relativism M. Simon over at Classical Values has an amusing post about how the relativists won the culture wars in the humanities--but there's a price they paid for it: Here comes the punch line. And on the first page too!It rather reminds me of the deconstructionist literature professor who spends all day telling his students that the race, class, sex, and orientation of a writer and of the reader make it impossible to determine any absolute meaning in a text. The real meaning is impossible to separate from all those distractions. After class ends, he leaves a message on the home answering machine for his wife to order a pizza for dinner.All this reflects what the philosopher Martha Nussbaum today describes as a "loss of respect for the humanities as essential ingredients of democracy." Nussbaum, who panned Bloom's book in The New York Review in 1987, teaches at the University of Chicago, which like Columbia has retained a Western-based core curriculum requirement for undergraduates. But on some campuses, "the main area of conflict is trying to make sure that the humanities get adequate funding from the central administration," Nussbaum wrote in an e-mail message, adding, "Our nation, like most nations of the world, is devaluing the humanities vis-Ã -vis science and technology, so constant vigilance is required lest these disciplines be cut." Louis Menand, a Harvard English professor and New Yorker staff writer who serves on Harvard's curriculum reform committee, concurs: "The big question for humanists is, How do we explain why what we do is important for people who aren't humanists? That's been tough, really tough."The Professor is complaining that the people think the Humanities have no relevance. If she is a liberal she should be cheering that moral relativism has won. If no judgments can be made no need to teach judgment, eh? I guess the downside of that bothers the Professor. Isn't it ironic, just a bit, don't ya think? The professor's wife to herself: "What do you mean by 'pizza'? Is giving me orders about food simply part of the phallocentric patriarchal system of oppression? Maybe you are really telling me that I should be 'available' when you return home? Or is this just another reminder of who is in charge here?" When the professor gets home: "No, I just wanted you to order a pizza, so we wouldn't have to cook dinner." Since I'm Sure The Clarification Won't Be Distributed As Widely As The First Quote From the September 17, 2007 Washington Post:
Labels: Iraqi WMDs, terrorism Need Some Cheap, Petty Laughs? Karl Marx Treatment Center presents the People's CubeI'm sore from laughing! Make sure you peruse the "News we just don't have time to write about" column on the rigbt.
Labels: humor The Obligations of the Christian Commonwealth A regular reader expressed surprise at a recent posting by me that he read as supporting increased government spending--and he thought that this was the first time that I had ever done that. First of all, I haven't been a reflexive anti-government spending person in many years. I supported the War on Terror--which has turned out to be really, really expensive (and might have been close to this expensive even if Bush had done it right). I have long supported increased government spending on basic research in the area of health, and the sciences. This doesn't mean that every grant makes sense--a lot of them don't--but some of the research that the government funds leads to basic understanding of mental illness, which is one of my pet concerns. Secondly, the point of that posting was that if the government decides to increase spending to provide health insurance for the uninsured, there are smarter, more efficient ways to do it, and less smart, less efficient ways to do it. I'm a bit weird about this, but I generally think that if we decide we are going to do step X, let's find a cheaper, more efficient way to do step X. Thirdly, I have for several years pointed out that part of the American tradition from the very beginning has been that this is a Christian commonwealth. There is a moral obligation that has been part of English law since at least the Elizabethan Poor Laws to provide at least some minimal level of assistance to those who are incapable of doing so themselves. As Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England points out: Life is the immediate gift of God, a right inherent by nature in every individual; and it begins in contemplation of law as soon as an infant is able to stir in the mother’s womb....That doesn't mean that every poor person has a right to cable TV, a semi-private hospital room, a car, and steak every night. It also doesn't mean that those who can work, but won't, have a right to support. There can be legitimate argument about what the right level of support is. Liberals tend to be a lot more magnanimous than conservatives about what "the necessities of life" include. There can also be legitimate argument about whether a particular mechanism is the right method of providing that support. Some methods are more efficient than others; some methods introduce socially destructive side effects, as the destruction of black inner city civilization caused by the Great Society demonstrates. But this is a Christian Commonwealth. Left-wing politicians like to point that out when pushing for social spending, but like to forget about it when it comes time to march in the Gay Pride Parade. Conservatives sometimes forget this when the issue of social welfare comes up. Libertarians, at least, are consistent: they don't acknowledge any governmental obligation on either count--and they aren't going to be winning any national elections in the near future, either. Resumption of the Cold War? This wasn't an encouraging thing to hear. From September 6, 2007 Reuters: LONDON (Reuters) -The air force scrambled four Tornado warplanes on Thursday to intercept eight Russian long-range bombers, the Ministry of Defence said.Those of us who grew up living under the shadow of nuclear war regarded the end of this insanity as a very positive thing. Unlike the Islamofascists, I never thought it was likely that either side would make a conscious decision to start such a war. Both sides recognized that, in the words often but erroneously attributed to Nikita Krushchev, "the living will envy the dead." But wars sometimes start by accident, or because one side is convinced the other side will back down rather than go to war. Putin is probably just sending a message with this. But what an incredibly stupid message. He needs to remember who it is that is killing Russians right now--and it is al-Qaeada's farm club in Chechnya, not the West. What Makes This Article Shocking Is Where It Appeared The article is about how homosexuality doesn't appear to be a fixed trait, and that homosexuals can become straight. Not just act straight, not just control their urges, but actually become straight. And the article is in the August 27, 2007 Mother Jones! This is probably the most consistently hard left magazine that I have ever read:
