Feature Article
Obesity Treatment should Not be Insurable
Obesity Treatment
The preoccupation of the press with Obesity Treatment is of personal interest. Having completed a half century of practice in pulmonary medicine, the current preoccupation with the pharmacologic treatment of obesity is of more than academic interest. The cost of these products exceeds the ability of most people to afford or insurance companies to cover.
Obesity is a relatively simple medical problem and its treatment is straight forward—the reduction of calories ingested. Since 3500 calories in addition to our usual diet maintenance will add one pound of weight and 3500 calory reduction in our usual diet will decrease our weight by one pound. However, almost all patients find this very difficult to implement.
There are many diet books. I have reviewed dozens as recorded on my website: in my book review section: http://www.medicaltuesday.net/book-reviews-health/ My experience was not significantly different from those recorded.
On my birthday in October 2023 with a weight of 230 pounds, I began missing lunch which I calculated to be about 500 calories. So every week or seven days would equal 3500 calories. With a reduction of 3500 calories per week, I predicted I would lose one pound per week.
In October 2024, after one year of this self study, I weighed 180 pounds. I had indeed lost the 50 pounds I had predicted.
I was never hungry during this past year. I continued my physical activity during my retirement by walking around our courtyard twice a day. I continued to use my bench press twice a day, currently 300 extensors, 200 flexors, and 200 knee lift sequences daily. I had no pharmacologic expenses.
The weight loss attributed to the promoted drugs may be in excess of one pound per week. Then in addition to the exess fat, one could begin losing muscle and bone. This would then have adverse consequences to health and well being.
So a safe, sane and costless way to lose 50 pounds is to miss lunch for one year. If that’s not enough, then after a year or two of normal living, miss lunch again for another year to lose another 50 pounds. Be sure to remember your starting weight inasmuch as it will be different than the previous starting weight.
Fat would normally be the first tissue to be removed which would have minimal adverse effect on body function. After losing the excess fat, the body would begin removing muscle and bony tissue which could begin having adverse effect on body function (loss of strengh) or structure (loss of height).
The above self study would indicate that there may be little need for weight loss drugs since the results can easily be obtain without pharmacologic intervention and the significant cost, whether personal or insurance.
This may also suggest that weight loss drugs need not be an insurable item. After losing 50 pounds of fat if weight loss continues one may begin experiencing muscle weakness or loss in height.
Many perople after significant weight loss, experience a rebound to their previous weight. I have not experienced a gain in weight in the six months after concluding this self study. My weight today is still 180 pounds
Del Meyer, MD
Pulmonologist, Retired
Feature Article
HEALTHCARE – AMERICA
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Del Meyer was born in Okarche, Oklahoma which was near the Concho Indian Reservation. Oklahoma had become a state in 2007. The William MEYER family had moved there from Illinois for an expanded farming opportunity in 2008. Each new resident received a 40-acre parcel of farmland from the former INDIAN Territory. The Meyer family with four sons and three daughters received seven parcels which supported continuing farming.
He was born at home in1935 with the family doctor Paul Neuman, MD, in attendance. He was born on his physician’s birthday who christened him as a future doctor. This emphasis remained with him during his entire education experience.
Del did the usual farm work in the fields in the summertime when out of school. He was exposed to considerable grain and field dust. He developed asthma which then confirmed that he was not fit to continue with the family farms as recommended by his physician. Other professions that farm boys could pursue at that time were medicine, ministry and law. While attending school, he assisted with the morning and evening chores, including milking the cows and tending to the farm animals, such as feeding the chickens, slopping the hogs, and feeding the sheep.
He attended Kansas University and upon graduation enrolled in the Kansas University School of Medicine graduating with an MD degree in 1966.
Upon graduation he interned at Wayne County General Hospital and then continued with his specialty training in Internal Medicine at this same hospital which was the largest hospital in the United States with 6500 patients with 500 in the acute hospital, which was the primary focus of the training programs, with the depths in the other divisions of psychiatry and the infirmary. These provided experience in a number of chronic diseases not normally found in training programs.
He had been deferred for his postdoctoral training by the Berry Plan which was designed by Dr. Berry to procure a continuous supply of physicians for the military services in the various specialties, by deferment for specialty training with the caveat of then joining the Medical Corps for a minimum of two years of active duty or the length of the deferment.
After two years in the United States Air Force, he obtained a National institutes of Health (NIH) fellowship in Pulmonary Medicine which he took at KUMC. The school was in its formative stage as a new UC medical school. He was the first pulmonary medicine fellow in the new program being established by Dr. Carroll Cross, who designed the pulmonary training programs utilizing international rotating visiting professorships. He opened a private office in Sacramento, California for the practice of Pulmonary Medicine in July 1970. He contributed articles to the society journal: Sacramento Medicine and then was offered the editorship. In addition to the monthly editor’s column, he introduced an additional column: HIPPOCRATES AND HIS KIN as well as a medical book review column. These can be accessed on his website: www.DelMeyer.net
Being the first fully trained pulmonologist in Sacramento, this allowed him to be very innovative in practice. He hired an RN which was unusual in the community who helped with his home visit programs for severely ill respiratory failure patients, many on life support with ventilators. The home ventilators were just hitting the market at that time. With the expertise of an RN, this supported tracheostomy care at home with good home visit support.
There was a need for this type of care as was seen with his full appointment schedule from day one. This caused him to recruit a second pulmonologist immediately upon his arrival. He continued with a full appt schedule, and he recruited a third pulmonologist. This afforded him the opportunity to establish full pulmonary service in three hospitals in the area as well as adding two associates. This improved the nighttime call schedule to every third night on call and every third weekend. Patients could now enter the practice from any of the three hospitals and the three offices they established.
They were able to upgrade the pulmonary function laboratory in each of the three hospitals to university caliber. They then proceeded to establish full pulmonary function laboratories in each of their three offices to the same sophistication as the hospital PFT labs which was a $30,000 investment in each office.
722 words
Back Page Summary.
America’s Healthcare crises is not of recent origin. Forty years ago, Drs Goodman & Musgrave identified significant problems with America’s healthcare only because healthcare is the most regulated and politicized sector of our economy. It takes considerable understanding of economics, medical care, politics, ethics, and emotions for anyone to obtain a unified view of America’s healthcare. Healthcare has gone through many revisions, but each has made it more complicated and expensive. They found that medical care was actually relatively inexpensive, but insurance has made it more costly.
The yearly physical exams have not yielded any improvement in healthcare outcomes. With the algorithm we present, the routine maintenance of our healthcare can be self-directed and insurance free until you require hospital care. It involves physicians only when questions occur not explained in the protocol. This represents a significant cost reduction in your own healthcare monitoring costs. Laboratory medical directors can now authorize the few screening tests that are appropriate as outlined in the proposal for diseases without any symptoms.
So, begin to save healthcare costs by paying for monitoring your own health with this algorithm. Out patience healthcare costs are a personal responsibility. Therefore, health insurance is only required for hospital care which could not be provided as outpatient medical or surgical care were not needed or utilized until a patient required in-patient medical or surgical care, thus saving enormous hospital related healthcare costs. Pending further actuarial review it is estimated that this will reduce the cost of healthcare by 50 percent or even more.
250 words.
Feature Article
MONITOR YOUR HEALTH Per decade of life
DO This before you see you Doctor and save your insurance costs
Cost of Monitoring Your Health per decade of life if paid in cash
HEALTH MAINTENANCE: THE COST OF MONITORING YOUR HEALTH.
Health maintenance is primarily the cost of monitoring your health status before you go to a physician or even need a physician. This can be a self-examination of Blood Pressure, Pulse, Weight, Height, and Vision which should be done yearly. They can be done at no cost in most pharmacies. Blood pressure instruments are readily available at minimal cost at pharmacies. Glucometers to check your sugar if you have symptoms of diabetes, or there is diabetes in the family can be obtained at the pharmacies at reasonable costs. Check your glucose before meals. If over 126 mg%, recheck and if levels persist over 126%, see a physician. If you’ve noted diminished vision on reading small print, check your visual acuity. This can be done with readily available eye charts either in the pharmacies or purchase. Normal is 20/20 visual acuity which is read directly from the chart. Glasses are not required for driving if the visual acuity is 20/40 or better.
All of the above can be equivalent to the order of the cost of other household items including upkeep of house, car and property which are personal responsibilities and do not require insurance. Hence, basic health insurance is not necessary for the usual monitoring or maintenance of health care as in any HMO (health maintenance organization) without the medical coverage aspects.
Health insurance is necessary for hospital care, for items that are large in cost or unpredictable whether for major medical care, surgery, OBG, emergencies or trauma. You may negotiate a high deductible health insurance plan to cover costs above the levels of maintenance costs.
Utilizing what major clinics deem as the minimal cost of health maintenance or routine care, that is not insurable, presents the following estimates for cost of private health care for each decade of life, which should be paid in cash as are other basic household items. To include these with major health insurance will increase the cost approximately ten-fold compared with cash. The only insurance necessary would be coverage for hospitalizations, whether for surgery, trauma or any major medical problems requiring admission to a hospital..
The cost of pediatric and adolescent care including immunizations are essentially known costs. These are mostly predictable and therefore, can be planned for and paid for in cash at time of service. Your major medical insurance should cover child and adolescent care on the same basis as an adult—primarily for hospitalization, surgery, and trauma. Be sure to read the fine print so the coverage begins after your payment for basic care as outlined above and below.
If this is the first visit, make sure the vaccinations are up-to-date. They are normally done prior to age 10, except for the annual flu shot. The flu virus vaccine has normally included strains of influenza A, and influenza B. It will now also include strains of the SARS-Co-V which has been known to be present in 20 percent of flu cases since first isolated in 1965. Prophylaxis details are still pending. The standard immunizations should include:
- Tetanus-diphtheria-pertussis immunization booster within the last 10 years
- Chicken pox if you’ve never had a vaccination or the disease
- Measles-mumps-rubella if you weren’t inoculated as a child
- Meningitis if you’re under 24 and never had a vaccination.
- Hepatitis A and B if you’re at high risk
- Annual flu shot which will vary yearly based on prevalence suspected
Different strains of Influenza A and Influenza B are normally included.
Influenza C is ubiquitous, very mild, and herd immunity is developed by age 10
The recent SARS-Co-V will more likely be added in the near future. It is a mild form of the flu syndrome, but like flu can come in epidemics. The 1918 flu epidemic killed one-third of the world (25-million ??). The Covid -19 epidemic of 2019 killed less than one percent of those infected.
The Third Decade of Life: Ages 20-29
The twenties are usually a relatively healthy decade of life for the average adult. You should be getting a Medical History and Physical exam from your primary physician every two- or three-years including checks on your blood pressure and height/weight. This should also be done every year on a self-exam basis. The cost of monitoring equipment such as blood pressure device is quite reasonable and will service an entire family. Most pharmacies have a BP chair near the pharmacist which is available to check vital signs. Most smart phones today have an entry to record this.
Screening tests are necessary for silent diseases such as anemia and kidney disease. Since these will be paid in cash, one can obtain the lab tests for approximately $100 per year. plus an office call to your personal physician, which can vary.
The average actuarial cost during this third decade of life should average out to about $300 per year—or $3,000 total for this decade of life.
Health insurance to cover these monitoring or maintenance items may cost $300 each month—or $3,600 per year or $36,000 for this decade of life. Thus it is obvious that paying cash for health monitoring or maintenance will save thousands of dollars from insurance costs.
Screening tests are necessary for silent diseases such as anemia which can be checked with a standard complete blood count (CBC). Screening test for kidney disease requires a complete urinalysis (CUA). These should be repeated every two- or three-years. During this decade a chemistry panel for multiple organ disease is advisable and should include a lipid panel to check cholesterol and triglycerides which can be elevated without any symptoms and need treatment, primarily with diet. If normal, no repeats are required during this decade of life. Your doctor might consider other tests based on your medical history and physical examination. If you have relatives with diabetes, or you have urinary frequency or urgency your doctor will want to screen you for this with an a1c test, the screening test for diabetes in addition to the CUA.
The Fourth Decade of Life: Ages 30-39
Your thirties are generally similar to your twenties with continued good health. Many of the recommended checkups are the same as in your twenties. A complete Medical History and Physical exam from your primary physician every two- or three-years should continue as well as a CBC and CUA with each exam. Another chemistry and lipid panel should be obtained during this decade if the previous one was abnormal or you have a strong family history of heart attacks or strokes. If diseases are diagnosed, additional testing would be needed. This would include a Hemoglobin A1c if diabetes is suspected as well as other tests to evaluate other abnormalities that are found.
The average actuarial cost during the fourth decade of life should be approximately $400 per year—or $4,000 total for this decade of life.
Health insurance may cost $400 for each month—or $4800 per year or $48,000 for the decade. This makes it even more obvious that paying cash for health maintenance will save thousands of dollars from insurance costs. Thus your deductible on your major health policy for hospitalization and surgery, OBG, and trauma should be the same as your basic cash costs or $400.
The Fifth Decade of life: Age 40-49
As you reach middle age, your body is going to need a minimal of increased attention, with a few more tests and procedures than in your twenties and thirties. You still need your basic medical checkups by your physician now increased to every one or two years. Your CBC and complete UA are also yearly during your annual evaluation. Chemistry, cholesterol, + Lipid panels may now be required every two to five years if abnormal. Otherwise continue with checks every five-years.
The average actuarial cost for the fifth decade of life should be approximately $500 per year—or $5,000 for this decade of life if paid in cash.
Health insurance may cost $500 per month—or $6000 per year or $60,000 for this decade of life. This proves how costly insurance is compared to recommended screening, with health insurance only above this level.
During this decade, men have to get screened for prostate cancer with a digital prostate exam plus a PSA (prostate screening antigen) and repeated yearly if elevated. Otherwise repeat every two or three years. Women have to begin screening for breast cancer and pelvic disease with a PAP smear. Your physician will set the extent and frequency for these. Prevailing recommendations for mammogram and pelvic exams are every two or three years during your fifth decade.
A vision exam may be needed as you age if you notice diminished vision. Visual acuity charts are readily available to screen for visual acuity. If you have difficulty in reading or your visual acuity is 20/30 or less, ophthalmologic exam becomes necessary. Glasses are not required for driver’s licenses unless your vision is 20/40 or less.
Audiology exam may be required if hearing impairment is noted. Audiologists work in physician ENT and Otology offices where the ENT surgeon will do the general exam. If the exam is normal, you may be referred to an audiologist that may be in the surgeon’s office or his clinic. Free standing audiology practices are now available and one can obtain an audiology exam directly. If abnormal, the audiologist will refer you to the ENT or Otologist specialist if you haven’t had an ear/nose/throat medical exam. Audiologist are now authorized to prescribe and dispense hearing aids.
If you have a family history of heart disease, or are at high risk for heart disease, or have lipid abnormalities, then your doctor may want to begin screening for coronary heart disease. If you have hypertension, he may begin treatment if a low salt diet on your own does not control your pressure within a few months. Normal blood pressure has been redefined by the American College of Cardiology as 130/85.
If you have asthma or difficulty in breathing, your doctor should begin screening your pulmonary function and if abnormal begin treatment usually with an inhaled bronchodilator. If abnormal, also monitor your oxygen saturation which you can do with the purchase of a pulse-oximeter readily available 0n line. My first pulse oximeter when I started my training was $500. I now have one in each of my exam rooms that were $50 on the web. Use it to check your oxygen saturation level whenever you become short of breath. If your saturation of oxygen (SaO2) is less than 95%, see your physician or see a pulmonologist.
The Sixth Decade of Life: Ages 50-59
In your 50s, one would continue with annual Medical Examinations by your physician with continued annual baseline screening tests which may now include chemistry and lipid panels.
At this time screening for colon cancer should be started. This may include a simple stool exam for blood or a sigmoidoscopy, a visual exam of your rectum and colon.
Screenings for Type II diabetes maybe considered if you have a family history of diabetes with an elevated hemoglobin A1C plus an elevated glucose level. Repeat yearly if elevated.
A baseline electrocardiogram may be considered if cardiac disease is suspected. If normal, it does not need to be repeated in this decade. Screenings for prostate cancer, breast and gyn cancers should continue.
Screening for depression and mental cognition and other psychiatric problems may be required. A convenient memory test increasingly used by physicians is having ten objects on display, having the patient identify each, and make a sentence with each. Then at the end of the appt check recall. If 7 or more are recalled, consider cognition normal. If 6 or less, refer to neurologist for an Alzheimer evaluation. Many physicians now use the five-object test during their annual exam as a screening test for memory or Alzheimer impairment.
Be sure that you have hospital insurance for major Medical, Surgery, Trauma, or any hospitalization including psychiatric for unplanned major adverse or unsuspected health problems.
The average actuarial costs during the sixth decade of life should be approximately $600 per year–$6,000 for this decade of life.
Health insurance to cover these maintenance items may cost $600 per month—or $7200 per year or $72,000 for this decade of life. When one looks at the insurance costs compared to the cash costs, it is becoming more obvious why the cost of healthcare is rising so fast. It is generally not because you or your doctor are over utilizing care, but more likely due to the hidden costs of insurance and hospital care of relatively healthy people in middle age.
The Seventh Decade of Life: Ages 60-69
The sixties were formerly thought to be the onset of your aging years. But we are really healthier now than when social security was implemented in the 1930s or Medicare in 1965. Your body is not ready to slow down or retire from work. To retire may decrease your life expectancy. It is important to keep fit and stay on top of your health and remain active. All the screenings you had done in your fifties, you’ll need to continue in your 60s & 70s and become more aware of health risks before disease sets in.
The average actuarial cost for the seventh decade of life should be approximately $700 per year–$7,000 for this decade of life.
Health insurance may cost $700 per month—or $8400 per year or $84,000 for this decade. This should confirm where excess healthcare costs really are—unnecessary lab tests.
This is decision time when Medicare becomes available. Medicare has become more restrictive with the passing of time with many items no longer approved or denied when your doctor orders them. One should do a careful cost analysis. If you’re in good health and still employed with normal screening, you may find that continuing to pay for usual care and private health care above this level may improve your life span. People of yesteryear would generally be calling it quits. This is not a recommendation not to enroll in Medicare when you turn 65. However, with Medicare projecting to go bankrupt in the next decade or so, this program may require serious consideration and give you medical freedom that you will not have in a government program.
Aging is something everyone has to go through. There is no fountain of youth. It’s a part of life. As you age, it’s important to keep tabs on your health. The need to see a doctor in your twenties isn’t as pressing as it is in your fifties, sixties, and seventies. Determine if you’re seeing the doctor often enough or getting checked up for the correct things with this quick guide.
Always question your doctor as to why on any of his recommendations for tests or procedures and what would be the cost and benefit to you.
The Eighth Decade of Life: Ages 70-79
We are now healthier in our 70s and living longer with life expectancy into the 80s. We have less medical costs in our 70s than we had in our 60s when Medicare was started. Medicare is predicted to go bankrupt in the next decade. Hence, our extrapolation into the 70s and 80s will show that health care costs will not be insurmountable even after Medicare goes bankrupt and we resume the usual self-care we had prior to Medicare. The only thing that can save Medicare is to increase the age of benefit from 65 to 72 years. That shouldn’t be difficult since most of us continue working. Medicare should also adjust the age for early benefits from age 62 to age 65. Many will see this as a reduction of entitlement and difficult to accept thinking it is too risky. However, the cost with this personalized health maintenance plan, especially when seen with all the Medicare denials, and lack of coverage, may be acceptable.
Many in their 70s are as healthy as they were in their 60s. We are healthier despite the new 50-years of a working lifetime than the previously 40-year work-life. This means we could continue with our full income for the additional 10 years and enjoy a better retirement.
The average actuarial cost during the eighth decade of life should be approximately $800 per year–$8,000 for this decade of life.
