The Unusual Suspects
Aug 13, 2009 Political
Yesterday, I talked a bit about Peter Singer- an advisor to Cass Sunstein, the Resident’s Regulatory Czar, and John Holdren, the Science Czar, two of the people who have been advising the Resident during this Healthcare debacle. Just since yesterday, I have been attacked by left wing loons who say that what I have written was trash- but they cannot say that what I have written about was untrue, because those are their own words.
Today, we will speak somewhat of Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, who reminds me some of Dr. Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death” in Auschwitz concentration camp. Dr, Emanuel, (that’s right- the brother of the SAME Emanuel that is the Resident’s Chief of Staff- nepotism is a wonderful thing if you can do it), has a theory that in a crisis, ( what constitutes a crisis here?), the lives of the very young and the very old are worth less than those in the 15- 40 year range. This is presumably because these people would be able to do more work for the state, and bring in more taxes.
Start with Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. He has already been appointed to two key positions: health-policy adviser at the Office of Management and Budget and a member of Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research.
Emanuel bluntly admits that the cuts will not be pain-free. “Vague promises of savings from cutting waste, enhancing prevention and wellness, installing electronic medical records and improving quality are merely ‘lipstick’ cost control, more for show and public relations than for true change,” he wrote last year (Health Affairs Feb. 27, 2008).
Savings, he writes, will require changing how doctors think about their patients: Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously, “as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of the cost or effects on others” (Journal of the American Medical Association, June 18, 2008).
Yes, that’s what patients want their doctors to do. But Emanuel wants doctors to look beyond the needs of their patients and consider social justice, such as whether the money could be better spent on somebody else.
Many doctors are horrified by this notion; they’ll tell you that a doctor’s job is to achieve social justice one patient at a time.
Emanuel, however, believes that “communitarianism” should guide decisions on who gets care. He says medical care should be reserved for the non-disabled, not given to those “who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens . . . An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia” (Hastings Center Report, Nov.-Dec. ’96).Translation: Don’t give much care to a grandmother with Parkinson’s or a child with cerebral palsy.
He explicitly defends discrimination against older patients: “Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age. Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years” (Lancet, Jan. 31). (Emphasis mine)
nypost.com
Yeah, but now that they are 65, having been 25 does not help them, in his mind. There seems to be too little compassion here for someone who is supposed to be formulating policy for Healthcare for all the people ( not just 25 year olds). Does that send a thrill up Chris Mathews’ leg, or is it a blood clot- we may never know if Zeke gets his way- Mathews is too old to save.
Now we get to Cass Sunstein, the Resident’s Regulatory Czar, who has some ideas of his own- many of these views are stifling and radical- for example, he wants to radically amend the boundaries of free speech:
He thinks that the current formulation, based on Justice Holmes’ conception of free speech as a marketplace “disserves the aspirations of those who wrote America’s founding document.”[9] The purpose of this reformulation would be to “reinvigorate processes of democratic deliberation, by ensuring greater attention to public issues and greater diversity of views.”[10] He is concerned by the present “situation in which like-minded people speak or listen mostly to one another,”[11] and thinks that in “light of astonishing economic and technological changes, we must doubt whether, as interpreted, the constitutional guarantee of free speech is adequately serving democratic goals.”[12] He proposes a “New Deal for speech [that] would draw on Justice Brandeis’ insistence on the role of free speech in promoting political deliberation and citizenship.”[10]
en.wikipedia.org
That is just one view that is out of the mainstream, and meant to silence, or at least mute critics of this administration, as well as promote the “Fairness Doctrine”, in the name of “diversity”. But there are other aspects of his views that, while out of the mainstream, would not be foreign to organizations such as PETA, but bothersome in that he is helping shape policy for this administration. His views on animal rights are right in line with those of John Holdren, and bring a troubling aspect to his task of “regulating” in this government.