The article goes on to talk to gay activists who argue that admitting that they are capable of change is bad politics. It also gives a surprisingly fair presentation of the work of the National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) and admits why the APA removed homosexuality from DSM-III: Freud was pessimistic that homosexuality could be treated, but doctors abhor an illness without a cure, and the 20th century saw therapists inflict the best of modern psychiatric practice on gay people, which included, in addition to interminable psychoanalysis and unproven medications, treatments that used electric shock to associate pain with same-sex attraction. These therapies were largely unsuccessful, and, particularly after the Stonewall riots of 1969—the clash between police and gays that initiated the modern gay rights movement—patients and psychiatrists alike started questioning whether homosexuality should be considered a mental illness at all. Gay activists, some of them psychiatrists, disrupted the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association for three years in a row, until in 1973 a deal was brokered. The APA would delete homosexuality from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) immediately, and furthermore it would add a new disease: sexual orientation disorder, in which a patient can't accept his or her sexual identity. The culprit in SOD was an oppressive society, and the cure for SOD was to help the gay patient overcome oppression and accept who he or she really was. (SOD has since been removed from the DSM.)UPDATE: Eric at Classical Values comments about this article, and links to a YouTube video: This video shows an effeminate gay man with a complaint I've heard before: "mainstream" straight-acting gays are intolerant of effeminate gays. (Which almost mimics the position of "straight society" that gays are effeminate and therefore repulsive.)Warning: While Eric's posting is (as usual) completely worksafe and civilized, the YouTube video he links to is rather awash in a couple of the words that you can't say on television. Labels: homosexuality 9/11 As A Failure of Understanding A great column by Mark Steyn, well worth reading in full. From the September 16, 2007 Orange County Register: This year I marked the anniversary of Sept. 11 by driving through Massachusetts. It wasn't exactly planned that way, just the way things panned out. So, heading toward Boston, I tuned to Bay State radio talk-show colossus Howie Carr and heard him reading out portions from the official address to the 9/11 commemoration ceremony by Deval Patrick, who is apparently the governor of Massachusetts: 9/11, said Gov. Patrick, "was a mean and nasty and bitter attack on the United States."Steyn goes on to point out the insanity of this, and observes that the reason that Islam is making such inroads into the West's most privileged youth: Fritz Gelowicz. Richard Reid. The Australian factory worker Jack Roche. The Toronto jihadists plotting to behead the Canadian prime minister. The son of the British Conservative Party official with the splendidly Wodehousian double-barreled name. All over the world there are young men raised in the "Multi-Kultur Haus" of the West who decide their highest ambition is to convert to Islam, become a jihadist and self-detonate.The need to have a deeper purpose in life is very strong. For those who have raised their children with no deeper of a significance than materialism, and no deeper concept of truth than "Does it make you happy?" (the whole Marin County mentality that gave us John Walker Lindh), the Islamic statement of purpose fills that hole. Labels: terrorism Bizarre Craig's List Ads You can always count on strange and odd stuff to show up on Craig's List, like this one that probably belongs in a very warped museum; and in the free category: partially eaten couch Labels: humor Armed School Teachers This is not a proud situation for America--but with the number of massacres, sometimes by mentally ill students, sometimes by mentally ill outsiders, and with the horrifying example of the Beslan Massacre by an al-Qaeda farm club, I think it is entirely appropriate that teachers have the option of being able to defend themselves and their students. What surprises me about this news story is the number of principals in Michigan who agree. From the September 12, 2007 Grand Rapids Press: I won't argue with the special weapons training requirement. If a teacher is going to be armed as part of protecting the students, that's a bit higher standard of care than if she is armed to protect herself. The school is opening itself up to some risk by so doing, and if they want to make sure that the teacher is higher trained than the Michigan concealed carry statute requires, I can't argue the point too strongly. Of course! Why, if we have weapons-free schools, no student or outsider will come on campus and start killing people! We have laws, policies, and procedures for that! Labels: gun rights Why Real Campaign Finance Reform Is Impossible John Lott has a piece in the New York Post today pointing out why news organizations are so keen on "campaign finance reform" that limits freedom: This is an obvious campaign contribution. If any corporation not in the news business gave a contribution