Health insurance may cost $800 per month–or $9600 per year or $96,000 for this decade of life. High deductible insurance should start above the average cost of self-care, starting at $800 per year during this decade and will be considerably less expensive than the usual complete insurance. This remains the individual’s responsibility to cover.
These illustrations are for basic outpatient health care monitoring and maintenance. Hospitalizations, whether for Medical, Surgeries, Trauma or other Emergencies require major health insurance coverage. This will be less expensive than current insurance for total health care which includes major profits to insurance companies for covering the healthy young people and those in midlife under 50.
The Ninth Decade of Life: Ages 80-89
At this time your doctor may want to do screenings for osteoporosis since falls and fractures occur more frequently in this decade. Your doctor may also consider ultrasound screenings for abdominal aortic aneurysm, as well as carotid artery ultrasound for stroke evaluation. These can be done by the panels that become available in most communities, frequently by mail invitation, on an annual basis and are relatively inexpensive.
Skin cancer, oral cancer and lung cancer screening may be considerations based on your health history, including your cigarette consumption history. If you have a chronic cough, a CXR (a chest x-ray) may be advisable if it persists after treatment and discontinuation of your cigarette habit.
.Depression should also be monitored along with signs of dementia, loss of memory, confusion e.g. Alzheimer’s disease or other causes of inability to care for oneself.
The average actuarial cost during the ninth decade of life should be approximately $900 per year–$9,000 for this decade of life.
Health insurance may cost $900 per month–or $10,800 per year or $108,000 for this decade of life. High deductible insurance to start above the average cost of self-care or $900 per year during this decade, will be considerably less expensive than usual complete insurance, but remains the individual’s responsibility to obtain.
If you look at the obituary columns in the papers, you will be surprised at the number of people that live into their ninth decade—also at the number that lived into their 10th decade and were working into their 9th decade. We are healthier at this stage of life than we have ever been. Life expectancy has increased 15 years during this time. Of course we should always have the safety of major medical/surgery/ER insurance in the event we develop a major illness or require hospitalization or surgery. This type of insurance should always be less expensive than the usual total insurance.
You may want to take the risk of MEDICARE denials with intermittent lack of care rather than continue this personal care plan for which you pay and also control.
The Tenth Decade of Life: Ages 90-100
Keep looking at the obituary columns in the papers and you will continue to be surprised at the number of people that live into their tenth decade—also at the number that live into their 11th decade or beyond 100 and were working into their 90s or 10th decade. We are healthier at this stage of life than we have ever been. We have already exceeded the life expectancy of age 65 by 25 years when Medicare was implemented.. Of course we should always have the safety of major medical/surgery/hospital policy in case we develop a major illness or require hospitalization or surgery.
The average actuarial cost during the tenth decade of life should be approximately $1000 per year–$10,000 for this decade of life.
Health insurance may cost $1000 per month–or $12,000 per year or $120,000 for this decade of life. High deductible insurance to start above the average cost of self-care starting at $1000 per year during this decade will be considerably less expensive than usual complete insurance, but remains the individual’s responsibility to decide or obtain.
You may want to take the risk of MEDICARE denials with intermittent lack of care rather than continue this personal care for which you pay but keeps you in charge. Review your options carefully. Don’t become insurance poor without any improvement in your health.
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Reference for another program tract can be found here. Read cautiously:
Annual tests may be overdone which may make it more costly.
Checkups Men Need For Every Decade of Life – 1800health.com | Simplifying Healthcare
Cost of private health care: $1010.10//mo. With a $4,000 deductible https://www.buyblueshieldca.com/shopping/individual/2056288?_gl=1*1079tbd*_gcl_aw*R0NMLjE2MzI1MjI4NzMuQ2p3S0NBanc3cldLQmhBdEVpd0FKM0NXTEFtWVpPa3QxUVF3RURQeVdaOVROZEE5SzhIX1RnTmVsNExPRTBXM0laOXJlNDFWdzdmTkNCb0NvMjRRQXZEX0J3RQ..&_ga=2.18670970.2144251387.1632522875-912958134.1632522875&_gac=1.55779673.1632522875.CjwKCAjw7rWKBhAtEiwAJ3CWLAmYZOkt1QQwEDPyWZ9TNdA9K8H_TgNel4LOE0W3IZ9re41Vw7fNCBoCo24QAvD_BwE
CONCERNS/CHECKUPS FOR WOMEN
Hypertension Symptoms Often Mistaken for Menopause in Middle-Aged Women
Heart Risks of Menopause
Menopause Hormone Therapy and Heart Risks
Heart-Healthy Lifestyle Choices After Menopause
Menopausal Symptoms May Predict Risk of Heart, Memory Trouble
Hypertension Symptoms Often Mistaken for Menopause in Middle-Aged Women
The Menopause Transition Is a Time of Serious Heart Disease Risk
Women Who Reach Menopause Before Age 40 Face Higher Risk for Future Heart Disease
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One Drive
File: HCUSA–Jan 2022
The continuation and revision of HealthCareUSA.net
Personal Health Care July 2021
Words: 3520
Pages: 8
Feature Article
1.Feature Article: A Basic Low-Cost Private HealthCare Proposal Pay cash for your basic outpatient health care and save over half the cost of insurance. Only Hospital care, Surgical care, Trauma and Emergency care require major medical insurance.
Actuarial data indicates that Americans pay far more for insurance for basic outpatient health care cost than paying cash for outpatient office and laboratory charges. In many instances the monthly cost of health insurance equals the annual cost of health care if paid for with cash. Health insurance would then be required for the unexpected hospital, emergency, trauma and surgery care.
Pay cash for all office or outpatient care including lab and x-rays and up to your deductible with insurance only for hospital, emergency, trauma, and surgery care will save you more than half of your health care costs. These charges are in the range of our usual household costs for utilities, house and car maintenance. Insurance just increases the cost of any maintenance. This is the same for car and household insurance.
The usual cost of outpatient care for each decade of life will approach the following:
This is not what you’ll find online, which is if you don’t have insurance, you’re not covered.
But insurance for outpatient health care may be 10 times as expensive as cash.
Purchase health insurance only for coverage of hospital and surgery care.
This will involve a new approach to health care than what you are used to.
But it will be critical that you understand this before all of healthcare becomes unaffordable.
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Ages 20-29 The actuarial costs in the third decade of life should be approximately $300 per year—or $3,000 total for this decade of life.
Health insurance may cost $300 each month—or $3,600 per year or $36,000 for this decade of life.
The twenties are usually a relatively healthy decade of life for the average adult. You should be getting a Medical History and Physical exam from your primary care physician every two- or three-years including checks on your blood pressure and height/weight. This should also be done every year on a self-exam basis. Most smart phones today have an entry to record this.
Screenings tests are necessary for anemia which is a basic complete blood count and for kidney disease which is a complete urinalysis. This should be repeated every two- or three-years. During this decade a chemistry panel for multiple organ disease is advisable which should include a lipid panel to check cholesterol and triglycerides which can be elevated without any symptoms and need treatment, primarily with diet. If normal, no repeats are required during this decade of life. Your doctor might consider other tests based on your medical history and physical examination.
Ages 30-39 The average cost as determined by actuaries during the fourth decade of life should cost approximately $400 per year—or $4,000 total for this decade of life.
Health insurance may cost $400 for each month—or $4800 per year or $48,000 for the decade.
Your thirties are generally similar to your twenties with a continued good health. Many of the recommended checkups are the same as your twenties. A complete Medical History and Physical exam from your primary care physician every two- or three-years should continue as well as a CBC and UA with each exam. Another chemistry and lipid panel should be obtained during this decade. If diseases are diagnosed, additional testing would be needed. This would include a Hemoglobin A1c if diabetes is found as well as other tests to evaluate other abnormalities that are found.
Age 40-49 The average cost as determined by actuaries for the fifth decade of life should cost approximately $500 per year—or $5,000 for this decade of life.
Health insurance may cost $500 per month—or $6000 per year or $60,000 for this decade of life.
As you reach middle age, your body is going to need a few more tests and procedures than in your twenties and thirties. You still need your basic medical checkups by your physician now increased to yearly. Your CBC and complete UA are also yearly during your annual evaluation. Chemistry, cholesterol, Lipid panels may now be required every two to five years if abnormal. Otherwise continue with checks every five-years.
During this decade, men have to get screened for prostate cancer with a PSA and repeat if elevated yearly. Otherwise repeat every two or three years. Women have to begin screening for breast cancer and gynecologic diseases. Your physician will set the extent and frequency for these. Prevailing recommendations for mammogram and pelvic exams are every two or three years.
A vision exam might be needed as you age. Visual charts are readily available to screen for visual acuity. If you have difficulty in reading or your visual acuity is 20/30 or less, ophthalmologic exam become necessary. Glasses are not required for driver’s licenses unless your vision is 20/40 or less.
Audiology exam may be required if hearing impairment is noted. Audiologist work in ENT and Otology offices where the ENT surgeon will do the general ENT exam and if all is normal, refer you to the audiologist that may be in his office or his clinic. Free standing audiology practices are now available and one can obtain an audiology exam directly. If abnormal, the audiologist will refer you to the ENT or Otologist specialist.
If you have a family history of heart disease, or are at high risk for heart disease, or have lipid abnormalities, then your doctor may want to begin screening for coronary heart disease. If you have hypertension, he may begin treatment.
If you have asthma or difficulty in breathing, your doctor should begin screening your pulmonary function and begin treatment usually with inhaled broncho-dilators
Ages 50-59 The average costs as determined by actuarial data during the sixth decade of life should be approximately $600 per year–$6,000 for this decade of life.
Health insurance may cost $600 per month—or $7200 per year or $72,000 for this decade of life.
In your 50s, one would continue with annual Medical Examinations by your physician with continued annual baseline screening tests which may now include annual chemistry and lipid panels. At this time screening for colon cancer should be started. This may include a simple stool exam for blood or a sigmoidoscopy.
Screenings for Type II diabetes maybe considered as well as an electrocardiogram if cardiac disease is suspected. Screenings for prostate cancer, breast and gyn cancers should continue.
Screening for depression or other psychiatric problems may be required.
If you become ill, that’s when you need your major surgery/hospital insurance plan.
Ages 60-69 The average cost for the seventh decade of life as determined by actuarily analysis should be approximately $700 per year–$7,000 for this decade of life.
Health insurance may cost $700 per month—or $8400 per year or $84,000 for this decade.
The sixties were formerly thought to be the onset of your aging years. But we are really healthier now than when social security was implemented in the 1930s or Medicare in 1965. Your body isn’t ready to slow down or retire from work. It is important to keep on top of your health. In addition to all the screenings you had done in your fifties, you’ll need to continue these in your 60s and become more aware of health risks before disease steps in.
Your doctor may want to do screenings for osteoporosis and might consider screenings for abdominal aortic aneurysm, and carotid artery ultrasound. These can be done by the panels that become available in most communities on an annual and very inexpensive basis. Skin cancer, oral cancer, lung cancer, might be considerations based on your health history.
Depression should also be monitored along with signs of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.
This is decision time when Medicare becomes available. Medicare has become more restrictive with the passing of time with many items no longer approved. One should do a careful cost analysis. If you’re in good health and still employed, you may find that continuing to pay for usual care and private health care may improve your life when people of yesteryear were calling it quits. This is not a recommendation not to enroll in Medicare when you turn 65. However, with Medicare projecting to go bankrupt in the next decade or so, this program may require serious consideration and give you medical freedom that you will not have in a government program.
Aging is something everyone has to go through. There is no fountain of youth. It’s a part of life. As you age, it’s important to keep tabs on your health. The need to see a doctor in your twenties isn’t as pressing as it is in your fifties, sixties, and seventies. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go. Determine if you’re seeing the doctor often enough or getting checked up on the correct things with this quick guide.
Ages 70-79 The average cost as determined by actuaries during the eighth decade of life should be approximately $800 per year–$8,000 for this decade of life.
Health insurance may cost $800 per month–or $9600 per year or $96,000 for this decade of life.
We are healthier in our 70s and living longer with life expectancy into the 80s. We have less medical costs in our 70s than we had in our 60s when Medicare was started. Medicare is scheduled to go bankrupt in the next decade. Hence, our extrapolation into the 70s and 80s is to show us that health care costs will not be insurmountable even after Medicare goes bankrupt and we resume with our usual health insurance prior to Medicare. The only thing that can save Medicare is to increase the age of benefit from 65 to 72 years. And to increase the age for early benefits from age 62 to age 65.
The above is for basic outpatient health care. Hospitalizations, Trauma/Emergency and Surgical care require major health insurance coverage which will be less expensive than current insurance for total health care.
Ages 80-89 The average cost as determined by actuaries during the ninth decade of life should be approximately $900 per year–$9,000 for this decade of life.
Health insurance may cost $900 per month–or $10,800 per year or $108,000 for this decade of life.
If you look at the obituary columns in the papers, you will be surprised at the number of people that live into their ninth decade—also at the number that live into their 10th decade and were working into their 9th decade. We are healthier at this stage of life than we have ever been. Of course we should always have the safety of major medical should we develop a major illness or require hospitalization or surgery.
Reference for a similar program can be found here-Read cautiously-Annual tests overdone.
Checkups Men Need For Every Decade of Life – 1800health.com | Simplifying Healthcare
__________
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Feature Article
Hold Facebook Responsible For Unwanted Communications By Matthew Vadum December 9, 2020
If social media giant Facebook isn’t held responsible for allegedly violating a federal ban on robocalls, consumers may face a future onslaught of unwanted text messages and automated calls, the Supreme Court heard.
The Supreme Court heard the case known as Facebook Inc. v. Duguid telephonically. While one hour was allotted for oral argument, Chief Justice John Roberts allowed the Dec. 8 hearing to go on for 83 minutes.
Although President Donald Trump has been a fierce critic of social media companies, accusing them of political bias and heavy-handed tactics against conservatives and his reelection campaign, in this case, the Trump administration sided with Facebook, as did a phalanx of large corporations such as Home Depot Inc. and Quicken Loans LLC, which filed briefs in support of Facebook’s position, claiming they have been sued in similar lawsuits.
The case concerns a federal law that imposes penalties of up to $1,500 for each unwanted call or text. The prohibition on such calls applies to dialing systems that can “store or produce telephone numbers to be called, using a random or sequential number generator.”
To deal with a growing volume of telephone marketing calls, in 1991, Congress enacted the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), which “restricts the making of telemarketing calls and the use of automatic telephone dialing systems and artificial or prerecorded voice messages,” according to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The rules apply to telecommunications companies and other marketers.
In 1992, the FCC required that entities making telephone solicitations institute procedures for maintaining company-specific do-not-call lists. In 2012, the FCC imposed further restrictions on telemarketers aimed at protecting consumer privacy.
Noah Duguid, a plaintiff suing Facebook who wants his lawsuit to become a class action, argues that what he considers to be the company’s permissive interpretation of the TCPA would expose the public to a tsunami of robocalls. Duguid says he was besieged by texts from Facebook in 2014 advising him of an attempted log-in, even though he didn’t have a Facebook account. Facebook denied responsibility, saying Duguid probably had a recycled phone number that used to be associated with an account.
Facebook is appealing the decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which rejected what it called “Facebook’s challenge that the TCPA as a whole is facially unconstitutional.” Facebook had argued that restrictions on its ability to communicate infringed the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and that companies could be held liable for huge damages for relatively minor violations of the law.
During oral argument, several justices seemed to think the language of the TCPA was ambiguous and that the law, enacted before cellphones were widely used and before Facebook was created, had been rendered obsolete by technological progress.
Facebook attorney Paul D. Clement told the justices that Duguid’s reading of the TCPA “creates a statute of impossible breadth.”
Clement said the other side had stretched the rules “of ordinary grammar and statutory construction” so there “becomes so much play in the joints that you essentially empower the judiciary to rewrite statutes.”
Bryan A. Garner, attorney for the respondent, told the justices that consumers benefit from the law, which, contrary to what critics say, isn’t outdated.
Facebook’s approach to the TCPA “would read the statute into oblivion,” said Garner, an expert in legal interpretation who is editor of “Black’s Law Dictionary,” and who co-wrote “Reading Law” with the late Justice Antonin Scalia.
“I believe that TCPA is more important today than ever because of advances in technology. The social media companies know exactly where you are at all times. They know every mouse click that you’ve made for the last 20 years. And they can target in a very manipulative way. So … the basic technology of getting a message through to somebody who’s carrying a handheld device remains the same.”
If social media giant Facebook isn’t held responsible for allegedly violating a federal ban on robocalls, consumers may face a future onslaught of unwanted text messages and automated calls, the Supreme Court heard.
The Supreme Court heard the case known as Facebook Inc. v. Duguid telephonically. While one hour was allotted for oral argument, Chief Justice John Roberts allowed the Dec. 8 hearing to go on for 83 minutes.
Although President Donald Trump has been a fierce critic of social media companies, accusing them of political bias and heavy-handed tactics against conservatives and his reelection campaign, in this case, the Trump administration sided with Facebook, as did a phalanx of large corporations such as Home Depot Inc. and Quicken Loans LLC, which filed briefs in support of Facebook’s position, claiming they have been sued in similar lawsuits.
The case concerns a federal law that imposes penalties of up to $1,500 for each unwanted call or text. The prohibition on such calls applies to dialing systems that can “store or produce telephone numbers to be called, using a random or sequential number generator.”
To deal with a growing volume of telephone marketing calls, in 1991, Congress enacted the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), which “restricts the making of telemarketing calls and the use of automatic telephone dialing systems and artificial or prerecorded voice messages,” according to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The rules apply to telecommunications companies and other marketers.
In 1992, the FCC required that entities making telephone solicitations institute procedures for maintaining company-specific do-not-call lists. In 2012, the FCC imposed further restrictions on telemarketers aimed at protecting consumer privacy.
Noah Duguid, a plaintiff suing Facebook who wants his lawsuit to become a class action, argues that what he considers to be the company’s permissive interpretation of the TCPA would expose the public to a tsunami of robocalls. Duguid says he was besieged by texts from Facebook in 2014 advising him of an attempted log-in, even though he didn’t have a Facebook account. Facebook denied responsibility, saying Duguid probably had a recycled phone number that used to be associated with an account.
Facebook is appealing the decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which rejected what it called “Facebook’s challenge that the TCPA as a whole is facially unconstitutional.” Facebook had argued that restrictions on its ability to communicate infringed the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and that companies could be held liable for huge damages for relatively minor violations of the law.
During oral argument, several justices seemed to think the language of the TCPA was ambiguous and that the law, enacted before cellphones were widely used and before Facebook was created, had been rendered obsolete by technological progress.
Facebook attorney Paul D. Clement told the justices that Duguid’s reading of the TCPA “creates a statute of impossible breadth.”
Clement said the other side had stretched the rules “of ordinary grammar and statutory construction” so there “becomes so much play in the joints that you essentially empower the judiciary to rewrite statutes.”
Bryan A. Garner, attorney for the respondent, told the justices that consumers benefit from the law, which, contrary to what critics say, isn’t outdated.
Facebook’s approach to the TCPA “would read the statute into oblivion,” said Garner, an expert in legal interpretation who is editor of “Black’s Law Dictionary,” and who co-wrote “Reading Law” with the late Justice Antonin Scalia.
“I believe that TCPA is more important today than ever because of advances in technology. The social media companies know exactly where you are at all times. They know every mouse click that you’ve made for the last 20 years. And they can target in a very manipulative way. So … the basic technology of getting a message through to somebody who’s carrying a handheld device remains the same.”
Justice Clarence Thomas told Garner that technology evolves so quickly nowadays that the law can’t keep up with it.