Sunstein has also written often in favor of animal rights. “Every reasonable person believes in animal rights,” he says.[13] He also says that human “willingness to subject animals to unjustified suffering will be seen … as a form of unconscionable barbarity… morally akin to slavery and the mass extermination of human beings,”[14] and that we might “conclude that certain practices cannot be defended and should not be allowed to continue, if, in practice, mere regulation will inevitably be insufficient—and if, in practice, mere regulation will ensure that the level of animal suffering will remain very high.”[13] Specifically he thinks that, “we ought to ban hunting.”[15] He also thinks that “we could even grant animals a right to bring suit”[16] and that it is possible that “that before long, Congress will grant standing to animals to protect their own rights and interests.”[17] This all stems from his claim that “animals, species as such, and perhaps even natural objects warrant respect for their own sake, and quite apart from their interactions with human beings.”[18]
en.wikipedia.org
What does this have to do with Healthcare? Simple,really- there would be less testing of drugs on animals, therefore fewer drugs able to help us in our time of sickness. I admit, there are some people I value less than some animals, but not in general, and not in policy, that is for sure.
When you combine these people with the other two people I wrote about yesterday, and add into the mix several others, like Van Jones, a convicted felon, and the “Green Jobs” Czar, and Carol Browner, an avowed socialist, and the Energy Czar, both of whom have radical agendas that will do nothing but impoverish us as we go forward, you have to be very concerned for our Republic and its future.
Our liberties are being stolen from us in the dark of the night, and they are grading Grandma to decide whether she is worth the care it will take to keep her alive. Meanwhile, as they decide that, they want to give animals more rights than they give Granny. The world is upside down, and we have truly gone down the rabbithole into Wonderland- although it is beginning to look a bit Satanic in its “answers” to the problems we face.
And I will reiterate the Resident’s own words yet again, because they bear repeating; ” If you want to see where I want to go, you need only look at who I surround myself with.”
Well, he didn’t lie about that, at least.
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Tags: eugenics, felons, radicals, rationing, socialists
And You Wonder Why We Are Nervous?
Aug 12, 2009 Political
The Resident keeps on mocking his detractors regarding the Healthcare bill, saying that they are resorting to “scare” tactics to try and kill this obamanation of a bill, but in reality, all one has to do is look at the architects of this bill- who had input in the formation of the terms by which these “people” ( and I say that provisionally) wish to dictate our lives.
Take Professor Peter Singer- a man who believes that a baby is not human until it can have actual thoughts, and recognize that there is a tomorrow. That alone is scary stuff, but there’s more-
Singer states that arguments for or against abortion should be based on utilitarian calculation which weighs the preferences of a mother against the preferences of the fetus. A preference is anything sought to be obtained or avoided; all forms of benefit or harm caused to a being correspond directly with the satisfaction or frustration of one or more of its preferences. Since a capacity to experience suffering or satisfaction is a prerequisite to having any preferences at all, and a fetus, at least up to around eighteen weeks, says Singer, has no capacity to suffer or feel satisfaction, it is not possible for such a fetus to hold any preferences at all. In a utilitarian calculation, there is nothing to weigh against a mother’s preferences to have an abortion, therefore abortion is morally permissible.
Similar to his argument for abortion, Singer argues that newborns similarly lack the essential characteristics of personhood — “rationality, autonomy, and self-consciousness”[28] — and therefore “killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living.”[29]
en.wikipedia.org
Kind of Nazi- like, isn’t it? But then he gets really bizarro- Don’t believe me? Okay, here we go-
In a 2001 review of Midas Dekker’s Dearest Pet: On Bestiality, Singer argues that sexual activities between humans and animals that result in harm to the animal should remain illegal, but that “sex with animals does not always involve cruelty” and that “mutually satisfying activities” of a sexual nature may sometimes occur between humans and animals, and that writer Otto Soyka would condone such activities.
en.wikipedia.org
Gee, now there’s somebody you don’t want working at the SPCA, much less having input in the most intrusive and expensive Healthcare bill ever to be debated.
Now we come to John Holdren, who, believe it or not, is the Resident’s Science Czar- Really? Allow me-
Forced abortions. Mass sterilization. A “Planetary Regime” with the power of life and death over American citizens.
The tyrannical fantasies of a madman? Or merely the opinions of the person now in control of science policy in the United States? Or both?
These ideas (among many other equally horrifying recommendations) were put forth by John Holdren, whom Barack Obama has recently appointed Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, and Co-Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology — informally known as the United States’ Science Czar. In a book Holdren co-authored in 1977, the man now firmly in control of science policy in this country wrote that:
• Women could be forced to abort their pregnancies, whether they wanted to or not;
• The population at large could be sterilized by infertility drugs intentionally put into the nation’s drinking water or in food;
• Single mothers and teen mothers should have their babies seized from them against their will and given away to other couples to raise;
• People who “contribute to social deterioration” (i.e. undesirables) “can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility” — in other words, be compelled to have abortions or be sterilized.