like this to MoveOn.org, it would be subject to all the limitations of federal law. Dr. Lott explains why, in practice, it will be impossible to make the New York Times obey the law on this, even though AT&T or IBM would be required to do so. This is why I have no confidence that real campaign finance reform is even possible--even if you could deal with these advertising discounts. News media organizations simply because they are reporting news and running opinion pieces, can provide an immense amount of free publicity for a candidate. They can do enormous damage by how they choose to slant the news. Since the national news media are overwhelming on the side of the Democrats, this means that the Democrats get an enormous amount of free media support that Republicans don't get. The Supreme Court has decided (correctly) that the First Amendment's protection of freedom of the press means that a law requiring that newspapers print a candidate's response to a negative editorial was unconstitutional. The net effect is that news organizations enjoy an unlimited right to promote or denigrate political candidates. Campaign finance "reform" measures such as McCain-Feingold limit freedom of speech by independent political committees in the 60 days before a general election--while explicitly protecting the right of news organizations to do as they wish. Other proposals seek to "level the playing field" by requiring Democrats and Republicans to spend equivalent amounts of money--and yet leave the news media free to continue their cheerleading on behalf of Democrats. This is hardly fair. Labels: freedom of speech Redefining Success I am inclined to believe that the ozone hole concerns were legitimate, even if later evidence suggests that it was more related to sunspot cycle. But Eric over at Classical Values points out that the definition of success for the ozone hole crowd is more related to laws passed than measurable progress on shrinking the Ozone Hole: We have succeeded in shrinking the hole that's growing
Labels: global warming Greetings From Horseshoe Bend We had a bit of a shower yesterday at sunset--and no, I don't think there were any leprechauns out there!  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge Labels: photography The Myth of the $435 Claw Hammer In yesterday's post about Medicaid, I casually referred to the overpriced hammer bought by the Pentagon in the 1980s--and a reader set me straight, pointing out that this was an accounting artifact of distributing R&D costs for a very complex set of equipment equally over all materials used in that project. This overstated the R&D costs for the hammer (since there were none) and understated the R&D costs of the engine. I've updated yesterday's posting, and you can read an interesting article explaining how this myth was created here. I knew that some of the claims made back then were, at best, misleading. For example, the $8000 coffee maker was pretty quickly revealed to be not a Mr. Coffee, but the kind of coffee maker that goes into an airliner--and which were only about 15% cheaper when the airlines bought it. The Fashion Police Are Spreading As I said a while back, when Atlanta was discussing a law against sagging pants, I applaud the intentions, but I don't see a way to write a law that can't be evaded. Still, there's some hope that discussion of these laws might lead adults to start cracking down on their kids about this--because that is the only domain where this problem has a ghost of chance of being fixed. From September 16, 2007 Associated Press: Cities Cracking Down on Saggy Pants Labels: vulgarity I Should Laugh At This... William Saletan--who is sufficiently liberal to say that men training horses to have sex with them is closer to heterosexuality than homosexuality--does a good job of shredding a new "scientific study" that claims that liberal brains work better than conservative brains: Saletan points out that the criteria used by the study are so artificial that they really don't tell us much about the real world: Perhaps what this tells us is how rapidly people respond to data--but not how well they respond. The smartest person that I know isn't blindingly fast in conversation. He often takes what would seem like a very long time to convert his thoughts into speech. But it isn't because he's stupid, or slow. He's taking his time to put his thoughts into the correct form. Sometimes the choice is fast or accurate. The fact that scientists think that they have come up with something meaningful based on this fairly laughable study tells me more about the scientists involved than about the science. I'm reminded of how otherwise respectable German scientists, after Hitler came to power, turned their Social Darwinist notions about ethnicity and genetics into Rassenkunde--"race science." A lot of this stuff made Social Darwinism look downright scientific and liberal. Of course, the real question is why the masses continue to fund bad, politically motivated "science" like this. At least the Rassenkunde crowd was producing bad science to satisfy what was becoming a majority view in Germany of "Aryan superiority." This trash is just to make the liberal minority feel self-righteously superior. Where Is Jeremiah? The book of Jeremiah in the Old Testament recounts how Jeremiah rebukes Israel for its immorality in worshipping false gods (including child sacrifice), materialism, and oppressing the weak. I occasionally post examples of what I consider decline and fall of Western civilization. Sometimes the fact that the government is taking a positive action is itself an indication of how rapidly our society is declining into vulgarity. It is a pretty depressing sign of the times that you can read the intelligentsia defend bestiality by saying that it is just like being heterosexual. Or European political parties pursuing the legalization of incest. Instapundit linked to this article in Marie Claire about the hot new cosmetic procedure which is so disturbing that I will not quote the article, or describe it. I can't even figure out a way to allude to it, because no rational person would even begin to imagine that anyone would think