The Facebook logo on a mobile phone in a picture illustration taken on Dec. 2, 2019. (Johanna Geron/Reuters)
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Feature Article
Behind the Scenes, Obama Never Left
The Epoch Times November 17, 2020
Commentary
The publication of Barack Obama’s new memoir was timed to carry the news cycle, regardless of the election’s outcome. The opinions expressed in “A Promised Land”—on America, race, Donald Trump, and so on—are more vivid than anything the Democratic candidate has said in his last year of campaigning.
And so, even after Joe Biden and the press corps have declared him president-elect, he continues to walk in the shadow of his former boss.
That’s intentional. Obama wants it understood that Biden is an avatar for a third Obama term. Now, he can complete the work of “fundamentally transforming America,” as he put it days before the 2008 election. Hillary Clinton was expected to at least protect what she inherited from Obama. But the victory of Trump, who had campaigned on undoing Obama’s domestic and foreign policy initiatives, left the outgoing president with only two options—watch his successor dismantle his legacy or stop him.
The coup is evidence of his choice. The senior U.S. officials, Democratic Party operatives, and media personalities who targeted the Trump circle for four years weren’t simply defending the privileges of the “Deep State.” These are bureaucrats, deputies, and courtiers who would not dare an attempt that bold unless it was OK’d from above.
The purpose of the coup was to block Trump from destroying Obama’s legacy until he could find an opening for him to return.
In a sense, Obama never left. He was the first president in a century to stay in Washington after the end of his term; Woodrow Wilson had suffered a stroke and couldn’t easily leave the capital. Obama explained that he and the first lady wanted their youngest daughter to graduate from her private high school before they moved on. Their child entered the University of Michigan last fall, but with the 2020 election cycle underway, the de facto leader of the Democratic Party wasn’t going anywhere.
In political circles, it was no secret that Obama had thrown his support behind Kamala Harris. She’s ambitious and appealing and, without any strong ideas or opinions of her own, poses no threat to him. She was Obama’s ideal heir, but primary voters found her fake and unlikeable, and she was out of the race in early December. He’d find a way to restore her, but, in the meantime, needed a horse to ride through the primaries.
His onetime vice president rambled incoherently, dropped lines, and finished fourth in the Iowa race. Nonetheless, in the first week of March, Obama’s establishment pushed out Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, and Elizabeth Warren to consolidate support behind Biden. In the age of coronavirus, a politician who was obviously disoriented reflected the state of the country.
A voluntary shut-in was the perfect role model for Americans forced to stay home. And Obama made sure they did.
In April, he told Democratic mayors on a conference call not to reopen their cities until coronavirus testing and monitoring were available nationwide. Shutting down the economic activity of major U.S. cities would put limits on any economic rebound and thereby hamper Trump’s reelection chances. COVID-19 also became the platform for the massive vote-by-mail campaign, which Obama promoted the same month in a succession of tweets that also alerted Democratic voters that his was the hand driving the Biden campaign.
When details of the coup started to seep through the media blockade, Obama played defense. In May, he leaked part of a phone call with Democratic officials in which he expressed dismay that the Justice Department had dropped charges against Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn. He said that Flynn should be charged with perjury, a recommendation soon picked up by the judge in the Flynn case, who appointed a former prosecutor to make an argument for charging the retired three-star general with perjury.
Throughout the spring and summer, records were declassified that gave evidence of Obama’s direct role in the anti-Trump operation. They showed that in January 2017, he’d tasked James Comey to continue the FBI’s phony investigation of Flynn. They documented that John Brennan had told him in July 2016 that Clinton had greenlighted an operation to vilify Trump as a Russian agent. Months later, Obama directed Brennan to produce an intelligence community assessment replicating Clinton’s smear campaign that delegitimized not only Trump’s presidency but also an election.
“Russiagate” gave rise to the special counsel investigation, which transformed into impeachment, which was replaced by the Democrats’ weaponization of the coronavirus, and the subsequent razing and looting of U.S. cities.
Whether or not Obama is now able to consolidate his legacy, the fact is that he’s already carved out his singular place in U.S. history—he’s the first president who interfered in the peaceful transfer of power, for four years. And it’s on his behalf that a rolling coup has pushed a nation to the edge of the abyss in order to remake it in his image.
Lee Smith is the author of the recently published book, “The Permanent Coup: How Enemies Foreign and Domestic Targeted the American President.”
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
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Feature Article
The Supreme Court Can Restore Separation of Powers
Over the last several decades, many of the laws written in the United States have not been written directly by Congress as the Constitution directs. Many, if not most, laws are written and enforced by the executive branch. How did this happen, and how can it be stopped?
Presidential elections have become more important as the executive branch has become increasingly more powerful. In the wake of Congress’s unwillingness to write actual laws, the executive branch has taken it upon itself to write them through what’s known as the “administrative state.” More and more, it’s unelected bureaucrats in federal agencies that make policy decisions and write binding laws in the form of regulations.
Today, agency regulations are nothing more than a way for the executive branch to work around Congress. The only way to fix this problem is for the Supreme Court to put a stop to this violation of the separation of powers. However, while it’s simple in theory, it’s more complex in practice.
Read more: http://www.medicaltuesday.net/feature-article/
Separation of Powers Is Vital to a Republic Form of Government
The Constitution created the government’s structure such that Congress makes the laws, the executive branch enforces the laws, and the courts, headed by the Supreme Court, interpret the laws. They are supposed to stay within their roles and not venture into another branch’s territory.
According to the Federalist Papers, the framers were deeply concerned about one person or group having the powers to both write and enforce laws. Madison said in Federalist No. 47 that if the “legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or body of magistrates,” there would be no liberties for citizens.
Alexander Hamilton said in Federalist No. 78 that the purpose of the Supreme Court was to be the “Guardians of the Constitution.” Judges received lifetime appointments to ensure they never had to buck the other two government branches.
Where Did the Administrative State Come From?
In the wake of the Civil War, many cities experienced ongoing widespread poverty. In the early 1900s, President Woodrow Wilson decided the best way to tackle the problem was to create federal agencies responsible for regulating and supervising different parts of the private sector. Wilson created one of the most important agencies of all to control the economy – the Federal Reserve. Today, the Fed prints money, controls inflation and deflation, and is the economy’s principal driver.
However, it was President Franklin D. Roosevelt who created a revolution of sorts in government. He was responsible for the creation of the Departments of Commerce, Labor, Health and Human Services, the SEC, the FCC, and others.
These new agencies issued regulations that created bureaucratic laws on Americans. The nation never looked back. Instead of reigning in unelected officials, Congress empowered them over the next half-century.
Who’s Running America?
Over the years, the courts have deferred to the “administrative state” under the guise they are not experts and don’t have all the agencies’ information. Since 1993, federal agencies have created over 3,000 new regulations every year. There are now hundreds of thousands of regulations. There are so many that on any given day, an American is breaking at least one law they could be punished for not written by Congress.
It’s apparent that those making the laws in the United States are not in Congress, and the government is realizing the concerns expressed by Madison and Hamilton. Power is growing in one group of people over the lives and businesses of America.
Will elections even matter if unelected people constantly create binding laws?
At this point, Americans no longer control their government through their elected members of Congress.
Supreme Court Could Overturn the Administrative State
Of the nine justices on the Supreme Court, five have expressed support for what’s known as the Nondelegation Doctrine. It holds that Congress cannot avoid its responsibilities by delegating its powers to the executive branch – which is exactly what’s been going on for decades.
The doctrine must be accurate according to the separation of powers as established in the Constitution. The courts have the power to force Congress to take back their responsibility by writing laws that are not vague or subject to interpretation. By forcing Congress to fulfill its Constitutional duties, the courts would take power away from unaccountable administrative agencies’ hands and restore it to the peoples’ representatives.
Of course, that would require courage and dedication from members of Congress. It would force them to listen to their constituents and could also erode the power of the two-party political system.
Would that really be a bad thing?
Don Purdum, Independent Political Analyst
Copyright 2020, UnitedVoice.com
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Feature Article
Masks Help Make and Keep America Afraid By Harold Pease, Ph.D.| www.LibertyUnderFire.org Healthcare, Liberty Articles | July 21, 2020
Last April the Washington Post published an article “Will Americans wear masks to prevent coronavirus spread?” It listed a variety of reasons why some will not wear masks. Unfortunately it missed the main one—masks help make and keep America afraid. The media, WHO and the CDC have been wrong on virtually every aspect of the virus, from early estimates of American death predictions from 2 to 3 million to even the practicality of wearing a mask. For many wearing masks represents submission to those with little regard for the Bill of Rights, not selfish insensitivity to others who might get the virus from the unmasked, as those who wish to take our liberty openly say. Read more . . .
One bluntly said, “If Donald Trump had not been elected president it would not be hyped.” Another, “Nothing more will be said of it if Joe Biden is elected president.”
The media began with the horrific death prediction of millions. When those numbers were not high enough opponents did two things to inflate them: one by counting deaths with Covid-19 as the same as those dying from Covid-19 and two, infecting nursing homes with patients with the virus. Turns out that more than 40% of those dying were in nursing homes. When a drug used to treat malaria—hydroxy-chloroquine—was found to cure the coronavirus as well, instead of excitement over the finding, the media and their accomplices unsuccessfully did everything to discredit its use. Clearly their agenda was to make and keep Americans afraid.
It is clear to most that the virus had been weaponized for the election of 2020. It damaged Trump’s best economy in U.S. history, nearly ended the popular Trump rallies, justified Biden’s non-aggressive presidential campaigning because of his obvious cognitive failings, provided the rational for three or less presidential debates and vote by mail efforts—all benefiting the Democrat Party.
The absolute best strategy for keeping Americans afraid is to keep them wearing and practicing the symbols of fear—masks, distancing, partially closed churches and in small groups. It is a constant reminder that the emergency is present and ongoing. The next best is to keep children from returning to school. That there exists no science that keeping children out of school is a benefit to them does not matter, nor that virtually all of Europe has opened their classrooms.
Nor did it matter that the Asian Pandemic of 1957 with a death of 116,000 Americans, or the Hong Kong Pandemic of 1968 with 100,000 deaths, may still be more than the 130,000 dying from Covid-19, subtracting at least 25% of those who did not actually die from Covid-19, but with it. The populations were much lower then and they wore no masks, closed no businesses, restaurants, churches, sporting events, schools, colleges or large gatherings. The population of America is 328,239,523. Do the math, dividing this number by 130,000 deceased equals .0004 X 100 =.04%—infinitesimally low. Dividing by the three million who got it, and recovered, .009 or 0.9% is not even 1% of the population.
This is why the vast majority of Americans cannot identify a family member or close friend dying from Covid-19. Still, the Left has Americans paralyzed and perpetually afraid. The death rate of the flu two years ago, 61,000, did not even make the news, but this is a presidential election.
Again the media have lost credibility. The same sources now pushing the narrative that those not wearing masks are doing so because of their selfishness and insensitivity toward others are the same people and outlets that were wrong at every turn respecting the coronavirus.
But none of this is new!! We count nine times when these same media outlets, organizations, and persons attempted to upend, even by coup d’etat, the 2016 presidential election.
Let’s review these attempts three happening simultaneously before Trump took office. Spygate the Trump Tower wiretapping, demonstrations in cities all over the United States (presumably funded by George Sores, to refuse the results of the 2016 election with signs “Not My President”), and finally, the Republican “Never Trumpers” movement. Once inaugurated the effort to get someone in his administration to declare him unfit so as to use the 25th Amendment to remove him followed. Then the Russia Hoax and the resultant 2½ year Robert Mueller Investigation. This followed by disclosure of the FBI/CIA Coup attempt to unseat him, next the Ukrainian Hoax, followed by the failed Impeachment attempt. Nine easily documented attempts to remove Trump from office. On issues relating to Trump it is hard to find anything upon which these media were accurate.
Trump endured three congressional investigations: the Mueller and Horowitz Reports, each exonerating him, and the US Senate Impeachment trial acquitting him. Trump suffered more unjustified opposition/persecution than all U.S. presidents combined.
So what is the main reason so many refuse to wear masks? Americans cannot be convinced that politicalization of the coronavirus is not the 10th attempt to oust Trump and bring down America and the anarchists the 11th. Many feel used, betrayed and undefended as they watch these same sources excuse non-wearing of masks for rioters and anarchists but condemn such for the rest. If most cannot identify a family member that has died from this pandemic after almost six months of headlines of death, why would they trust these falsifying sources? To many the preservation of the Bill of Rights and not wearing the symbols of control and fear are all they have to resist those who want to make and keep Americans afraid and take our liberty.
Dr. Harold Pease is a syndicated columnist and an expert on the United States Constitution. He has dedicated his career to studying the writings of the Founding Fathers and applying that knowledge to current events. He taught history and political science from this perspective for over 30 years at Taft College. Newspapers have permission to publish this column. To read more of his weekly articles, please visit www.LibertyUnderFire.org.
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Last April the Washington Post published an article “Will Americans wear masks to prevent coronavirus spread?” It listed a variety of reasons why some will not wear masks. Unfortunately it missed the main one—masks help make and keep America afraid. The media, WHO and the CDC have been wrong on virtually every aspect of the virus, from early estimates of American death predictions from 2 to 3 million to even the practicality of wearing a mask. For many wearing masks represents submission to those with little regard for the Bill of Rights, not selfish insensitivity to others who might get the virus from the unmasked, as those who wish to take our liberty openly say. Read more . . .
One bluntly said, “If Donald Trump had not been elected president it would not be hyped.” Another, “Nothing more will be said of it if Joe Biden is elected president.”
The media began with the horrific death prediction of millions. When those numbers were not high enough opponents did two things to inflate them: one by counting deaths with Covid-19 as the same as those dying from Covid-19 and two, infecting nursing homes with patients with the virus. Turns out that more than 40% of those dying were in nursing homes. When a drug used to treat malaria—hydroxy-chloroquine—was found to cure the coronavirus as well, instead of excitement over the finding, the media and their accomplices unsuccessfully did everything to discredit its use. Clearly their agenda was to make and keep Americans afraid.
It is clear to most that the virus had been weaponized for the election of 2020. It damaged Trump’s best economy in U.S. history, nearly ended the popular Trump rallies, justified Biden’s non-aggressive presidential campaigning because of his obvious cognitive failings, provided the rational for three or less presidential debates and vote by mail efforts—all benefiting the Democrat Party.
The absolute best strategy for keeping Americans afraid is to keep them wearing and practicing the symbols of fear—masks, distancing, partially closed churches and in small groups. It is a constant reminder that the emergency is present and ongoing. The next best is to keep children from returning to school. That there exists no science that keeping children out of school is a benefit to them does not matter, nor that virtually all of Europe has opened their classrooms.
Nor did it matter that the Asian Pandemic of 1957 with a death of 116,000 Americans, or the Hong Kong Pandemic of 1968 with 100,000 deaths, may still be more than the 130,000 dying from Covid-19, subtracting at least 25% of those who did not actually die from Covid-19, but with it. The populations were much lower then and they wore no masks, closed no businesses, restaurants, churches, sporting events, schools, colleges or large gatherings. The population of America is 328,239,523. Do the math, dividing this number by 130,000 deceased equals .0004 X 100 =.04%—infinitesimally low. Dividing by the three million who got it, and recovered, .009 or 0.9% is not even 1% of the population.
This is why the vast majority of Americans cannot identify a family member or close friend dying from Covid-19. Still, the Left has Americans paralyzed and perpetually afraid. The death rate of the flu two years ago, 61,000, did not even make the news, but this is a presidential election.
Again the media have lost credibility. The same sources now pushing the narrative that those not wearing masks are doing so because of their selfishness and insensitivity toward others are the same people and outlets that were wrong at every turn respecting the coronavirus.
But none of this is new!! We count nine times when these same media outlets, organizations, and persons attempted to upend, even by coup d’etat, the 2016 presidential election.
Let’s review these attempts three happening simultaneously before Trump took office. Spygate the Trump Tower wiretapping, demonstrations in cities all over the United States (presumably funded by George Sores, to refuse the results of the 2016 election with signs “Not My President”), and finally, the Republican “Never Trumpers” movement. Once inaugurated the effort to get someone in his administration to declare him unfit so as to use the 25th Amendment to remove him followed. Then the Russia Hoax and the resultant 2½ year Robert Mueller Investigation. This followed by disclosure of the FBI/CIA Coup attempt to unseat him, next the Ukrainian Hoax, followed by the failed Impeachment attempt. Nine easily documented attempts to remove Trump from office. On issues relating to Trump it is hard to find anything upon which these media were accurate.
Trump endured three congressional investigations: the Mueller and Horowitz Reports, each exonerating him, and the US Senate Impeachment trial acquitting him. Trump suffered more unjustified opposition/persecution than all U.S. presidents combined.
So what is the main reason so many refuse to wear masks? Americans cannot be convinced that politicalization of the coronavirus is not the 10th attempt to oust Trump and bring down America and the anarchists the 11th. Many feel used, betrayed and undefended as they watch these same sources excuse non-wearing of masks for rioters and anarchists but condemn such for the rest. If most cannot identify a family member that has died from this pandemic after almost six months of headlines of death, why would they trust these falsifying sources? To many the preservation of the Bill of Rights and not wearing the symbols of control and fear are all they have to resist those who want to make and keep Americans afraid and take our liberty.
Dr. Harold Pease is a syndicated columnist and an expert on the United States Constitution. He has dedicated his career to studying the writings of the Founding Fathers and applying that knowledge to current events. He taught history and political science from this perspective for over 30 years at Taft College. Newspapers have permission to publish this column. To read more of his weekly articles, please visit www.LibertyUnderFire.org.
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Feature Article
In The News: New York Times Stalks Tucker Carlson! Family Afraid Again!! Jul 27, 2020 | Liberty Articles By Harold Pease, Ph.D.
At the close of the cable news show “Tucker Carlson Tonight” July 20, 2020, Tucker had the strangest ending that I have ever heard a news anchor announce. I could feel his fear for his family
It began normal, “Well, all of a sudden the media have ripped off the mask and they’re supporting violence as a political tactic. They spent the last few months describing the riots as mostly peaceful. It provided cover for rioting. They’ve watched conservative speakers shut down; their families harassed.” I have published similar sentences describing the deep state, establishment media coverage of the law and order issues of today.
He next apologized for referencing himself. “Since the show began almost four years ago, I’ve really tried not to talk about myself on the air, or even use the first-person pronoun. The last thing this country needs is more narcissism.”
He then related how the media with the thug organization Antifa had driven him out of his home in Washington DC almost two years before. “Left wing journalists publicized our home address in Washington. A group of screaming Antifa lunatics showed up while I was at work. They vandalized our home. They threatened my wife. She called 911 while hiding in a closet. A few weeks later they showed up again at our house. For the next year they sent letters to our home threatening to kill us. We tried to ignore it. It felt cowardly to sell our home and leave. We raised our kids there, in the neighborhood, and we loved it. But in the end, that’s what we did. We have four children. It just wasn’t worth it.” Read more. . .
Returning to his reluctance to report as news his persecution he said, “But tonight we’re going to make an exception to that rule. We don’t have much choice.”
I sat glued to my chair listening in horror because what was happening to him in America, with millions listening, could happen to anyone without an audience. He was one of the most viewed anchors in America.
But what came next is representative of what happened under Germany’s Adolph Hitler or Joseph Stalin’s media tyranny in Russia. “Last week the New York Times began working on a story about where my family and I live. As a matter of journalism, there is no conceivable justification for a story like that. The paper is not alleging we’ve done anything wrong and we haven’t. We pay our taxes; we like our neighbors. We’ve never had a dispute with anyone. So why is the New York Times doing a story on the location of my family’s house? Well you know why. To hurt us, to injure my wife and kids so that I will shut up and stop disagreeing with them. They believe in force.”