• A transnational “Planetary Regime” should assume control of the global economy and also dictate the most intimate details of Americans’ lives — using an armed international police force.zombietime.com
This, unfortunately, is just the beginning of the wrong- headed thinking that pervades the White House, and after becoming just a little acquainted with these two sc**bags, you really feel like washing your eyes out. These are people we want to have power in deciding our fate? Is their “input” really something that is positive? Or is it as repugnant to you as it is to me?
I know that after doing the researchI have done, I no longer feel that Sarah Palin’s “Death Panel ” comment is that far out of line- indeed, sorry to say, she might be right on in her assessment, because these are not the only two that (A)- have had input on this bill, and (B)- are “Czars” in this administration.
The Resident once said that if we want to know how he is going to make his decisions, to just look at the people he surrounds himself with. Well- we are looking, but the glimpse is certainly not reassuring us about the state of our Healthcare.
Tomorrow, I will introduce you to Ezekiel Emmanuel, the brother of the Resident’s Chief of Staff, and Van Jones, the Resident’s “Green Jobs Czar”. They also hold views that are puzzling, considering the Healthcare Debate.
In the meantime, study these people- the more you know, the more horrified you will be.
And if I was the Resident, I wouldn’t leave Peter Singer and Bo, the Resident’s dog, in the same room.
It’s just not safe.
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Tags: eugenics, morality, rationing, Sterilization
Look At All The Pretty People
Jul 16, 2009 Political
The arguments about “Universal Healthcare” continue to swirl around Capital Hill, all without the main point being uttered, and that point is Eugenics.
Eugenics is the study and application of a form of population control that came into vogue in the 1920s with the ‘Progressive” movement- yes, the same people we call Liberals today have the same basic beliefs in population control, especially with respect to “undesirable” people.
Sounds kind of Nazi- like, doesn’t it? Well, that is because the Nazis learned it from people like Woodrow Wilson, and Margaret Sanger, the “Mother” of Birth Control, and the founder of Planned Parenthood.
Margaret Sanger, the Saint of Planned Parenthood, advocated beliefs that were not dissimilar to those of my twisted teach. The fabled women’s rights activist was all about negative eugenics – meaning making sure ”social misfits” and other undesirables never got the chance to repulse the right people, by making sure they never got born.
“Birth control,” she declared in 1923, “is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, or preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defectives.” Her mission: to stop ”keeping alive thousands who never, in all human compassion, should have been brought into this world.”
Sanger was ambitious. She actively advocated for sterilization of the great unwashed – the “feeble-minded, insane… deaf, deformed and dependent,” including “orphans, ne’er-do-wells, tramps, the homeless and paupers.” Talk about a hard knock life.
bighollywood.breitbart.com
She was and is not the only one who felt this way about the various parts of our society, you know, the parts that Liberals like to bus to the polls to vote for them, and then never see in public again? Yea, those people. Hillary Clinton says she proudly calls herself a “New Progressive”, and the liberal Democrats are trying their best to re- brand themselves as “Progressives”, as it seems as if “Liberal” has a negative connotation. Oh really? More negative than “Nazi”?
“I hated the wretchedness and hopelessness of the poor,” Sanger wrote, “and never experienced that satisfaction in working among them that so many noble women have found.” Indeed, her whole life seems to have been spent rebelling against the devout Roman Catholicism of her parents; Sanger’s mother got pregnant a whopping 18 times (which probably explains a lot).
Yes, thanks to Sanger’s one-woman crusade, 8300 people were sterilized in the state of Virginia alone. Her most famous casualty was a young rape victim named Carrie Buck, whose tubes were ultimately cut – against her will – because she was allegedly promiscuous and mentally “challenged” with a rocky family history. “Three generations of imbeciles are enough,” Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously wrote of the case. Snip snip.
bighollywood.breitbart.com
There we go, with even Oliver Wendell Holmes, the noted Jurist, taking sides on behalf of the People police. The sad truth, though, is that this isn’t just past history, a sorry episode in our past, but will be revived with the commencement of “Universal Healthcare”, as our loving government will put a price on treatment, and if you do not fit in their criteria, you will die, plain and simple.