that this was necessary. It is, I am afraid, a sign of how completely hardcore pornography and specifically sodomy has taken over the definition of what makes a woman attractive. I have flipped through more than a few of the magazines that my daughter read as a teenager, such as Marie Claire and Glamour, and I have noticed a self-refuting contrast between the articles and the ads. The articles emphasize that what matters in making a woman beautiful is what is on the inside. The ads emphasize that you need this makeup, these clothes, and by implication this body to get a man interested in you. I would like to believe the readership reads the articles, and is completely uninfluenced by the ads. But who's kidding whom? I remember reading several years back a disturbing article about how the widespread watching of pornography, and the increasingly exposed pictures of male celebrities, were beginning to create widespread discomfort among teenaged males about their bodies--much like several generations of teenaged girls have grown up convinced that they were ugly because they didn't look like various actresses. I weep for a country that has declined so rapidly that young women feel that the procedure described in that Marie Claire article is necessary for them to be optimally attractive. Perhaps if the feminists had spent a bit less time worrying about abortion, and a bit more time promoting the idea that women are people, not devices for men's sexual gratification, we wouldn't be in this absurd situation today. Labels: decline and fall of Western civilization Sunday, September 16, 2007
Medicaid and Illegal Aliens; Medicaid and Nursing Care The Center for Immigration Studies is an anti-illegal alien organization--and so this report about illegal alien use of Medicaid is quite surprising. For those that want to think that every every group against illegal immigration hates them and demonizes them, you will probably find the report a bit startling. Some of the summary remarks relative to Medicaid: • In 1996, 22 percent of immigrant-headed households used at least one major welfare program, compared to 15 percent of native households. After declining in the late 1990s, welfare use returned to 1996 levels by 2001, with 23 percent of immigrant households using welfare compared to 15 percent of native households. (Figure 1)Table 1 shows the percentage of immigrants, broken into "all immigrants" and "legal immigrants" who receive some form of welfare: TANF; food stamps; or Medicaid. The rates of assistance for legal immigrants are higher than for natives. This doesn't surprise me a lot; many immigrants to America are refugees, often with little or no English skills, limited education, and sometimes pretty serious traumatic experiences before they arrived. But what is surprising is that there is very little difference in assistance rates between "all immigrants" and "legal immigrants." The illegals apparently use governmental assistance just a bit more than the legal immigrants. A regular reader points out something that tends not to get much discussed: a lot of elderly patients end up on Medicaid in end of life conditions, such as dementia. The reason is that it in many parts of the country, nursing care will run $5800 a month, and in some areas, $9000 a month. It doesn't take more than a few months for the average retiree to be broke enough that Medicaid comes into play. He also points out that examining the bills for such nursing care leads to some pretty indefensible charges--like $360 for a three minute visit by a neurologist in a hospital who did nothing and $18 for a Tylenol tablet. Yeah, yeah, I know that there's some overhead involved, and some paperwork because a nurse has to go give the pill to a patient. But it does seem as though the $900 hammer crowd that used to work for the Pentagon is at work in the medical care system as well. Perhaps instead of just increasing taxes to make a health insurance system for the uninsured, the left might want to consider if there's something that can be done to get the spending orgy under control first--and with the savings, use that to fund health insurance for the uninsured. It is certainly the case that part of what is driving up the costs of our medical system is that it works a bit too well. There are an enormous number of people alive today who, in previous generations would never have made it to 50. I mentioned Dr. Andrew Weil's book Healthy Aging a while back. Weil made the point that more important than a long lifespan is a longer active healthy period of life. It does no good to add five years to a person's life, if those five years are spent hooked up to machines in a hospital bed. That's more like existence than life, and is it expensive, both to the individual, and to the society. I think that most people share my view that it is better to live to 75, and go from active and healthy to dead in a couple of days, rather than living to 90, and spending the last five years of that life in severe discomfort, unable to do much but wait for nurses to change your diapers and give you sponge baths. (And that's one of the less unpleasant things that can happen to you at end of life.) That's why I think that medical research and medical care should be focused as much as possible on preventing health problems, rather than treating them once they develop. UPDATE: A reader with experience working in military procurement points out that the $300 or $436 or $3000 hammer (depending on which of these accounts is correct) is an artifact of accounting practices no longer in use: The contractor simply allocated his overhead equally among all items on the contract, from engines to hammers, which was approved by the government (a practice since abandoned). Had the contractor allocated overhead to each item in accordance with its "actual" cost, the overall contract price would not have changed (or maybe it would have gone up to account for the time spent calculating each line items actual overhead).
Labels: health care Cute Pictures of Pets If you haven't recently received one of those emails filled with pictures of cute pets doing adorable things--go here. Labels: humor |