This is the New York Times, for more than a century the most trusted news outlet in America, and they are adopting the suppression tactics of two of the most brutal dictators in world history. The tactics of each the Times covered over past decades with distain.
Tucker continued. “But the New York Times followed us. The paper has assigned a political activists called Murray Carpenter to write a story about where we are now. They’ve hired a photographer called Tristen Spinski to take pictures. Their story about where we live is slated to run in the paper this week. Editors there know exactly what will happen to my family when it does run. I called them today and I told them, but they didn’t care. They hate my politics. They want this show off the air. If one of my children gets hurt because of a story they wrote, they will consider it collateral damage. They know! It’s the whole point of the exercise, to inflict pain on our family, to terrorize us, to control what we say. That’s the kind of people they are.”
Of course, the New York Times knows what they are doing. They saw how it worked under Hitler and Stalin—they are the Times—they were horrified with what they covered then. Now they are doing the same to those who disagree with them. Carlson added “They’ll deny this, of course, they’ll claim it’s just journalism, just the facts. Really!!”
Then he asked for empathy. “So how would Murray Carpenter and his photographer Tristen Spinski feel if we [Tucker Carlson Tonight] told you where they live? If we put pictures of their homes on the air? What if we publicize the home address of every one of the soulless robot editors at the New York Times, who was assigned and managed this incitement to violence against my family? What about the media editor, Jim Windoff? We can do that. We know who they are. Would that qualifies as journalism? We doubt they’d consider it as journalism. We don’t consider this journalism.”
Carlson made an astute but truthful observation. “They’d call it criminal behavior if we did it.” Then concluded, “And that tells you everything! It does tell you everything!!”
If The New York Times can destroy a very popular FOX News anchor, it can destroy any media source. A free press in America is close to being an illusion.
We hope our assistance in publicizing this travesty will help stop its escalation.
Dr. Harold Pease is a syndicated columnist and an expert on the United States Constitution. He has dedicated his career to studying the writings of the Founding Fathers and applying that knowledge to current events. He taught history and political science from this perspective for over 30 years at Taft College. Newspapers have permission to publish this column. To read more of his weekly articles, please visit www.LibertyUnderFire.org.
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Feature Article
Masks Help Make and Keep America Afraid By Harold Pease, Ph.D.| www.LibertyUnderFire.org Healthcare, Liberty Articles | July 21, 2020
Last April the Washington Post published an article “Will Americans wear masks to prevent coronavirus spread?” It listed a variety of reasons why some will not wear masks. Unfortunately it missed the main one—masks help make and keep America afraid. The media, WHO and the CDC have been wrong on virtually every aspect of the virus, from early estimates of American death predictions from 2 to 3 million to even the practicality of wearing a mask. For many wearing masks represents submission to those with little regard for the Bill of Rights, not selfish insensitivity to others who might get the virus from the unmasked, as those who wish to take our liberty openly say.
One bluntly said, “If Donald Trump had not been elected president it would not be hyped.” Another, “Nothing more will be said of it if Joe Biden is elected president.”
The media began with the horrific death prediction of millions. When those numbers were not high enough opponents did two things to inflate them: one by counting deaths with Covid-19 as the same as those dying from Covid-19 and two, infecting nursing homes with patients with the virus. Turns out that more than 40% of those dying were in nursing homes. When a drug used to treat malaria—hydroxy-chloroquine—was found to cure the coronavirus as well, instead of excitement over the finding, the media and their accomplices unsuccessfully did everything to discredit its use. Clearly their agenda was to make and keep Americans afraid.
It is clear to most that the virus had been weaponized for the election of 2020. It damaged Trump’s best economy in U.S. history, nearly ended the popular Trump rallies, justified Biden’s non-aggressive presidential campaigning because of his obvious cognitive failings, provided the rational for three or less presidential debates and vote by mail efforts—all benefiting the Democrat Party.
The absolute best strategy for keeping Americans afraid is to keep them wearing and practicing the symbols of fear—masks, distancing, partially closed churches and in small groups. It is a constant reminder that the emergency is present and ongoing. The next best is to keep children from returning to school. That there exists no science that keeping children out of school is a benefit to them does not matter, nor that virtually all of Europe has opened their classrooms.
Nor did it matter that the Asian Pandemic of 1957 with a death of 116,000 Americans, or the Hong Kong Pandemic of 1968 with 100,000 deaths, may still be more than the 130,000 dying from Covid-19, subtracting at least 25% of those who did not actually die from Covid-19, but with it. The populations were much lower then and they wore no masks, closed no businesses, restaurants, churches, sporting events, schools, colleges or large gatherings. The population of America is 328,239,523. Do the math, dividing this number by 130,000 deceased equals .0004 X 100 =.04%—infinitesimally low. Dividing by the three million who got it, and recovered, .009 or 0.9% is not even 1% of the population.
This is why the vast majority of Americans cannot identify a family member or close friend dying from Covid-19. Still, the Left has Americans paralyzed and perpetually afraid. The death rate of the flu two years ago, 61,000, did not even make the news, but this is a presidential election.
Again the media have lost credibility. The same sources now pushing the narrative that those not wearing masks are doing so because of their selfishness and insensitivity toward others are the same people and outlets that were wrong at every turn respecting the coronavirus.
But none of this is new!! We count nine times when these same media outlets, organizations, and persons attempted to upend, even by coup d’etat, the 2016 presidential election.
Let’s review these attempts three happening simultaneously before Trump took office. Spygate the Trump Tower wiretapping, demonstrations in cities all over the United States (presumably funded by George Sores, to refuse the results of the 2016 election with signs “Not My President”), and finally, the Republican “Never Trumpers” movement. Once inaugurated the effort to get someone in his administration to declare him unfit so as to use the 25th Amendment to remove him followed. Then the Russia Hoax and the resultant 2½ year Robert Mueller Investigation. This followed by disclosure of the FBI/CIA Coup attempt to unseat him, next the Ukrainian Hoax, followed by the failed Impeachment attempt. Nine easily documented attempts to remove Trump from office. On issues relating to Trump it is hard to find anything upon which these media were accurate.
Trump endured three congressional investigations: the Mueller and Horowitz Reports, each exonerating him, and the US Senate Impeachment trial acquitting him. Trump suffered more unjustified opposition/persecution than all U.S. presidents combined.
So what is the main reason so many refuse to wear masks? Americans cannot be convinced that politicalization of the coronavirus is not the 10th attempt to oust Trump and bring down America and the anarchists the 11th. Many feel used, betrayed and undefended as they watch these same sources excuse non-wearing of masks for rioters and anarchists but condemn such for the rest. If most cannot identify a family member that has died from this pandemic after almost six months of headlines of death, why would they trust these falsifying sources? To many the preservation of the Bill of Rights and not wearing the symbols of control and fear are all they have to resist those who want to make and keep Americans afraid and take our liberty.
Dr. Harold Pease is a syndicated columnist and an expert on the United States Constitution. He has dedicated his career to studying the writings of the Founding Fathers and applying that knowledge to current events. He taught history and political science from this perspective for over 30 years at Taft College. Newspapers have permission to publish this column. To read more of his weekly articles, please visit www.LibertyUnderFire.org.
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Feature Article
Current Issue
DO YOU REMEMBER? By K. Wills Sterling | kwsterling@comcast.net
Remember 4 months ago? You went to work without the govt.’s permission. Your kids went to school, where they could socialize and learn and be free — without the govt.’s permission. They played Little League and soccer with other kids, and enjoyed the mental and physical health benefits of that — without the govt.’s permission. You went shopping or met friends at the bar without asking the govt.’s permission. You went to church without asking the govt.’s permission. You could swim, hike, work out, go to the beach, SING at the top of your lungs. Go anywhere and do anything (legal), without asking the govt.’s permission. You could smile across the counter at the clerk, shake hands with old and new friends, throw a party or a barbecue if you wanted to. You could hug your best friend who just lost his dad, or put your arms around that neighbor whose husband is dying and who needs some human comfort. You could hold hands with someone who was sick and pray for them. No social distancing necessary, and you weren’t required to wear a gag.
Now you do only what the govt. says you are allowed to do. You don’t go to work – you might even have lost your job because of the govt. — and you can’t go to bars or a restaurant. Your kids are shut off from the socialization they desperately need for mental health, and they are not allowed to go to school or to play soccer or T ball. You willingly don the gag, which is a psychological tool they are using to make you shut up. You willingly maintain social distancing, which is a well-known CIA torture mechanism designed to break the will of the people, as well as a tool to limit citizens’ ability to organize. These are methods we have traditionally used only around those who are sick, but now the govt. is enforcing them 24/7, to make us suspicious of everyone around us, as if everyone is a potential enemy, someone who might harm us. They are even encouraging us to snitch on each other, as if this is North Korea.
You even, irrationally, believe that it’s OK to protest but it’s not OK to go celebrate your nation’s birthday with your fellow citizens. You irrationally believe the rhetoric that the spike in cases is somehow not related to the thousands of protestors who stand shoulder to shoulder every day, for 12 or 14 hours, in densely populated cities in every state. No, no, it must instead be the 50 people gathered for 1 hour in church one day a week. And it never occurs to you, the discrepancy between what you are told and what you see right in front of you: That the most locked-down population, the one that hasn’t even gone to the grocery store in the past 4 months, and who lives in an environment where everyone is masked … those people, in the nursing homes, are the ones at greatest risk of death, despite social distancing and masks and lockdowns. While the children who have 0% risk of death are being masked and locked down, too. This is an irrational policy … and yet you do nothing. You demand nothing of this govt. that is supposed to be working for YOU, not telling you what to do as if YOU work for IT.
Why don’t you ask, “WHY?”
DO YOU SEE WHAT YOUR GOVT. HAS DONE TO YOU? They said it would be a month. Now it’s four months, with no end in sight. You’ve been well trained now, so you don’t even argue. Everyday studies and data are proving that the govt. is lying, and yet you sit there and do nothing. You believe the propaganda from the govt. and the media – which has become Pravda now, spouting what the govt. wants you to hear, instead of the scientists who are on the front lines, who are telling you that this isn’t as deadly as the media claims, that the masks don’t work, that we need to focus on protecting only certain populations, not locking down everyone. That herd immunity is our best hope, but all of our policies are preventing that. So why do you believe your lying govt.? Are you so afraid, are you so invested in fear and propaganda, that you are willing to trade all of your freedom so that you can sit alone in your house, without contact with others for the rest of your life?
I guess the gags and the CIA torture tools have worked. Wow, that was fast. Americans laid down their freedoms – so priceless, so preciously bought with blood – without a whimper.
This is no longer about a virus, not when they give you no data – for instance, how many of the new cases are asymptomatic? How many are mild? What are the actual age ranges of the new cases? Are they still counting positive antibody tests – which show that people have recovered from the illness – as if they are new cases, just to jack up the numbers? How accurate are the tests anyway? Where are the sensitivity and specificity data that we always have for other tests, such as strep throat? Given that thousands of past tests have been contaminated with the virus, are the new tests pure, or are they contaminated, too? Is anyone even checking? You already know that Medicare reimbursements for CV19 are several times higher than for flu or other similar illnesses – could there possibly be a money component to the higher numbers? You also know that for months they have wrongly counted deaths with CV19 as deaths from CV19, and in many cases they just assumed deaths were CV19 when there were no symptoms or a positive test result to prove it – something they have never done for any other illness in our history, and in fact it is anything but scientific to list mortality data that way. Does it occur to you that all of these things are designed to falsely increase the death numbers? Why would they need to do that? If the illness is really as deadly as they say, there would be no need to say, for example, that someone who is in hospice for leukemia actually died of CV19. And yet that is what they are doing. They’ve changed the rules, but only for this illness, not for anything else. They’re inflating the numbers to make you afraid. There’s no scientific reason to be handling it this way. So why are they doing it?
I’ll tell you why. This is about breaking your will to be free. This is about you being trained to do what the govt. says, and ONLY what the govt. says, and to stop demanding your First Amendment rights. They knew that you, being Americans, would want to do the right thing for everyone, because that’s our history. That’s our national mindset, no matter what some people think. They knew that you’d be willing to give up your freedom “for the sake of the public good,” because you would see it as the right thing. They took advantage of you and your good, open heart. You aren’t even aware that this is how Hitler, and Stalin, and Lenin, and Mao all began. For months they’ve trained you with the gag and the isolation, and now, while they keep you in your homes, they allow large lawless crowds to destroy your nation’s symbols and history, and demand that we do away with the citizen police force — THE VERY PEOPLE WHO WOULD PROTECT YOU FROM THIS. Folks, it’s all connected. Your nation is crumbling before your very eyes, and in your heart, you know it is, but you’ve been trained. You put on the gag and you stayed in your home and you did nothing.
Do you realize that since Christ walked the earth 2000 years ago, every government before America consisted of a king or an emperor? It is not for no reason that King George III said, when Washington stepped down as president, that he was the greatest man of the age. Up to that moment, there had never been an elected president or a prime minister; only kings who ruled more or less at their pleasure, and who ruled for a lifetime. They controlled the army, and citizens had no arms and no power to change who ruled over them.
America changed that. Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin … they changed that. They put their lives and their fortunes on the line, risking everything they had, to build a new nation and a new form of government – and in doing so they forever altered the destiny of nations around the world by showing that the principles of self-determination and inalienable rights are the only path to justice and freedom.
If we are to keep America and its principles, we must save her now. NOW is the moment.
Not November. It will be too late then.
So REMEMBER. Remember the July 4th fireworks celebrations with patriotic music playing, at the ball field or the park near your house, where you gathered with people of all stripes singing “God Bless America,” and everyone holding their hands over their hearts when the national anthem was played. Remember the July 4th barbecues with your friends, flags planted in the grass and kids catching fireflies together, and sparklers fizzing in the dark. Remember your history, your heritage, and the men and women who have died to give you opportunity and freedom – to work, to go to school, to worship, and even to protest. This is the greatest country ever created, a country that has opened its hearts to people around the world like no other nation before it. A nation that has defended freedom wherever it needed to be defended, and arguably THE reason that Hitler failed in his quest for world domination. Hundreds of thousands of our men have spilled their blood to help people in other countries – people of all colors – to be free. REMEMBER THAT.
Think back to 4 months ago and REMEMBER what it means to be free, what it was like to move about and congregate and do whatever you wanted to do, to run your business and go to school without the government’s permission. Remember how that felt, and fight for it. Otherwise you will never be free again.
Do you love America? THEN FIGHT FOR HER.
– K. Wills Sterling
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We give our thanks to Gretchen Longmore of Atlanta for bringing this article and Mr Sterling to our attention and for Mr Sterling to give us approval to re-publish his timely OpEd.
In his words: I am a freelance medical writer and editor with more than 25 years’ experience in media ranging from trifold flyers and slide kits to drug study protocols, journal articles, and multi-volume book manuscripts. My goal is to work closely with clients to provide personalized, professionally written and/or edited documents, ensuring conformance to American Medical Association, American Psychological Association, Council of Science Editors, or University of Chicago style, as appropriate.
The menu below contains links to additional information about my background and experience, as well as samples of my professional work. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.
Please see his vast Resumé at http://kwsterlingcommunications.com/KWSterling_Communications/Education_Experience.html
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Feature Article
Current Issue
Will This Corona-Virus Disruption Improve Education in America?
According to a recent USA Today/Ipsos poll, 60 percent of parents surveyed said they will likely choose at-home learning this fall rather than send their children to school even if the schools reopen for in-person learning. Thirty percent of parents surveyed said they were “very likely” to keep their children home.
While some of these parents may opt for an online version of school-at-home tied to their district, many states are seeing a surge in the number of parents withdrawing their children from school in favor of independent homeschooling. From coast to coast, and everywhere in between, more parents are opting out of conventional schooling this year, citing onerous social distancing requirements as a primary reason.
Indeed, so many parents submitted notices of intent to homeschool in North Carolina last week that it crashed the state’s nonpublic education website.
Other parents are choosing to delay their children’s school enrollment, with school districts across the country reporting lower than average kindergarten registration numbers this summer.
School officials are cracking down in response.
Concerned about declining enrollments and parents reassuming control over their children’s education, some school districts are reportedly trying to block parents from removing their children from school for homeschooling.
In England, it’s even worse. Government officials there are so worried about parents refusing to send their children back to school this fall that the education secretary just announced fines for all families who keep their children home in violation of compulsory schooling laws. “We do have to get back into compulsory education and obviously fines sit alongside as part of that,” English secretary Gavin Williamson announced.
When school officials resort to force in order to ensure compliance, it should prompt parents to look more closely at their child’s overall learning environment. Parents have the utmost interest in ensuring their children’s well-being, both physically and emotionally, and their concerns and choices should be respected and honored.
After several months of learning at home with their children, parents may not be so willing to comply with district directives and may prefer other, more individualized education options. Pushed into homeschooling this spring by the pandemic, many parents are now going willingly, and eagerly, down this increasingly popular educational path.
Read the entire story at FEE . . .
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Editor’s Note: Formal home school plans are available on the website and can be obtained for as little as $25 per child per month. Some families are working together with their children’s cousins or friends to share the parent’s expertise. This works rather well for primary education of grades K-3.
Some parochial schools are allowing their classrooms to be used once or twice a week by these member families and share a trained teacher to expand into grades 4-6. This makes parochial or private education quite reasonable and improve the education in our country.
This also makes civics, American history, religious instruction and moral training possible. This will calm the anti-American riots and prevent the democratic socialism from taking over our country. Maybe we should be grateful that it must have been Divine Providence to send us the Corona virus which may have saved American Education and restored moral behavior.
According to a recent USA Today/Ipsos poll, 60 percent of parents surveyed said they will likely choose at-home learning this fall rather than send their children to school even if the schools reopen for in-person learning. Thirty percent of parents surveyed said they were “very likely” to keep their children home.
While some of these parents may opt for an online version of school-at-home tied to their district, many states are seeing a surge in the number of parents withdrawing their children from school in favor of independent homeschooling. From coast to coast, and everywhere in between, more parents are opting out of conventional schooling this year, citing onerous social distancing requirements as a primary reason.
Indeed, so many parents submitted notices of intent to homeschool in North Carolina last week that it crashed the state’s nonpublic education website.
Other parents are choosing to delay their children’s school enrollment, with school districts across the country reporting lower than average kindergarten registration numbers this summer.
School officials are cracking down in response.
Concerned about declining enrollments and parents reassuming control over their children’s education, some school districts are reportedly trying to block parents from removing their children from school for homeschooling.
In England, it’s even worse. Government officials there are so worried about parents refusing to send their children back to school this fall that the education secretary just announced fines for all families who keep their children home in violation of compulsory schooling laws. “We do have to get back into compulsory education and obviously fines sit alongside as part of that,” English secretary Gavin Williamson announced.
When school officials resort to force in order to ensure compliance, it should prompt parents to look more closely at their child’s overall learning environment. Parents have the utmost interest in ensuring their children’s well-being, both physically and emotionally, and their concerns and choices should be respected and honored.
After several months of learning at home with their children, parents may not be so willing to comply with district directives and may prefer other, more individualized education options. Pushed into homeschooling this spring by the pandemic, many parents are now going willingly, and eagerly, down this increasingly popular educational path.
Read the entire story at FEE . . .
Feedback . . .
Subscribe MedicalTuesday . . .
Subscribe HealthPlanUSA . . .
Editor’s Note: Formal home school plans are available on the website and can be obtained for as little as $25 per child per month. Some families are working together with their children’s cousins or friends to share the parent’s expertise. This works rather well for primary education of grades K-3.
Some parochial schools are allowing their classrooms to be used once or twice a week by these member families and share a trained teacher to expand into grades 4-6. This makes parochial or private education quite reasonable and improve the education in our country.
This also makes civics, American history, religious instruction and moral training possible. This will calm the anti-American riots and prevent the democratic socialism from taking over our country. Maybe we should be grateful that it must have been Divine Providence to send us the Corona virus which may have saved American Education and restored moral behavior.