You will have been judged to not be worth the cost.
Rationing health care means getting value for the billions we are spending by setting limits on which treatments should be paid for from the public purse. If we ration we won’t be writing blank checks to pharmaceutical companies for their patented drugs, nor paying for whatever procedures doctors choose to recommend. When public funds subsidize health care or provide it directly, it is crazy not to try to get value for money. The debate over health care reform in the United States should start from the premise that some form of health care rationing is both inescapable and desirable. Then we can ask, What is the best way to do it?
Last year Britain’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence gave a preliminary recommendation that the National Health Service should not offer Sutent for advanced kidney cancer. The institute, generally known as NICE, is a government-financed but independently run organization set up to provide national guidance on promoting good health and treating illness. The decision on Sutent did not, at first glance, appear difficult. NICE had set a general limit of £30,000, or about $49,000, on the cost of extending life for a year. Sutent, when used for advanced kidney cancer, cost more than that, and research suggested it offered only about six months extra life. But the British media leapt on the theme of penny-pinching bureaucrats sentencing sick people to death. The issue was then picked up by the U.S. news media and by those lobbying against health care reform in the United States. An article in The New York Times last December featured Bruce Hardy, a kidney-cancer patient whose wife, Joy, said, “It’s hard to know that there is something out there that could help but they’re saying you can’t have it because of cost.” Then she asked the classic question: “What price is life?”
nytimes.com
Great question- What price is life? I guess that depends on the person, but shouldn’t that not be the government’s decision? I can say that yes, the system needs fixing, but I certainly do not want the government to decide who lives and who dies.
With the criteria that proponents of Eugenics would apply, Stephen Hawking would never have been kept alive to postulate his theories on black holes or string theory- he would have been killed, if not actively, than by neglect, because the government cannot quantify potential.
When a Washington Post journalist asked Daniel Zemel, a Washington rabbi, what he thought about federal agencies putting a dollar value on human life, the rabbi cited a Jewish teaching explaining that if you put one human life on one side of a scale, and you put the rest of the world on the other side, the scale is balanced equally. Perhaps that is how those who resist health care rationing think. But we already put a dollar value on human life. If the Department of Transportation, for example, followed rabbinical teachings it would exhaust its entire budget on road safety. Fortunately the department sets a limit on how much it is willing to pay to save one human life. In 2008 that limit was $5.8 million. Other government agencies do the same. Last year the Consumer Product Safety Commission considered a proposal to make mattresses less likely to catch fire. Information from the industry suggested that the new standard would cost $343 million to implement, but the Consumer Product Safety Commission calculated that it would save 270 lives a year — and since it valued a human life at around $5 million, that made the new standard a good value. If we are going to have consumer-safety regulation at all, we need some idea of how much safety is worth buying. Like health care bureaucrats, consumer-safety bureaucrats sometimes decide that saving a human life is not worth the expense. Twenty years ago, the National Research Council, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, examined a proposal for installing seat belts in all school buses. It estimated that doing so would save, on average, one life per year, at a cost of $40 million. After that, support for the proposal faded away. So why is it that those who accept that we put a price on life when it comes to consumer safety refuse to accept it when it comes to health care?
nytimes.com
Because miracles do happen- people do come out of comas, overcome handicaps, and become inspirations to us all. Because we are a nation of lost causes, and we love the underdog.
Just because the “Progressives”, the Nazis in our society do not want to look at the great unwashed, the less than perfect members of our society, should not give them the right to say that these people haven’t the right to live. This began with the “Pro- Choice” movement, where they can kill off the smallest, most defenseless members of our society, but now they are putting a price on everyone’s life, and that is just plain wrong.
That should be everyone’s personal choice alone- certainly not some snooty governmental watchdog’s.
This is not about creating a master race, or getting rid of the undesirables, but something just as sinister- getting rid of people who cost too much.
This is all about dollars.
Not so much about sense.
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Tags: birth control, eugenics, human cultivation, rationing
Gucci, Gucci, Goo
Apr 26, 2009 Political
Eugenic- Pertaining to eugenics; relating to, or tending towards, the production of fine offspring. (eugenics)- The scientific application of the findings of the study of heredity to human beings with the object of perpetuating those inherent and hereditary qualities which aid in the development of the human race.