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Feature Article
Current Issue
Pundits crowding our medical experts
Unfortunately, we live in an era of people spouting opinions on social media and cable news with no knowledge of a topic. TV pundits with no knowledge of virology, public health, or pandemic history are crowding out medical experts. Twitter, which promotes shouting over listening, is also loaded with comments ignorant to the data. News networks should push aside legacy political commentators and put infectious diseases physicians on the air to warn the public about the pandemic. Now more than ever, physicians need to speak up about the pending health crisis in the U.S.
Arguments about the exact case fatality rate (CFR) have become a distraction from the real issue at hand — preparedness. While it’s a worthy exercise to determine if CFR estimates are including mild or asymptomatic patients in the denominator, it does not change our need to prepare or how we treat individual patients. Data from Italy suggests the CFR may be as high as 3%-4%. Adding an assumption that roughly half of people with mild or no symptoms were not tested, it may be closer to 1.5%-2%, just below that of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic which killed 30 million people. The Diamond Princess ship was a controlled case study: 705 people tested positive for the virus, and seven died, suggesting a 1% CFR, albeit a slightly older skewed population. Regardless of where the true CFR is between 1% and 3.4% as the WHO is reporting, this is, at best, at least 10 times worse than a bad flu season and at worst, a pandemic that could claim millions of American lives.
Marty Makary, MD, MPH, is MedPage Today’s Editor-in-Chief as well as professor of health policy & management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
Click here to see all of MedPage Today’s COVID-19 coronavirus coverage.
Last Updated March 19, 2020
Read more . . . https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/85324
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Feature Article
Current Issue
Are we Heading Towards another GREAT DEPRESSION?
How bad was the Great Depression? Over the four years from 1929 to 1933, production at the nation’s factories, mines and utilities fell by more than half. People’s real disposable incomes dropped 28 percent. Stock prices collapsed to one-tenth of their pre-crash height. The number of unemployed Americans rose from 1.6 million in 1929 to 12.8 million in 1933. One of every four workers was out of a job at the Depression’s nadir, and ugly rumors of revolt simmered for the first time since the Civil War. “The terror of the Great Crash has been the failure to explain it,” writes economist Alan Reynolds. “ People were left with the feeling that massive economic contractions could occur at any moment, without warning, without cause. That fear has been exploited ever since as the major justification for virtually unlimited federal intervention in economic affairs.”1 Old myths never die; they just keep showing up in economics and political science textbooks. With only an occasional exception, it is there you will find what may be the 20th century’s greatest myth: Capitalism and the free-market economy were responsible for the Great Depression, and only government intervention brought about America’s economic recovery. April Fool
A Modern Fairy Tale:
According to this simplistic perspective, an important pillar of capitalism, the stock market, crashed and dragged in America to depression. President Herbert Hoover, an advocate of “hands-off,” or laissez-faire, economic policy, refused to use the power of government and conditions worsened as a result. It was up to Hoover’s successor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to ride in on the white horse of government intervention and steer the nation toward recovery. The apparent lesson to be drawn is that capitalism cannot be trusted; government needs to take an active role in the economy to save us from inevitable decline. But those who propagate this version of history might just as well top off their remarks by saying, “And Goldilocks found her way out of the forest, Dorothy made it from Oz back to Kansas, and Little Red Riding Hood won the New York State Lottery.” The popular account of the Depression as outlined above belongs in a book of fairy tales and not in a serious discussion of economic history.
THe GreAT, GreAT,GreAT,GreAT depression
To properly understand the events of the time, it is factually appropriate to view the Great Depression as not one, but four consecutive downturns rolled into one. These four “phases” are:
- Monetary Policy and the Business. Cycle
II. The Disintegration of the World Economy.
III. The New Deal.
IV. The Wagner Act.
The first phase covers why the crash of 1929 happened in the first place; the other three show how government intervention worsened it and kept the economy in a stupor for over a decade. Let’s consider each one in turn. . .
Read more . . . https://www.mackinac.org/archives/1998/sp1998-01.pdf
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Feature Article
Current Issue
What is happening in America, once the apotheosis of capitalism?
Is a specter of socialism haunting America, especially among our millennials? There is disquieting evidence of many young Americans’ sympathy for socialism.
Exhibit A: 2.052 million people under the age of 30 voted for democratic socialist Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primaries and caucuses.
Exhibit B: Polls find that, not only do a large majority of millennials have a favorable opinion of socialism, a near majority would prefer to live under socialism rather than capitalism.
Exhibit C: The no-longer sleeping Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) now boasts 30,000 members, most of them in their twenties and eager to follow the socialist banner.
We’ve come a long way since the 1988 presidential race when George H. W. Bush buried his Democratic challenger Michael Dukakis by labeling him a “liberal.” Socialism is no longer a parlor game for academics but a political alternative taken seriously by millennials who are not put off by the radical DSA platform.
DSA believes in ending the private ownership of industries whose products are viewed as “necessities.” The production of such products, it argues, should not be left to “profiteers.” It also believes that government should “democratize” private businesses — that is, give workers control over them — to the greatest extent possible. “Socialism,” explains a member of DSA’s national steering committee, “is the democratization of all areas of life, including but not limited to the economy.”
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What is happening in America, once the apotheosis of capitalism?
The first part of that answer lies in two words, not “Karl Marx,” but “Bernie Sanders.” The senator from Vermont captured the hearts and the votes of many millennials with his call for single payer health care, free public college, campaign finance reform, and racial, economic, and climate justice. The prime target of his animus was the top 1 percent in America who own, it is true, some 40 percent of the nation’s total wealth — as much as the bottom 90 percent. What Bernie rarely pointed out was that the same top 1 percent paid 39.5 percent of the individual income taxes. Sanders had a ready explanation for how to pay for all of the freebies: increase the taxes on the rich and their corporations. In Bernie’s world, there is such a thing as a free lunch because the bill will be paid by those at the top.
According to one CNN analyst, millennials rallied in the many thousands behind Sanders because they are socially liberal — especially on LGBT rights — saddled with mountains of student debt, disillusioned with the status quo, “and eager to break with traditional [political] models.” Bernie provided solutions to all their problems — without detailing the price or conceding the lessening in individual liberty. Such details were swept aside by the revolutionary spirit of the millennials who “felt the Bern.” As one Bernista said, “You can build a powerful political movement with a base of 2 million true believers.”
The second reason for the shift toward socialism was the Great Recession of 2008. It tore a huge hole in the American people’s belief in capitalism as the way to a better life and sent them looking for alternatives. Many of them, especially younger Americans, found it in a “soft socialism” that was part welfare state, part administrative state, part socialist democracy.
The most startling poll was the YouGov survey that reported that given a choice, 44 percent of young people between the ages of 16 and 29 would prefer to live in a socialist nation rather than a capitalist country. Another seven percent would choose communism. However, the same poll revealed that only 33 percent of the respondents could correctly define socialism as based on the common ownership of economic and social systems as well as the state control of the means of production. What most millennials mean by “socialism” seems to be a mix of our welfare state and what they perceive to be Swedish democratic socialism. But Sweden and the other Scandinavian countries including Denmark favor the free market and are content with private rather than government ownership of their major industries. However, Danish domestic spending including comprehensive health care has a high price — a top personal income tax of 57 percent.
The millennial trend toward an acceptance of socialism is not new. A 2014 poll by Reason-Rupe, a libertarian group, reported that 58 percent of those aged 18 to 24 had a favorable view of socialism. A 2016 Gallup survey found that 55 percent of those 18-29 had a “positive image” of socialism. But 90 percent were favorable to “entrepreneurs” while 78 percent favored “free enterprise.” How can a group be 55 percent socialist and 78 per cent entrepreneurial? Either through cognitive dissonance or plain ignorance. In any case, it is critical for advocates of free enterprise to make the case against socialism because acceptance of socialism by any name places millennials on a slippery slope. Another recession and/or a well-run presidential campaign by a charismatic demagogue could move America farther down the road to serfdom.
A 2016 Harvard poll determined that 33 percent of Americans under 30 wanted socialism. In January 2016, YouGov asked millennials whether they had a favorable or unfavorable opinion of socialism. Eight percent replied “very favorable,” 35 percent “somewhat favorable,” for a total of 43 percent, almost the same percentage as in their 2017 survey.
But would these same millennials choose socialism, if in exchange for “free” education and “free” health care, they would have to give up their personal property, such as their iPhone? Would seven percent of millennials declare their willingness to live under communism if they knew the real costs of communism as practiced in some 40 nations over the past century — the denial of free speech, a free press, and free assembly, the imprisonment and execution of dissidents, no free and open elections, no independent judiciary or rule of law, the dictatorship of the Communist Party in all matters and on all occasions?
For the first time in decades, socialists are taking advantage of the Bernie Sanders phenomenon to organize, raise funds, and field candidates from New York City to Oakland, California. A major instrument is DSA — the Democratic Socialists of America — about which the liberal New Republic asked, “Are the Democratic Socialists for America for Real?”
The most dramatic proof of socialism’s new-found political clout was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s upset victory over veteran Rep. Joseph Crowley of New York, the number four Democrat in the House of Representatives, in the June Democratic primary. Ocasio-Cortez received 57 percent of the vote — to Crowley’s 42 percent — while pledging to back Medicare for all, free college tuition, legalization of marijuana and the elimination of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Attractive and articulate, the 28-year-old socialist announced she would support progressive candidates who challenged Democratic incumbents in primaries. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi cautioned Ocasio-Cortez not to oppose liberal Democrats who had a proven record of results. Former Sen. Joe Lieberman, the Democratic Party’s vice-presidential nominee in 2000, warned that “the policies Ms. Ocasio-Cortez advocates are so far from the mainstream, her election in November would make it harder for Congress to stop fighting and start fixing problems.” He noted that Republicans were already referring to Ocasio-Cortez as “the new face” of the Democratic Party. But an ideologue like Ocasio-Cortez is unlikely to be ruled by conventional politics.
The same can be said of Democratic Socialists. Over 700 elected delegates from around the country attended DSA’s 2017 national convention in Chicago, the historic site of many political beginnings from the 1860 presidential nomination of Abraham Lincoln to the riotous 1968 Democratic National Convention. Veterans of the organization were “blown away” by the enthusiasm of the younger DSA members whose priority is to win elections that advance socialism. Chicago City Councilman Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, aged 28, is one of DSA’s elected officials. He advised an ecumenical approach for socialist candidates — to run on the Democratic ballot line because it offers access to people who want single-payer healthcare and a $15 minimum wage. As part of its demographic outreach, Bianca Cunningham, the African-American chair of New York City’s DSA labor branch, helped to form a national Afro-socialist caucus. . .
Read the entire article at the Heritage:
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Feature Article
Current Issue
The Dangerous Denial of Sex Biologists in WSJ: Only Two Sexes, Male and Female, There is No Sex ‘Spectrum’ By Michael W. Chapman February 14, 2020
In a powerful commentary in the Feb. 3 edition of The Wall Street Journal, biologists Colin Wright and Emma Hilton explain that, scientifically, there are only two sexes, male and female, and there is no sex “spectrum.” They also stress that “biologists and medical professionals” must stop being politically correct and “stand up for the empirical reality of biological sex.”
With the phenomenon of some men saying they “identify” as women and some women saying they “identify” as men, or any “gender identity” combination therein, “we see a dangerous and anti-scientific trend toward the outright denial of biological sex,” state the biologists Wright and Hilton.
This notion that there is a sex “spectrum,” where people can choose “to identify as male or female,” regardless of their anatomy, is irrational and has “no basis in reality,” say the biologists. “It is false at every conceivable scale of resolution.”
As they explain, “In humans, as in most animals or plants, an organism’s biological sex corresponds to one of two distinct types of reproductive anatomy that develop for the production of small or large sex cells—sperm and eggs, respectively—and associated biological functions in sexual reproduction.”
“In humans, reproductive anatomy is unambiguously male or female at birth more than 99.98% of the time,” they write. “The evolutionary function of these two anatomies is to aid in reproduction via the fusion of sperm and ova.”
“No third type of sex cell exists in humans, and therefore there is no sex “spectrum” or additional sexes beyond male and female,” state the biologists. “Sex is binary.”
Furthermore, “the existence of only two sexes does not mean sex is never ambiguous,” write Hilton and Wright. “But intersex individuals are extremely rare, and they are neither a third sex nor proof that sex is a ‘spectrum’ or a ‘social construct.'”
Adam and Eve. (Screenshot) See in the full report in the WSJ
The two scientists go on to explain that those “most vulnerable to sex denialism are children” because “gender identity” instead of biological sex can cause confusion. Puberty-blocking drugs and “affirmation therapies” that reinforce this confusion may contribute to gender dysphoria, say Hilton and Wright.
They add that this “pathologizing of sex-atypical behavior is extremely worrying and regressive. It is similar to gay ‘conversion’ therapy, except that it’s now bodies instead of minds that are being converted to bring children into ‘proper’ alignment with themselves.”
(Screenshot) See in the full report in the WSJ
In conclusion, they state, “The time for politeness on this issue has passed. Biologists and medical professionals need to stand up for the empirical reality of biological sex. When authoritative scientific institutions ignore or deny empirical fact in the name of social accommodation, it is an egregious betrayal to the scientific community they represent. It undermines public trust in science, and it is dangerously harmful to those most vulnerable.”
Transgender cyclist Rachel McKinnon has defended her right to compete in women’s sport despite accepting trans athletes may retain a physical advantage over their rivals. (Photo by OLI SCARFF/AFP via Getty Images)
Transgender ideology harms women, gays—and especially feminine boys and masculine girls.
By Colin M. Wright and Emma N. Hilton | WSJ |Feb. 13, 2020
Colin Wright is an evolutionary biologist at Penn State. Emma Hilton is a developmental biologist
at the University of Manchester.
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Feature Article
Current Issue
The Politicization Of Science The Irreproducibility Crisis of Modern Science
Causes, Consequences, and the Road to Reform
David Randall Christopher Welser
Preface by Peter Wood
The National Association of Scholars (NAS) has long been interested in the politicization of science. We have also long been interested in the search for truth—but mainly as it pertains to the humanities and social sciences. The irreproducibility crisis brings together our two long-time interests, because the inability of science to discern truth properly and its politicization go hand in hand.
The NAS was founded in 1987 to defend the vigorous liberal arts tradition of disciplined intellectual inquiry. The need for such a defense had become increasingly apparent in the previous decade and is benchmarked by the publication of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind in January 1987. The founding of the NAS and the publication of Bloom’s book were coincident but unrelated except that both were responses to a deep shift in the temperament of American higher education. An older ideal of disinterested pursuit of truth was giving way to views that there was no such thing. All academic inquiry, according to this new view, served someone’s political interests, and “truth” itself had to be counted as a questionable concept.
To some extent the natural sciences held themselves exempt from the epistemological and social revolution that was tearing the humanities (and the social sciences) apart. Most academic scientists believed that their disciplines were immune from the idea that facts are “socially constructed.” Physicists were disinclined to credit the claim that there could be a feminist, black, or gay physics. Astronomers were not enthusiastic about the concept that observation is inevitably a reflex of the power of the socially privileged.
A reproducibility crisis afflicts a wide range of scientific and social-scientific disciplines, from epidemiology to social psychology. Many supposedly scientific results cannot be reproduced, because of improper use of statistics, arbitrary research techniques, lack of accountability, political groupthink, and a scientific culture biased toward producing positive results. The report includes a series of policy recommendations, scientific and political, for alleviating the reproducibility crisis . . .
Read the original report at https://www.nas.org/reports/the-irreproducibility-crisis-of-modern-science/full-report
Feature Article
Current Issue
Basic Ambulatory Medical Care is Not Insurable.
We have become so accustomed to having all of medical care covered by insurance. The evidence indicates that if we paid for our basic ambulatory care personally, instead of paying through our health insurance program, we would save 47 percent of our costs. That’s a huge savings. However, we seldom hear of this side of the issue. People have been led to believe that health care is so expensive, it can’t be considered as a personal responsibility. The health insurance industry has been very effective in their promotion that no one should be without full insurance. However, the cost of basic medical care is quite inexpensive and it is controlled by each of us personally.
If we think of outpatient medical care, we would be able to make our own decisions and everyone would be interested in saving costs. We would see these costs every time they occur. When we see a physician, we would pay his fee directly. How often we need to see a physician can be indexed to decades of age. A person in his 30s, goes to see a physician perhaps once or so per year. This would be on the order of $150. To obtain laboratory screening of a blood count, urinalysis, and cholesterol would be under $150. Current guidelines suggest that screening test may be indicate every five or ten years. That would place ambulatory health care at about $300 per year. So for that decade of life medical insurance should start after a $300 deductible for the year.
These costs increase with age. With no good actuarial data available, let’s estimate the cost of ambulatory medical care in our 40s would probably be about $400 a year. For our demonstration, let’s consider a $500 cost for ambulatory care in our 50s. At this stage of our life we may need a chest x-ray or electrocardiogram, but not likely every year.
For the sake of our illustration let us extrapolate a cost of $600 a year in our 60s. At this time we may need more laboratory evaluations, perhaps some diagnostic procedures and two or possibly three office visits a year.
As people are living longer and healthier, many are working into their 70s, which would probably required basic costs of about $700 per year and avoid the hassles of Medicare until age 72 or 75.
When one compares the above numbers with the cost of complete health insurance, it represents major savings of medical care costs. One cannot get full health insurance based on any of the above estimated costs of ambulatory medical care.
Once these costs are actuarily confirmed or modified, it becomes obvious that basic ambulatory medical care, if paid at the time of service directly, is less expensive than the cost of any health insurance available. It has been blown out of proportion by the health insurance, Hospital, Government, Medicare, Medical complex.
Then the issue of the expensive portion of health care requires medical insurance. We then need major medical insurance for hospital care, surgeries, and trauma care, This type of deductible insurance should be based on the costs that exceeds the basic ambulatory care, The deductible should then be equal to the cost of basic ambulatory care indexed for each decade or life. This type of policy is relatively inexpensive compared to present insurance policies. Some would estimate the cost is likely to be less than half the costs we see advertised which in many instances is more than a thousand dollars per month.
This privatization of basic health care should be the first step to control of medical care costs.
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Feature Article
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Climategate: Ten years later By Kelvin Kemm | November 1st, 2019 | Climate
This month marks the tenth anniversary of “Climategate” – the release of thousands of emails to and from climate scientists who had been (and still are) collaborating and colluding to create a manmade climate crisis that exists in their minds and computer models, but not in the real world. The scandal should have ended climate catastrophism. Instead, it was studiously buried by politicians, scientists, activists and crony capitalists, who will rake in trillions of dollars from the exaggerations and fakery, while exempting themselves from the damage they are inflicting on everyday families.
Few people know the Inconvenient Facts about the supposed manmade climate and extreme weather “crisis.” For example, since 1998, average global temperatures have risen by a mere few hundredths of a degree. (For a time, they even declined slightly.) Yet all we hear is baseless rhetoric about manmade carbon dioxide causing global warming and climate changes that pose existential threats to humanity, wildlife and planet. Based on this, we are told we must stop using fossil fuels to power economic growth and better living standards. This is bad news for Africa and the world.
We keep hearing that rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels cause rising global temperatures. But satellite data show no such thing. In fact, computer model predictions for 2019 are almost a half degree Celsius (0.9 degrees F) above actual satellite measurements. Even worse, anytime a scientist raises questions about the alleged crisis, he or she is denounced as a “climate change denier.”
A major source of data supporting the human CO2- induced warming proposition came from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom.