That sounds like quite a mouthful, doesn’t it? It also sounds fairly benign, until you begin, like a sore, to pick at it. Once you begin to look at the deeper meanings and think about the history of eugenics, this doesn’t sound like such a good thing, but this is what is happening under the surface here in the good old U.S. of A., as well as the European countries.
Since 1992, in Minnesota, there has been a DNA database that they keep on all newborns, and I have found that many other states also have a variant of this database. Let me explain.
Every time a baby is born, a nurse takes blood from a pinprick on the baby’s foot- this is to check for diseases and other conditions that the baby might have- a good thing, right? But then, whereas the hospital used to destroy the blood sample, now it is taken to a lab for gene sequencing, so these doctors can find out if your baby might be prone to cancer, Parkinson’s disease, Muscular Dystrophy, and a horde of other conditions that plague mankind. The Government keeps this blood database for comparison and experimentation. This still sounds like a good thing, right?
Here’s where it goes off the rails- because these doctors can do such a fine job on DNA. they can feasibly find out if your potential baby has a temper, is prone, (in their opinion) to violence, or might develop other qualities that might (again, in their opinion) be detrimental to the human race. Their job is to determine if your potential baby will be a plus or a minus in the great numbers game that is the human race. They want to be the judge of your baby’s potential- or lack thereof.
There have been advocates of Eugenics since the 1920s- it was taught with great fervor in the Universities of the world. People who thought of themselves as “Progressives” openly advocated the study of eugenics as a practical method of moving the evolution of human development forward dramatically. There was just one problem- not enough was known about DNA at the time, so practical study of it was stymied, but there were plenty of advocates, from Charles Lindbergh to Franklin Roosevelt, to Adolph Hitler.
Oh yeah, that’s right, many of the eugenics experiments Hitler’s SS carried out on Jewish prisoners were designed to create a “Master Race”- that is Eugenics at is most basic and cruel form. Because DNA was not understood well at that time, many of the experiments involved “grafting” different anatomical parts onto a living body to see if it would take. The SS would experiment on midgets, and twins, all to find out any data that might help them in their quest. The process and logic was tortured and cruel, and we would, you would think, never condone this barbaric behavior today. You would only be partly right.
Instead, the process can begin in the womb. You have heard that soon you will be able to choose traits for your child, thus having “designer” babies. You can choose to have your baby be blue eyed, blonde haired, all the traits you desire- but there is a dark side to this also- the undesirable traits that your child might have in his genes. Progressives want to weed out these undesirable traits, and might want you to terminate, indeed might have you terminate, by law, your child, so that the Down’s syndrome, cancer, Muscular Dystrophy, whatever might be the deficiency they believe they see, will not have a chance to become part of the human race. It might just be that your child doesn’t have, IN THEIR JUDGEMENT, the potential to be as intelligent as these “Progressives” would like.
So sorry, no baby for you.
The kicker is, they might just prohibit you from having any children, just to make sure that your DNA doesn’t pollute the purity they seek. For example, Sickle- cell Anemia is a killer of proportionately many more Blacks than any other race- getting rid of this would be a good thing, right? Maybe not, if you were the ones told that you were not allowed to have children since your potential children MIGHT get the disease. Now you are banned from having children, all based on a possibility.
Add to this is the very real probability that the insurance companies would use this data to determine if you could be covered by insurance. If you were prone to cancer- say it was a possibility that genetically you MIGHT get cancer, well, they would adjust their coverage accordingly, or deny you coverage altogether. This would be the “business” side of eugenics, and we would pay the cost in not only money, but potential.
Stephen Hawking is a fine example- he would have been killed in the womb, or never been allowed to be conceived, if the judgement was based on his physical condition alone. Yet this man made great strides in our understanding of physics and the cosmos, all while being enormously crippled physically.
The study and application of Eugenics is a very real thing, people, and this brings up the question that “Progressives” hate to hear- just because you may believe you can play God, does that really mean you should? Some things should be left to God alone.
Or as “Progressives” like to worship Darwin, leave the cycle of life to Natural Selection.
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Tags: database, designer babies, dna, eugenics