Then on the morning of 17 November 2009 a Pandora’s box of embarrassing CRU information exploded onto the world scene. A computer hacker penetrated the university’s computer system and took 61 Megs of material that showed the CRU had been manipulating scientific information to make global warming appear to be the fault of mankind and industrial CO2. Among many other scandals, the shocking leaked emails showed then-CRU-director Prof. Phil Jones boasting of using statistical “tricks” to remove evidence of observed declines in global temperatures.
In another email, he advocated deleting data rather than providing it to scientists who did not share his view and might criticize his analyses. Non-alarmist scientists had to invoke British freedom of information laws to get the information. Jones was later suspended, and former British Chancellor Lord Lawson called for a Government enquiry into the embarrassing exposé.
The affair became known as “Climategate,” and a group of American University students even posted a YouTube song, “Hide the Decline,” mocking the CRU and climate modeler Dr. Michael Mann, whose use of the phrase “hide the decline” in temperatures had been found in the hacked emails. . .
Can this tiny increase really explain any observed global warming since the Little Ice Age ended, and the modern industrial era began? Since California became a state, the measured global rise in atmospheric temperature has been less than 1C. But most of this increase occurred prior to 1940, and average planetary temperatures fell from around 1943 until about 1978, leading to a global cooling scare. . .
Moreover, during the well-documented Medieval Warm Period from about 950 to 1350, warmer global temperatures allowed Viking farmers to raise crops and tend cattle in Greenland. The equally well documented 500-year Little Ice Age starved and froze the Vikings out of Greenland, before reaching its coldest point, the Maunder Minimum, 1645-1715. That’s when England’s River Thames regularly froze over, Norwegian farmers demanded compensation for lands buried by advancing glaciers, and priests performed exorcism rituals to keep alpine glaciers away from villages. Paintings from the era show crowds of people ice skating and driving horse-drawn carriages on the Thames.
Industry and automobile emissions obviously played no role in either the MWP or the LIA.
These dramatic events should ring warning bells for any competent, honest scientist. If the Medieval Warm Period occurred without industrial CO2 driving it, why should industrial CO2 be causing any observed warming today? Europe’s great plague wiped out nearly a quarter of its population during the Little Ice Age. The warm period brought prosperity and record crops, while cold years brought misery, famine and death.
Ten years before Climategate, Dr. Mann released a computer-generated graph purporting to show global temperatures over the previous 1500 years. His graph mysteriously made the Medieval Warm Period, Little Ice Age and Maunder extreme cold years disappear – and planetary temperatures spike suddenly the last couple decades of twentieth century. The graph had the shape of a hockey stick, was published worldwide and became a centerpiece for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Many scientists were highly suspicious of the hockey stick claims. Two of them, Steven McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, completely discredited Mann’s computer program and revisionist history. Of course, that did not stop former US vice president Al Gore from using the discredited graph in his doom and gloom climate change movie, An Inconvenient Truth.
The hacked CRU emails also showed exchanges between Mann and Jones, in which they discussed how to intimidate editors who wanted to publish scientific views contrary to theirs, to suppress any contradictory studies. In one email, Jones expressed his desire to get rid of the “troublesome editor” of the Climate Research journal for daring to publish differing views. The editor got sacked.
When University of Colorado climate skeptic Professor Roger Pielke, Jr. asked the CRU for its original temperature readings, he was told the data had been (conveniently) lost. Lost!?! Do professionals lose something as valuable as original data? Many suspected they just didn’t want anyone to expose their clever manipulations and fabrications.
But if industrial carbon dioxide did not cause recent global warming, what did? A Danish research group, led by Prof. Henrik Svensmark, has found a very credible match between levels of sunspot activity (giant magnetic storms) on our Sun and global temperatures over the last fifteen hundred years. This all-natural mechanism actually fits the evidence! How terribly inconvenient for alarmists.
Cosmic rays from deep space constantly impinge on the Earth’s upper atmosphere and produce clouds, much like high-flying jets leave white contrails behind their engines. More clouds can trap heat, but they also cause global cooling because not as much sunlight strikes the Earth. More sunspots mean a stronger magnetic shield, therefore fewer cosmic rays reaching Earth, thus less cloud cover and more global warming. The Sun is currently in a near-record period of low sunspot activity.
All sorts of interest groups are suppressing this information. Maybe worse, when Climategate broke, “climate justice” campaigner for Friends of the Earth Emma Brindal said bluntly: “A climate change response must have at its heart a redistribution of wealth and resources.” Not protecting Earth from manmade CO2 emissions or natural and manmade climate change – but redistributing wealth and resources, according to formulas that self-appointed ruling elites decide is “socially just.” . . .
Real social justice and human rights mean everyone has access to abundant, reliable, affordable energy, especially universally important electricity. Not from expensive, intermittent, weather-dependent wind turbines and solar panels. From fossil fuel, nuclear and hydroelectric power plants.
We in the developing world will no longer let climate truth be suppressed. We will not allow loud, radical activists to put the brakes on African economic development, jobs, and improved health and living standards, in the name of advancing their anti-human, wealth redistribution agendas. . .
Read the entire scientific article . . .
Author
Dr Kelvin Kemm is a nuclear physicist and CEO of Nuclear Africa (Pty) Ltd, a project management company based in Pretoria, South Africa. He is the recipient of the prestigious Lifetime Achievers Award of the National Science and Technology Forum of South Africa. He does international consultancy work in strategic development.
https://www.cfact.org/2019/11/01/climategate-ten-years-later/
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There’s no need to dread conflict during dinner Finding common ground with liberals at Thanksgiving By Kay Coles James, President, Heritage Foundation
With Thanksgiving approaching, a common complaint I hear is that the mix of political views at holiday gatherings can create some tense moments.
However, there’s no need to dread conflict during dinner. In fact, a conversation handled the right way may actually show your family that they have more in common than they think.
The key is to talk about issues from common ground. Many liberals don’t understand that conservatives care just as much as they do (maybe more) about clean air and water, helping the poor, ensuring no one goes without needed health care, and creating jobs so everyone has a chance to live the American Dream.
Unfortunately for liberals, history has proven that most of their big-government policy solutions have been failures. Indeed, they’ve often hurt the people they were intended to help. Smaller-government solutions, by contrast, have consistently produced the outcomes most of us seek.
Here are a few issues you might encounter over the holidays and how you could address them. You might actually win over Uncle John — or at least keep the bickering to a minimum.
1) Helping America’s poor:
We’ve spent trillions on the War on Poverty since it began more than 50 years ago, yet the poverty rate still hovers around 12 percent to 15 percent. Today, we spend a trillion dollars a year on federal, state and local welfare programs, yet 40 million Americans are still considered poor. If we divided that $1 trillion among 40 million people and gave it to them directly, we could hand a family of four $100,000 a year.
So why haven’t we ended poverty yet? Because the current welfare system discourages work, discourages families from staying together and encourages dependence on government. In other words, welfare keeps the poor poor.
While we can provide a safety net for those who truly need it, it’s critical that we limit how long able-bodied people can be on welfare, create work requirements as a condition for receiving benefits and help recipients learn job skills so they can stop depending on taxpayers.
In many instances, churches and charities can better help those in need by administering aid more compassionately, weeding out those defrauding the system, and ensuring that more aid dollars get to the needy rather than go to the overhead of a giant bureaucracy.
2) Better pay:
The higher corporate taxes some are proposing to pay for expanding government would leave less money for companies to invest, grow, and create more and better-paying jobs. As we’ve seen after the recent tax cuts and deregulation efforts, many U.S. businesses have been adding jobs and increasing wages, and businesses that went overseas for lower tax rates have returned to America. As a result, unemployment is at a 50-year low. Moreover, the poor haven’t been left behind; in fact, the lowest-income workers have seen the largest percentage increases in pay.
Hearing these facts over Thanksgiving turkey might make Aunt Betty reconsider her plans to protest the town’s biggest employer for not paying its “fair share” of taxes.
3) Fixing health care:
Under President Obama’s health care reform, health insurance premiums doubled in the first four years and choices decreased. Now, some are proposing even more government control with Medicare for All. A Heritage Foundation analysis shows that to fund such a proposal, every working American would have to pay an additional 21 cents of every dollar earned on top of the taxes he already pays. Even after the supposed savings the plan would deliver, almost three quarters of Americans would be worse off financially than under the current system.
Instead, we should be eliminating regulations that dictate the coverage consumers are forced to buy. That would immediately lower prices, as people would only buy the types of coverage they needed. Additionally, creating transparency in health care pricing and giving individuals more power to shop around for better prices would create competition among providers. Just as with cars, computers and even groceries, greater competition incentivizes providers to lower prices and develop more choices to attract customers.
The truly needy could continue to get assistance through Medicaid, but forcing everyone onto a government system and saddling them with outrageous taxes to pay for it isn’t the answer.
If you can cut through the political doublespeak and discuss the real cost of Medicare for All over pumpkin pie, Cousin Ted might just realize that the politicians weren’t exactly honest in their sales pitch.
If you’re looking for more ways to talk about topics from health care to education to the Second Amendment and more, Heritage has a website devoted to facts, figures and compelling messaging about successful small-government solutions for the biggest issues America faces.
May your Thanksgiving be what it was always meant to be — a time that brings
your family closer together, not one that pushes them apart.
Happy Thanksgiving!
- Kay Coles James is president of The Heritage Foundation (heritage.org).
Feature Article
Current Issue
President Trump Champions Religious Freedom at the U. N.
Kelsey Zorzi reported in the WSJ that President Trump championed Religious freedom at the United Nations more vigorously than any of his predecessors.
President Trump isn’t known as a champion of human rights, but on Monday he became the first American president to convene a meeting at the United Nations on religious freedom. He kicked off the U.N. General Assembly’s annual session with a “Global Call to Protect Religious Freedom.”
Flanked by Secretary-General António Guterres and Vice President Mike Pence, the president declared: “No right is more fundamental to a peaceful, prosperous, flourishing society than religious freedom, yet it is rare around the world. As we speak, many people of faith are being jailed, murdered, often at the hands of their own government.” More than 80% of the world’s population lived in nations that restrict religious freedom as of 2009, and the situation hasn’t improved, according to Pew Research.
Feature Article
Previous Issue
How Government Programs Ruined Childhood
Childhood is being ruined and parents are the only ones who can save it.
By Kerry McDonald | Senior Education Fellow | www.fee.org | Tuesday, August 20, 2019
An op-ed in Sunday’s New York Times entitled “We Have Ruined Childhood” offers disheartening data about childhood depression and anxiety, closely linked to school attendance, as well as the disturbing trend away from childhood free play and toward increasing schooling, standardization, and control.
“STEM, standardized testing and active-shooter drills have largely replaced recess, leisurely lunches, art and music,” says the writer Kim Brooks, who is the author of the book, Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear.
While many of Brooks’s insights are spot-on, the undertones of her article make clear that she is focused on the collective “it takes a village” narrative of childrearing. Indeed, her book praises “the forty-one industrialized nations that offer parents paid maternity leave—to say nothing of subsidized childcare, quality early childhood education, or a host of other family supports” (p. 50).
The assertion is that most parents are desperate and alone and they must rely on government programs to help raise their children. She writes in her article:
The work of raising children, once seen as socially necessary labor benefiting the common good, is an isolated endeavor for all but the most well-off parents. Parents are entirely on their own when it comes to their offspring’s well-being…No longer able to rely on communal structures for childcare or allow children time alone, parents who need to work are forced to warehouse their youngsters for long stretches of time.
This narrative is backwards. It was the expansion of government programs, particularly in education, that weakened the family, led many parents to abdicate responsibility for their children’s upbringing, and caused them to increasingly rely on government institutions to do the job for them. These institutions, in turn, grew more powerful and more bloated, undermining the family and breeding contempt for parental authority. What may seem like a charitable endeavor to help families ends up crippling parents and emboldening the state. As President Ronald Reagan reminded us: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.”
Brooks knows better than many of us the terror associated with granting the state more power: Her book details her harrowing ordeal of being accused of child neglect and ordered to complete 100 hours of community service for leaving her child alone in a car for five minutes while she ran a quick errand. The village shouldn’t be in charge of raising children; parents should.
So how did we get here? While the seeds of mounting state power and institutionalization were sown in the 19th century and spread throughout the 20th, it was Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson who dramatically accelerated these efforts in 1964-1965 with his “Great Society” legislation. One of the most consequential effects of Johnson’s Great Society proposal was getting Congress to pass the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA) which gave unprecedented control of education to the federal government, mainly through the funding of a variety of government programs. In fact, expanding the government’s role in education was a stated goal of the Great Society plan. As Johnson himself stated: “And with your courage and with your compassion and your desire, we will build a Great Society. It is a society where no child will go unfed, and no youngster will go unschooled.” (Heaven forbid a child be unschooled!)
The result of Johnson’s plan was the establishment and enlargement of programs such as Head Start, which was initiated in 1965 to provide government preschool and nutrition programs to low-income children. Despite billions of dollars spent on the federal Head Start program over the last half-century (the annual Head Start budget is over $10 billion in 2019), the results have been disappointing. As researchers at the Brookings Institute noted, the most in-depth studies of Head Start show that any initial gains disappeared by the end of kindergarten. More troubling, by third grade the children in the Head Start program were found to be more aggressive and have more emotional problems than children of similar backgrounds who did not attend Head Start.
Perhaps the most far-reaching impact on education of LBJ’s Great Society was the lasting legacy of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
Not only are these outcomes concerning for the children involved, they also indicate how government programs can strain family relationships. Notably, it was the parents of the Head Start children who said their children were more aggressive than non-Head Start children of similar backgrounds, suggesting that parental bonds could be compromised at the same time that government early learning programs could foster maladaptive social behaviors. When parents, not government, are in charge of determining a child’s early learning environment they may rely on informal, self-chosen networks of family and friends, thus building social capital in their communities, or they may choose from among various private preschool options where they retain control over how their child learns. If parents are not satisfied, they can leave. When government increasingly controls early childhood programs, reliance on family members, friends, and other private options fades. Grandma is no longer needed, and she becomes less of an influence in a child’s life and learning and less of a support system for her daughter or son.
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Johnson’s Great Society plan had other consequences that served to weaken family roles and strengthen government. The Child Nutrition Act of 1966 greatly expanded the National School Lunch Program, allocating additional funding and adding school breakfasts. While no one wants a child to go hungry, relying on government programs to feed children can cause poor health outcomes, strip parents of their essential responsibilities, weaken informal family and community support systems, and lead parents to hand over even more control of childrearing to the government.
Perhaps the most far-reaching impact on education of Johnson’s Great Society was the lasting legacy of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that paved the way for ongoing and amplified federal involvement in education. It was the ESEA that was reauthorized in 2001 as the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) that led to the standardization of schooling through Common Core curriculum frameworks, as well as regular testing. No Child Left Behind morphed into The Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015, again a reauthorization of Johnson’s ESEA, that tried to shift some curriculum standard-setting to states but retained regular testing requirements under federal law.
In her weekend op-ed, Brooks laments the increasing role of regimented schooling in children’s lives. She writes:
School days are longer and more regimented. Kindergarten, which used to be focused on play, is now an academic training ground for the first grade. Young children are assigned homework even though numerous studies have found it harmful.
She is absolutely correct, and the culprit is increasing government control over American education through the ongoing reauthorization and expansion of federal education programs. Longer, more regimented, more standardized, more test-driven schooling is a direct consequence of the government’s education policy.
Childhood is being ruined and parents are the only ones who can save it.
The inevitable result of these expanded government powers is less control over education by parents. As parents lose this control, they cede more authority to government bureaucracies, which in turn grow more powerful and more bloated while parents get weaker and more vulnerable.
I agree that childhood is being ruined, as children play less, stress more, and find themselves in institutional learning environments for most of their childhood and adolescence. I also agree that the problem is getting worse. The solution, however, is to weaken government and strengthen families, not vice versa. Put families back in charge of a child’s education. Grant parents the respect and responsibility they rightfully deserve. Remember that the government’s role is to secure our natural rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—not to determine what those pursuits are.
Childhood is being ruined and parents are the only ones who can save it.
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Kerry McDonald is a Senior Education Fellow at FEE and author of Unschooled: Raising Curious, Well-Educated Children Outside the Conventional Classroom (Chicago Review Press, 2019). Kerry has a B.A. in economics from Bowdoin College and an M.Ed. in education policy from Harvard University. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband and four children. You can sign up for her weekly newsletter on parenting and education here.
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From FEE.org : https://fee.org/articles/how-government-programs-ruined-childhood/ reprint under the https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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Feature Article
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Communism and Nazism Are Now Legally Synonymous in Ukraine
By Jon Miltimore | Managing Editor: FEE.org | Saturday, July 27, 2019
Their names still haunt us. Chelmno. Belzec, Sobibor. Treblinka. Auschwitz. Dachau. Majdanek.
They stir images of the horrors of Nazi killing centers, where millions of Jews, Poles, Soviet POWs, and gypsies were systematically killed in one of the great horrors of the twentieth century.
For many of us, this imagery is associated exclusively with Hitler and his Nazi minions. Such a view does not align with the historical record, however.
Communism’s Death Toll
The Black Book of Communism, an international bestseller, reveals that the handiwork of twentieth-century communists more than matched the Nazis. In fact, a glance at the figures shows the communist death toll dwarfs the bloody work of the Nazis: In China, 65 million dead; in the Soviet Union, nearly 20 million; Vietnam, 1 million; Cambodia, 2 million. North Korea is 2 million and counting. Chalk up a few million more with Eastern Europe (1 million), Africa (1.7 million), and Afghanistan (1.5 million).
“In all, Communist regimes killed some 100 million people—roughly four times the number killed by the Nazis—making communism the most murderous ideology in human history,” Marc Thiessan wrote in the Washington Post.
The different perceptions of the horrors of Nazi Germany to horrors of twentieth-century communism have long been a source of frustration for many who see cognitive dissonance in how the hammer-and-sickle is treated compared to the Swastika.
For lawmakers in Ukraine, this cognitive dissonance was apparently more than they could bear. In 2015, legislation was passed to make Nazism and communism legally synonymous.
Last week, that law was upheld by a Ukrainian court.
“The communist regime, like the Nazi regime, inflicted irreparable damages to human rights because during its existence, it had total control over society and politically motivated persecutions and repressions, violated its international obligations, and its own constitutions and laws,” the court declared, in a ruling published on its website.
The ruling appears to pave the way for the removal of most of the remaining communist monuments and landmarks bearing Soviet names in Ukraine. It also prohibits the use of Nazi and communist symbols.
The Starvation of Ukraine
That communism is a touchy subject in Ukraine should come as no surprise. As the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Applebaum chronicled in her 2017 book Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine, nearly 4 million Ukrainians died from starvation in the Soviet Union between 1931 and 1934. Applebaum makes is quite clear how this happened.
“The Soviet Union’s disastrous decision to force peasants to give up their land and join collective farms; the eviction of ‘kulaks,’ the wealthier peasants, from their homes; the chaos that followed,” she writes, “all [was] ultimately the responsibility of Joseph Stalin, the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party.”
Millions of people starving is horrifying. What’s more terrifying is that this policy was not accidental.
As late as the summer of 1932 mass starvation appeared avoidable, Applebaum writes. The Soviets could have asked for international aid, as they had in previous famines. It could have stopped exporting grain or halted grain requisitions. Party leaders chose not to.
Instead, in the autumn of 1932, the Soviet Politburo, the elite leadership of the Soviet Communist Party, took a series of decisions that widened and deepened the famine in the Ukrainian countryside and at the same time prevented peasants from leaving the republic in search of food. At the height of the crisis, organized teams of policemen and party activists, motivated by hunger, fear, and a decade of hateful and conspiratorial rhetoric, entered peasant households and took everything edible: potatoes, beets, squash, beans, peas, anything in the oven and anything in the cupboard, farm animals and pets.
As a result, 3.9 million Ukrainians died. In light of these horrors, it’s no surprise that many in Ukraine, which suffered under Nazi rule the following decade, see little difference between the collective atrocities of the Nazis and the collective atrocities of the communists.
Restricting Speech
Before taking too much satisfaction in a nation equating communism and Nazism, however, the law in its entirety should be considered. As noted above, the legislation prohibits the use of Nazi and communist symbols. Violators of the law can be imprisoned.
There is a great deal of free speech confusion today, especially in the US. Does it apply to people making wedding cakes? NFL quarterbacks not standing during the National Anthem? Speakers invited to talk on college campuses? Conspiracy theorists on Twitter?
Each of these issues is a topic worthy of discussion, but the fundamental purpose of free speech is to protect people from laws like Ukraine’s. The 1st Amendment of the Bill of Rights says Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. That means the state won’t put you in jail for saying something deemed verboten.
Europe’s crackdown on free expression is no secret. In fact, it’s a trend many would like to bring to the United States. However, both Europeans and Americans would do well to consider two groups who would have enthusiastically supported state-imposed bans on undesired speech: Nazis and communists.
That in itself should be enough to make us recognize the danger of state bans on speech.
Jon Miltimore
Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has appeared in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Washington Times.
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From FEE.org: https://fee.org/articles/communism-and-nazism-are-now-legally-synonymous-in-ukraine/ reprint under the https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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Editor: It is our hope, desire, and prayer that our friends, neighbors, relatives, and even members of the Family of Faith, who have been hoodwinked by the current expounding of democratic socialism will take note that they are treading on fire and realize they are in the company of the greatest purveyors of human killing ever seen on the face of this earth since the Great Flood.
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Feature Article
Past Issue
Featured Article: Dramatically High Rate of Knee Arthroscopies
Dramatically Higher Rate of Knee Arthroscopy in the United States.
Are we getting what We’re Paying For?
by Chris Centeno, MD
A study has revealed that the knee arthroscopy rate in US is more than double the rates of knee surgery in Europe or Canada. In addition, despite often long knee surgery recovery times, the number of knee arthroscopic surgeries increased by about 1/2 in the decade from 1996 to 2006. There were about 1,000,000 arthroscopic knee surgeries in the United States in the year 2006 alone. About 500,000 of those were for meniscus tears. First, these numbers are staggering. The current US population is about 307 million people, so approximately 1 in 300 people in the year 2006 had knee arthroscopy. If we exclude the patients treated for complete retracted ACL tears (maybe 100,000 patients based on the study)-an indication for knee surgery that we feel is very appropriate to perhaps (not proven yet) reduce the onset of more severe knee arthritis, that leaves about 900,000 surgeries. If we also take out another 100,000 surgeries that are likely performed for knee micro fracture surgery (where there is some low level evidence showing some efficacy in certain younger and male patient populations) and issues like severe locking episodes where a piece of cartilage is in the wrong spot and disabling the patient, that leaves about 800,000 surgeries focused on debridement and meniscus repair. If we assume hospital and physician costs of about $5,000 per surgery and add 25% for dealing with direct surgical complications such as infection, re-operation, etc.., the total United States societal cost is about $5 billion per year. Over a decade, this is $50 billion. While this would be fine if all of this knee surgery resulted in these knees being “fixed”, however the research suggests that this isn’t the case. In particular, the two surgeries we’re discussing that cost 5 billion dollars a year either haven’t been shown to be better than placebo surgeries or there’s current significant controversy over whether they’re effective. As an example, knee debridement surgeries (“cleaning up” the inside of the knee) have been shown to be no better than placebo surgeries. As another example, knee surgery for most meniscus tears may not work well and we’re not sure anymore whether most meniscus tears in middle aged to elderly patients even cause pain. The upshot? We’re spending an awful lot of money on knee surgeries that we don’t know to be effective.
Editor’s Note: Humans have had ligament strains and tears for thousands of years. It has only become a surgical opportunity in the last century. It is important for patients with knee problems show appropriate caution and restraint.
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Feature Article
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Gender Reconstruction
Transgenderism in the Elite in First Things December 2019 by R. R. Reno in The Public Square: Thomas Donnelly was a member of the foreign policy establishment in Washington, D. C., holding a position most recently at the American Enterprise Institute. He is no more, however, having been recently “reborn” as Giselle Donnelly. Josh Rogin profiled the new Donnelly in a Washington Post column, “a story of suffering, struggle, loss and love.” (more…)
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Medicine Meets the Press
The clash between physicians and the press in the U.S. is older than the republic itself. The first recorded debate goes back to the Boston smallpox outbreak of 1721. Newspapers, including Benjamin Franklin’s The Courant, launched a crusade against Dr. Zabdiel Boylston’s practice of immunization. (more…)
Feature Article
Past Issue
The Continuing Epidemic of Trans
After a dark history in which transgender kids were routinely ignored . . . or persecuted, a new protocol of social and physical transition has emerged. For teens that experience persistent gender dysphoria, this protocol can provide profound relief from suffering. For some kids, however, gender dysphoria is temporary. And the effects of transitioning can be permanent.
Your Child Says She’s Trans, She wants Hormones and Surgery. She’s 13
The Atlantic recently had this headline for a cover story and provided the story of the girl who was 12 when first interviewed, and then followed her through adolescence. They detailed the struggles she went through. She was at the point of demanding bilateral mastectomies and hormone therapy. The parents were highly educated and spent a great deal of time with their daughter. As the girl progressed through middle school, she found other girls who felt the way she did. As she became more gossipy with her classmates, she began to see herself in other girls. She began to feel at home in her body. (more…)
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The Genius of America
Why Wilbur Wright Deserves the Bulk of the Credit for the First Flight
A new book advances a controversial theory about the singular contribution that went into the brothers’ pioneering achievement.
The breakthrough propeller, its blades shaped by hatchet and drawknife from two-ply spruce, was sheathed in linen and sealed with aluminum powder mixed into a heavy varnish. (Eric Long) (more…)
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Past Issue
The Hoodwinking of America: Democratic Socialism
The Four Types of Socialists
By Tom Trinko
With the rise of socialist candidates in the New Hampshire voting, it’s probably useful to look at what types of people feel comfortable with socialism.
There are 4 main types of people who believe in the false promises of socialism: (more…)
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What the Neo-Socialists in Congress Don’t Understand about Poverty
https://fee.org/people/xavier-underwood/
In a few short weeks, America will welcome the 116th Congress.
I believe the 2016 presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., gave socialism a countercultural boost among my generation. Millennials suffer under the weight of crushing student loan debt and a deteriorating safety net from employers who will pay them less than their parents earned. It is within this economic context that a system promising to create parity among citizens looks attractive. (more…)
Feature Article
Past Issue
Minimum Wage Laws
The Best Argument Against Minimum Wage Laws: You Don’t Own Other People
Like anything else, the seller—the prospective employee—owns what is offered for sale.
By Tom Mullen | FEE | Tuesday, December 04, 2018
With Democrats about to take control of the House, it is likely we will see an increase in the federal minimum wage pass the lower chamber, even if it has no chance of becoming a law. We will just as surely hear opponents making completely sound economic arguments against minimum wage laws.
Minimum wage laws cause unemployment, these opponents say, because they price those workers whose skills don’t justify the minimum wage out of the market completely. If a worker only has the skills to produce $14/hour worth of benefits to an employer, the employer is better off not employing that person rather than losing $1 dollar/hour doing so, if the minimum wage is $15/hour. And regardless of where the minimum wage is presently, any increase in the price of labor will result in less demand for labor, all other things being equal. (more…)
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Today is election day. Will the prosperity of the last two years continue?
Wall Street seems to think it will.
Vice President Mike Pence arrives for a campaign rally with President Donald Trump at Southport High School,
Friday, Nov. 2, 2018, in Indianapolis. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Vice President Mike Pence stated, “I think we’re going to expand our majority in the United States Senate, and I think we’re going to hold our Republican majority in the House of Representatives,” Pence said in a Friday interview with Hill.TV
“But that being said, there is certainly common ground in areas that we can work [with Democrats] that the president has laid out,” he continued. “I think there’s a broad range of areas that we’ll be able to work with that Democrat minority in the House and the Senate, and we’ll continue to reach out to do that.” (more…)
Feature Article
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From Bishop Jackson on Character Assassination of Bret Kavanaugh
*From:*Bishop E.W. Jackson [mailto:stand@standamerica.us]
*Sent:* Friday, September 28, 2018 1:18 PM
*Subject:* Stop Fake News STAND for Truth Project
Dear Patriots,
If you witnessed yesterday’s historic hearing on Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination, you must be as angry as I am that a man who has lived an impeccable life could have his reputation
besmirched by one accuser claiming to have been assaulted by him in high school.
I watched the hearings from beginning to end. It is clear to me from forty years of ministry that Christine Blasey Ford is an emotionally damaged woman, but I do not believe that has anything to do with Brett
Kavanaugh.
Men who assault women never do it only once. It is a pattern of behavior rooted in deep mental and emotional problems which do not go away. There is no credible evidence of a pattern of such behavior on
Judge Kavanaugh’s part. Dr. Ford has no corroborating witnesses or evidence of any kind. To the contrary, many woman commend Kavanaugh’s behavior as exemplary. The witnesses Dr. Ford claims were present when the alleged incident occurred, say it never happened and they have no
idea what she is talking about. (more…)
Feature Article
Past Issue
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Apple Caught red handed Mask off! Social-media censor king revealed
Posted By Art Moore On 08/20/2018
Frontpage,Diversions,Money, Politics,U.S. |
The recent wave of censorship of conservative voices on the internet by tech giants Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Apple mirrors a plan concocted by a coalition of George Soros-funded, progressive groups to take back power in Washington from President Trump’s administration.
A confidential, 49-page memo for defeating Trump by working with the major social-media platforms to eliminate “right wing propaganda and fake news” was presented in January 2017 by Media Matters founder David Brock at a retreat in Florida with about 100 donors, the Washington Free Beacon reported at the time. (more…)
Feature Article
Past Issue
How I went from a Trump critic to a Trump supporter
I admit that I was wrong about Trump. He’s not a clown.
Gary Varvel, Indianapolis Star
Over the years, my caricatures of Donald Trump have evolved but not as much as my opinion of him. When Trump announced he was running for president, I admit that I didn’t take this millionaire, hotel magnate, reality TV show celebrity as a serious candidate. I doubted his ability to do the job. So, I drew him as a clown. In fact, my cartoons were as critical of him as many of my liberal cartoonist friends.
Then Trump started a war with the media, tagging major news outlets as “fake news.” Ahem, I’m in the media.
And while Trump promised to pursue conservatives policies, this conservative cartoonist doubted his sincerity. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that he was on the left. (more…)
Feature Article
Past Issue
Susan Maxwell Skinner – Photojournalist and Singer
Citizen Susan Parade Grand Marshal at the Carmichael Elks Independence Day Parade.
CARMICHAEL, CA (MPG) – After many years of photographing the Carmichael Independence Day Parade, Susan Maxwell Skinner will this year ride in its first division as Grand Marshal. “July 4 has always been my favorite American Holiday,” says the New Zealand transplant. “I feel a huge emotional response at celebrations. I’m grateful to the nation that accepted me; I love to share its pride.”
Skinner became a US citizen in March of 2017. “At the naturalization ceremony, I was nostalgic surrendering my Green Card,” she says. “That bit of plastic was a faithful friend for more than 30 years. When my US passport arrived in the mail, I knew I had had something even more precious in my hand. Millions of people dream and sacrifice for the freedom it promises. Some of the greatest US patriots I know are immigrants.” (more…)
Feature Article
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Clinicians can treat the Health Care Crises
ATS 2018 kicked off with the Opening Ceremony, featuring distinguished physician, educator, and medical scientist Darrell G. Kirch, MD, president and chief executive officer of the Association of American Medical Colleges.
“It is high time that we exert our leadership for the sake of the people we serve,” said Darrell G. Kirch, MD, “Our patients depend on us, and future generations of patients depend on us.” During the keynote address, Dr. Kirch laid out six key challenges facing health care around the world. Clinicians are best equipped to meet all six. (more…)
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Past Issue
Electronic Health Record Software
What is the leading electronic health record (EHR) software?
Jason Barber, Headhunter, Co-Founder at Fetch Recruiter (2016-present)
Answered May 30 2017 · Author has 1.9k answers and 3.5m answer views
Epic is hands down the leader.
Cerner is second.
Third place doesn’t matter.
Epic is the leader because they offer the closest version of an “All in One” system. If you sign up for Epic a hospital can get close to all of the information systems in one place. (more…)
Feature Article
Past Issue
Handbook for Total Body Re-Conditioning
Scientific Weight-Loss
Joint-Ligament-Muscle Conditioning
Aerobics-Balance-Strengthening Exercise
Mental Health-Memory Stimulation
Del Meyer, MD
The Handbook will be available in mid-April at Amazon.com . . .
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Feature Article
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Why Entitlements never seem to go away
Trump Administration Says States May Impose Work Requirements for Medicaid
By ROBERT PEAR | JAN. 11, 2018
Advocates for Medicaid beneficiaries said the new policy was likely to be challenged in court if people were denied coverage for failure to meet a state’s work requirement.
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration said on Thursday that it would allow states to impose work requirements in Medicaid, a major policy shift that moves toward fulfilling a conservative vision for one of the nation’s largest social insurance programs for low-income people. (more…)
Feature Article
Past Issue
Has America’s Biggest Health Care Problem Been Identified?
Congress Has Forgotten America’s Biggest Health Care Problem
The critical question is not who gets care and who doesn’t, but how it’s delivered.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s health care bill won’t do anything to incentivize states and health care organizations to deliver better, more efficient care.
Above, McConnell speaks at a fundraiser in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, on June 30.
Photo by Bryan Woolston/Reuters removed
We spend too much on health care in this country—U.S. health care spending has spiked to more than 17 percent of our gross domestic product. Insurance has become outrageously expensive, which is one of the reasons we need health care reform. (We all utilize more when it’s free.) (more…)
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Past Issue
Sexual Politics – Due Process Restored
The DeVos revision of sexual-abuse rules will reveal who stands where on due process.
By Daniel Henninger | WSJ | Sept 13, 2017
In the annals of American justice, it will be hard to exceed what the Obama administration tried to do with its Title IX guidance letter in 2011. The letter from the Department of Education—most ironically, from its Office of Civil Rights—effectively eliminated centuries of due-process rights at every institution of higher learning in the U.S. That transgression is about to end. (more…)
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Past Issue
One Hundred Million Killed
100 Years of Communism—and 100 Million Dead
The Bolshevik plague that began in Russia was the greatest catastrophe in human history.
By David Satter | WSJ | Nov. 6, 2017
Armed Bolsheviks seized the Winter Palace in Petrograd—now St. Petersburg—100 years ago this week and arrested ministers of Russia’s provisional government. They set in motion a chain of events that would kill millions and inflict a near-fatal wound on Western civilization.
The revolutionaries’ capture of train stations, post offices and telegraphs took place as the city slept and resembled a changing of the guard. But when residents of the Russian capital awoke, they found they were living in a different universe. (more…)
Feature Article
Past Issue
How Martin Luther has shaped Germany for half a millennium
The 500th anniversary of the 95 theses finds a country as moralistic as ever
The Economist | Print edition | Europe | Jan 7th 2017
SET foot in Germany this year and you are likely to encounter the jowly, dour portrait of Martin Luther. With more than 1,000 events in 100 locations, the whole nation is celebrating the 500th anniversary of the monk issuing his 95 theses and (perhaps apocryphally) pinning them to the church door at Wittenberg. He set in motion a split in Christianity that would forever change not just Germany, but the world.
At home, Luther’s significance is no longer primarily theological. After generations of secularisation, not to mention decades of official atheism in the formerly communist east (which includes Wittenberg), Germans are not particularly religious. But the Reformation was not just about God. It shaped the German language, mentality and way of life. For centuries the country was riven by bloody confessional strife; today Protestants and Catholics are each about 30% of the population. But after German unification in the 19th century, Lutheranism won the culture wars. “Much of what used to be typically Protestant we today perceive as typically German,” says Christine Eichel, author of “Deutschland, Lutherland”, a book about Luther’s influence. (more…)
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Bigotry in America
The Exhaustion of American Liberalism
White guilt gave us a mock politics based on the pretense of moral authority.
By Shelby Steele | WSJ | March 5, 2017 2177 COMMENTS
The recent flurry of marches, demonstrations and even riots, along with the Democratic Party’s spiteful reaction to the Trump presidency, exposes what modern liberalism has become: a politics shrouded in pathos. Unlike the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s, when protesters wore their Sunday best and carried themselves with heroic dignity, today’s liberal marches are marked by incoherence and downright lunacy—hats designed to evoke sexual organs, poems that scream in anger yet have no point to make, and a hysterical anti-Americanism.
All this suggests lostness, the end of something rather than the beginning. What is ending? (more…)
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Past Issue
Planned Parenthood Controversy
Harrison on Planned Parenthood controversy: ‘God is not silent’
OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT, OFFICIAL STATEMENTS, PRESSROOM
By Rev. Dr. Matthew C. Harrison | July 29, 2015
“It is the deadly hatred with which Satan attacks Christ. It is the thirst for a vengeance against Christ, which Satan cannot satisfy. It is the anxiety before Christ the judge. It is the rage of the fatally wounded beast.” — Rev. Hermann Sasse’s sermon on the Fourth Sunday after Trinity, 1942
Tuesday morning, the Center for Medical Progress released another video exposing Planned Parenthood and the evil and immense pain that occur inside its clinics. The video is graphic. Little arms and legs are ripped from tiny bodies. They are callously referred to as “specimens,” sold at a price. (more…)
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Obamacare Is Uninsuring the Insured
By Doug Badger | National Review OnlineAugust 10, 2017Health Insurance, ObamaCare
The law expanded coverage among the poor at the expense of coverage among the middle class.
The number of people with individual health-insurance coverage is shrinking.
Despite $146 billion in federal subsidies to low-income households and well-capitalized insurers, 2.6 million fewer people had individual policies in March 2017 than in March 2016, a drop of nearly 15 percent. (more…)
Feature Article
Past Issue
The Insanity Of Liberalism
Justin Trudeau: The Insanity Of Liberalism
August 2, 2017 thestonecoldtrutheditor Christopher Speer, Justin Trudeau, Layne Morris, Omar Khadr, Stone Cold truth
Trudeau is nothing but a summer camp counselor, dressed in a fine-tailored suit,
running a country.
By Taylor Foland
Canada’s snowflake, Justin Trudeau just did something truly unimaginable. Omar Khadr, a convicted jihadi, was just awarded a $10.5 million settlement for killing one U.S. serviceman, and blinding another. The jihadi was on the battlefield in Afghanistan in July of 2002. The jihadi threw a grenade at U.S. Army Delta Force Medic Sgt. First Class Christopher Speer, killing him, and blinding Army Sgt. First Class Layne Morris. (more…)
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The Senate bill would repeal the Obamacare tax penalty
Free the Obamacare 15 Million
They’re not ‘losing’ insurance; they just won’t be forced to get policies they don’t want.
By Doug Badger | National Review OnlineJune 26, 2017ObamaCare, Reform Initiatives
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) today warned lawmakers that 15 million people will lose medical coverage next year if the Senate GOP’s health-care bill becomes law.
That’s not quite accurate. CBO doesn’t believe that millions will “lose” their insurance in 2018. Instead, the agency thinks that millions will happily cancel their coverage — even those who get it for free. The reason: The Senate bill would repeal the Obamacare tax penalty on the uninsured, known as the individual mandate. (more…)
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Sexism largely manifests itself in people acting rationally
Why Patriarchy once made economic sense
By Cathy Reisenwitz
PATRIARCHY IS ACTUALLY A REALLY IMPORTANT CONCEPT FOR ANYONE INTERESTED IN ECONOMICS
Patriarchy describes the way ideas around gender, specifically performance and expectations inhibit economic, educational, and personal growth. In other words, patriarchy is the word for systemic sexism.
Okay, but sexism works both ways. Actually, it works many ways. Men, women, and genderqueer individuals all experience sexism. Male oppression, such as higher instances of suicide, gender discrimination in child custody cases, and overrepresentation in dangerous jobs, are results of sexism, specifically from gendered expectations. So why gender a term for systemic sexism? (more…)
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Trump May Herald a New Political Order
Seldom does a presidential election mark a permanent shift. The last time it happened was 1932.
By JOHN STEELE GORDON | The WSJ | Jan 15, 2017
For all their noise and news dominance, presidential elections typically don’t change the country all that much. That isn’t a bad thing but a sign of how strong American democracy is. It rarely veers far from the center, where successful policy usually lies. But on rare occasions, deep historical currents and extraordinary political talents produce an entirely new order. It happened in the presidential elections of 1828, 1860, 1896, 1932—and, quite probably, 2016.
Feature Article
Past Issue
Why Voting for Donald Trump Is a Morally Good Choice
By Wayne Grudem, Posted: Jul 28, 2016
I offer the following article, “Why Voting for Donald Trump Is a Morally Good Choice” by Wayne Grudem, without comment other than it is a perspective that ought to be considered in the 2016 presidential election and has not been adequately treated in the establishment press. It is well worth the read and can be found at www.LibertyUnderFire.org.
Liberty Articles | Sep 5, 2016
Some of my Christian friends tell me they can’t in good conscience vote for Donald Trump because, when faced with a choice between “the lesser of two evils,” the morally right thing is to choose neither one. They recommend voting for a third-party or write-in candidate.
As a professor who has taught Christian ethics for 39 years, I think their analysis is incorrect. Now that Trump has won the GOP nomination, I think voting for Trump is a morally good choice.
American citizens need patience with each other in this difficult political season. Close friends are inevitably going to make different decisions about the election. We still need to respect each other and thank God that we live in a democracy with freedom to differ about politics. And we need to keep talking with each other – because democracies function best when thoughtful citizens can calmly and patiently dialog about the reasons for their differences. This is my contribution to that discussion.
A good candidate with flaws
Feature Article
Past Issue
Bigot-Baiting
The Public Square by R. R. Reno, Editor
First Things: America’s Most Influential Journal Of Religion And Public Life
August 2016
I can’t imagine a policy more irrelevant to the problems facing our society than bathroom privileges for transgender students. The bottom half of American society is collapsing. Voters are revolting against establishment candidates, casting doubt on the economic and cultural consensus that has predominated over the last generation. And the Obama administration presses for transgender rights? This is amazing, but not surprising given the history of post-sixties liberalism. (more…)
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Past Issue
Donald Trump, Man Of Faith
The Back Page by Matthew Schmitz
First Things | August/September 2016
Donald Trump is a man of faith. It’s true that during his presidential campaign he has demeaned women, mocked the disabled, and praised the abortionists of Planned Parenthood; that his early exploits include repeated adulterous affairs, about which he boasts, and a failed attempt to evict a widow from her home; that, unlike King David, to whom his more shameless supporters compare him, he has never asked God for forgiveness. Trump is nonetheless a man of strong and very American faith. His career throws a light on the spirit of the age, as Lytton Strachey once said of Cardinal Manning. The light is not very flattering. (more…)
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Practice Fusion, #1 In EMR With 25M Electronic Medical Records, Debuts IPad App
With great power comes great responsibility, and in few places is that more true than the healthtech industry. Practice Fusion is the leading provider of electronic medical records, now helping 130,000 doctors to track records for 25 million patients, CEO Ryan Howard told me today. That’s over 3x the EMRs hosted by Kaiser Permanente or the VA. Practice Fusion is free for doctors and patients. It monetizes through a marketplace for labs, pharmacies, and drug companies who pay for preferred placement in front of doctors who direct a staggering $40 billion in spend a year through the platform. Its new iPad app, debuted today at Practice Fusion’s annual conference, will let these doctors access records while out of the office. (more…)
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It’s A Good Day For BABIES
Or so says Rep Bette Grande, who introduced the bills.
North Dakota has all but enacted what would be two of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country. .
Even those in North Dakota who normally balk at government spending don’t seem concerned about spending money on a fight over the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion.
“We have a lot of important things to spend money on,” said Sen. Dwight Cook, a Republican from Mandan who chairs the Senate Finance and Taxation Committee and calls himself a fiscal conservative. “But I didn’t give any consideration to the cost (of abortion litigation).”
Lawmakers on Friday sent Gov. Jack Dalrymple two anti-abortion bills, one banning the procedure as early as six weeks into a pregnancy and another prohibiting women from having the procedure based on the fetus’ gender or because it has a genetic defect, such as Down syndrome. Abortion-rights activists have vowed to fight the measures in court. The battle is likely to be closely-watched by abortion foes and supporters of legal abortion across the U.S.
Dalrymple hasn’t offered any hints as to where he stands on the abortion bills. . . “I think plenty of people in the party would love to push this to the Supreme Court and they would love to be the state that overturns Roe v. Wade,” said Mark Jendrysik, a University of North Dakota political science professor who expects Dalrymple to sign the abortion measures into law. . .
Cook, who has served in the Legislature for 17 years, said he expects Dalrymple to sign the legislation.
“He’s as pro-life as I am, and to what degree he looks at cost, I don’t know,” Cook said. “If I had to bet, I’d bet he signs them.”
North Dakota is one of several states with Republican-controlled Legislatures and GOP governors that is looking at abortion restrictions. Arkansas passed a 12-week ban earlier this month that prohibits most abortions when a fetal heartbeat can be detected using an abdominal ultrasound. . .
A fetal heartbeat can generally be detected earlier in a pregnancy using a vaginal ultrasound, but Arkansas lawmakers balked at requiring women seeking abortions to have the more invasive imaging technique. North Dakota’s measure doesn’t specify how a fetal heartbeat would be detected.
North Dakota is uniquely positioned to undertake an expensive legal fight. Fueled by the unprecedented oil bonanza in the western part of the state, North Dakota now leads the nation in population growth, boasts a nearly $2 billion budget surplus and has the lowest unemployment rate in the nation. . .
Murder is the unlawful killing, with malice aforethought, of another person, and generally this state of mind distinguishes murder from other forms of unlawful homicide (such as manslaughter). As the loss of a human being inflicts enormous grief upon the individuals close to the victim, and the commission of a murder is highly detrimental to the good order within society, most societies both present and in antiquity have considered it a most serious crime worthy of the harshest of punishment. In most countries, a person convicted of murder is typically given a long prison sentence, possibly a life sentence where permitted, and in some countries, the death penalty may be imposed for such an act – though this practice is becoming less common.[1] In most countries, there is no statute of limitations for murder (no time limit for prosecuting someone for murder). A person who commits murder is called a murderer.[2]
States have adopted several different schemes for classifying murders by degree. The most common separates murder into two degrees, and treats voluntary and involuntary manslaughter as separate crimes that do not constitute murder.
· First degree murder is any murder that is willful and premeditated. Felony murder is typically first degree.[5][6]
· Second degree murder is a murder that is not premeditated or planned in advance.[7]
· Third degree murder is a catch all for all other murders in some states.
· Voluntary manslaughter (often referred to as Third degree murder) sometimes called a “Heat of Passion” murder, is any intentional killing that involved no prior intent to kill, and which was committed under such circumstances that would “cause a reasonable person to become emotionally or mentally disturbed.” Both this and second degree murder are committed on the spot, but the two differ in the magnitude of the circumstances surrounding the crime. For example, a bar fight that results in death would ordinarily constitute second degree murder. If that same bar fight stemmed from a discovery of infidelity, however, it may be mitigated to voluntary manslaughter.[8]
· Involuntary manslaughter stems from a lack of intention to cause death but involving an intentional, or negligent, act leading to death. A drunk driving-related death is typically involuntary manslaughter. Note that the “unintentional” element here refers to the lack of intent to bring about the death. All three crimes above feature an intent to kill, whereas involuntary manslaughter is “unintentional,” because the killer did not intend for a death to result from their intentional actions. If there is a presence of intention it relates only to the intent to cause a violent act which brings about the death, but not an intention to bring about the death itself. [9]
· The Model Penal Code classifies homicides differently, without degrees. Under it, murder is any killing committed purposefully and knowingly, manslaughter is any killing committed as a result of recklessness, and negligent homicide is any killing resulting from negligence.[10]
· Fetal Homicide in the United States
Under the common law, an assault on a pregnant woman resulting in a stillbirth was not considered murder; the child had to have breathed at least once to be a human being.[citation needed] Remedies were limited to criminal penalties for the assault on the mother and tort action for loss of the anticipated economic services of the lost child and/or for emotional pain and suffering. With the widespread adoption of laws against abortion, the assailant could be charged with that offense, but the penalty was often only a fine and a few days in jail.
· When the Supreme Court greatly reduced laws prohibiting abortions in Roe v. Wade (1973) those sanctions became harder to use. This meant that an assault which ensured that the baby never breathed would result in a lesser charge. Various states passed “fetal homicide” laws, making killing of an unborn child murder; the laws differ about the stage of development at which the child is protected.
· After several well-publicized cases, Congress passed the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which specifically criminalizes harming a fetus, with the same penalties as for a similar attack upon a person, when the attack would be a federal offense. Most such attacks fall under state laws; for instance, Scott Peterson was convicted of killing his unborn son as well as his wife under California’s pre-existing fetal homicide law.
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The Ludwig Von Mises Institute
A Special Message from Lew Rockwell
April 15th is a horrible day, because it sums up all the wealth destruction called taxation that we are subjected to all year long.
As Murray Rothbard pointed out, taxation is the worst method of looting us. Inflation is destructive, of course, and it might make a loaf of bread cost $10. But at least you get a loaf of bread. With taxation, you get nothing—except theft and other violations of our civil liberties.
Society, as Mises noted, is divided into two competing classes by interventionist government: the taxpayers and the tax consumers. If you are a payer, you are automatically demonized as greedy. On the other hand, those who want the fruits of your labor involuntarily transferred to themselves and their favored pressure groups are the compassionate.
At the Mises Institute, we have a different view. You have a right to what you earn, and those who use the threat and reality of government violence to take it from you are muggers in expensive suits. As Murray said, the State is just a Gang of Thieves writ large.
The politicians blab about spending cuts, but it is all lying propaganda. They plan to increase spending, but use the specter of alleged spending cuts as another excuse to pick your pocket with more taxes. (Spending cuts? Please throw us in that briar patch, Br’er Government.)
Then there are the attacks on tax “loopholes,” when you are allowed to keep some of your own money. As Mises said, it is through these loopholes that capitalism breathes.
But centuries of pro-tax indoctrination has had its effect. Eighty percent of people, according to a Pew study, think it’s immoral to “underreport” one’s income. It’s as if the politicians own us, but generously let us keep some of our own earnings.
That Pew survey does provide one ray of hope: more and more young people dissent from the morality of coercive taxation. We saw the anti-tax passion of the Ron Paul movement, and we see it at the Mises Institute.
It’s true, more and more young people reject the notion of taxation. They want lower taxes. Most of all, they want no taxes. They think they should be able to keep their own earnings.
With our publications, classes, website, and conferences, we are reaching these young people about taxes and the rest of government.
The young don’t want to be sheared. And they are looking for the freedom answers, for example that private property should be inviolate, for moral and economic reasons. They understand, as did 16th-century economist Juan de Mariana, that the only free country is one where no one is afraid of the tax collector.
The Mises Institute is rallying the young to our ideas on taxes and everything else. Please help us, in the shadow of April 15th, continue to do so, and to step it up.
PS: Needless to say, the Mises Institute does not accept one zinc penny of government funding. We depend on generous supporters like you to make our ideas widely available. Won’t you help?
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There Oughta Be A Law
by Adam Allouba
| You may not hear that precise expression every day, but you recognize the sentiment. It’s one that you probably feel yourself now and then: The government should do something to fix some problem or another. It may be something gravely serious or nothing more than a minor nuisance; it may be something that oughta be mandatory or oughta be illegal. But whatever it is, it needs to change and using the law is the way to change it.
“There oughta be a law” is not something you’re likely to hear coming out of the mouth of a libertarian, however, except as sarcasm. Most libertarians believe that government legislation leads to bad outcomes for all kinds of reasons, from warped incentives to unintended consequences. More fundamentally, libertarians are against government legislation because we believe that it is inherently wrong to initiate coercion against other human beings. Now, that is a decidedly minority view; most people believe the state should adopt rules that govern our conduct in order to (presumably) make the world a better place. So why the disagreement on such a basic question? In my view, the reason that non-libertarians are so comfortable with government action is that they have not thought through what exactly it means to say, “There oughta be a law.” Of course, they know that it means that something should be mandatory or illegal—but they haven’t taken a step back to think about what exactly that means in practice. So what does it mean to assert that government should do something? Let’s start at the beginning. The textbook definition of the state is an entity with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force (within its borders). It’s vital to understand that this is not some eccentric libertarian viewpoint—any introductory political science textbook will tell you the same thing. In practice, that means that if you violate the state’s rules, you get punished through force. Drive too fast? Get fined. Flunk a health inspection? Get shut down. Sell drugs? Get arrested. Wait a minute, you might say. I see how being thrown in jail for selling drugs is using force, but shutting down a restaurant? That doesn’t seem like force. And a speeding ticket? Getting pulled over is inconvenient and no one likes paying up, but where’s the force there? In fact, having your property seized or your business shut down is a use of force. This can be made clear by thinking about what happens to people who don’t comply. Imagine a simple scenario: You’re a business owner who buys and sells second-hand goods. One day someone enters your store with an old baby walker that’s been sitting in their basement for the past decade. Figuring someone might be interested, you take it off their hands. Unbeknownst to either of you, however, that walker has been banned since last it was used. And because it’s your unlucky day, later that afternoon, in walks an employee of Health Canada’s product safety division. “That’s illegal!” he says, pointing to the offending device. Thinking he should mind his own business, you ignore him and, when he insists, politely ask him to leave. Unfortunately for you, our hypothetical do-gooder is fully seized of his mission to protect the public. The next day, he informs his supervisor of your contraband. When the inspector comes through the door, you tell him that your mother used a walker with you, you used one with your kids, that he’s out of his mind and that he has until the count of 10 to get out before you get him out. Undeterred, our friend returns—this time, with police backup. At this point, your choice becomes clear: Either let the man onto your property to carry out his task, or risk finding yourself staring down the barrel of a gun. Kicking out a man with a clipboard is one thing, but trying to kick out a police officer is liable to get you shot dead.
|
To read the entire opinion, go to http://www.quebecoislibre.org/14/140115-10.html
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America’s Privileged Class
We’re No. 1 — In Public Employee Pay
Andrew G. Biggs National Review, August 12, 2013
Pay for state and local government employees has gotten a great deal of publicity. Lost in the press attention, however, is that federal employee compensation remains a problem, too, and new data again indicate that Washington, D.C., may be overpaying for the 2 million workers it employs, says Andrew G. Biggs, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
In a 2011 paper with Jason Richwine, Biggs concluded that federal workers receive salaries and benefits around 37 percent higher than do private sector workers with similar levels of education and experience. A study by the Congressional Budget Office, using slightly different methods, showed a smaller wage premium for federal workers, but still reached a qualitatively similar conclusion: Federal workers receive pay and benefits 16 percent above private-sector levels.
Data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) allows Biggs to compare how U.S. federal government employees are paid relative to central government employees in 18 other countries.
The OECD analyzed the salaries, benefits and paid leave for government employees; the combined value of these three categories equals total compensation. The OECD looked at four main categories of public employees:
- Senior management.
- Middle management.
- Professionals. The OECD examined two specific professional positions, statisticians and economists/policy analysts.
- Secretarial staff. This category is made up of two groups, senior/executive secretaries and office secretaries/general office clerks.
The key factor is benefits:
- U.S. federal employees don’t merely receive more generous benefits than do private-sector workers; they receive much more generous benefits than do public employees in most other developed countries.
- The OECD data show that U.S. federal employees’ total benefits add up to 37 percent of their wages, compared with 16 percent for central government employees in Australia, 25 percent in the Netherlands and Belgium, 27 percent in Great Britain, and 23 percent across the OECD as a whole.
Source: Andrew G. Biggs, “We’re No. 1 — In Public-Employee Pay,” National Review, August 12, 2013.
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PotoMac Watch
Strassel: The IRS Scandal Started at the Top | WSJ
Was the White House involved in the IRS’s targeting of conservatives? No investigation needed to answer that one. Of course it was.
President Obama and Co. are in full deniability mode, noting that the IRS is an “independent” agency and that they knew nothing about its abuse. The media and Congress are sleuthing for some hint that Mr. Obama picked up the phone and sicced the tax dogs on his enemies.
But that’s not how things work in post-Watergate Washington. Mr. Obama didn’t need to pick up the phone. All he needed to do was exactly what he did do, in full view, for three years: Publicly suggest that conservative political groups were engaged in nefarious deeds; publicly call out by name political opponents whom he’d like to see harassed; and publicly have his party pressure the IRS to take action.
Mr. Obama now professes shock and outrage that bureaucrats at the IRS did exactly what the president of the United States said was the right and honorable thing to do. “He put a target on our backs, and he’s now going to blame the people who are shooting at us?” asks Idaho businessman and longtime Republican donor Frank VanderSloot.
Mr. VanderSloot is the Obama target who in 2011 made a sizable donation to a group supporting Mitt Romney. In April 2012, an Obama campaign website named and slurred eight Romney donors. It tarred Mr. VanderSloot as a “wealthy individual” with a “less-than-reputable record.” Other donors were described as having been “on the wrong side of the law.”
This was the Obama version of the phone call—put out to every government investigator (and liberal activist) in the land.
Twelve days later, a man working for a political opposition-research firm called an Idaho courthouse for Mr. VanderSloot’s divorce records. In June, the IRS informed Mr. VanderSloot and his wife of an audit of two years of their taxes. In July, the Department of Labor informed him of an audit of the guest workers on his Idaho cattle ranch. In September, the IRS informed him of a second audit, of one of his businesses. Mr. VanderSloot, who had never been audited before, was subject to three in the four months after Mr. Obama teed him up for such scrutiny.
The last of these audits was only concluded in recent weeks. Not one resulted in a fine or penalty. But Mr. VanderSloot has been waiting more than 20 months for a sizable refund and estimates his legal bills are $80,000. That figure doesn’t account for what the president’s vilification has done to his business and reputation.
The Obama call for scrutiny wasn’t a mistake; it was the president’s strategy—one pursued throughout 2012. The way to limit Romney money was to intimidate donors from giving. Donate, and the president would at best tie you to Big Oil or Wall Street, at worst put your name in bold, and flag you as “less than reputable” to everyone who worked for him: the IRS, the SEC, the Justice Department. The president didn’t need a telephone; he had a megaphone.
The same threat was made to conservative groups that might dare play in the election. As early as January 2010, Mr. Obama would, in his state of the union address, cast aspersions on the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, claiming that it “reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests” (read conservative groups).
The president derided “tea baggers.” Vice President Joe Biden compared them to “terrorists.” In more than a dozen speeches Mr. Obama raised the specter that these groups represented nefarious interests that were perverting elections. “Nobody knows who’s paying for these ads,” he warned. “We don’t know where this money is coming from,” he intoned. . .
The IRS is easy to demonize, but it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It got its heading from a president, and his party, who did in fact send it orders—openly, for the world to see. In his Tuesday press grilling, no question agitated White House Press Secretary Jay Carney more than the one that got to the heart of the matter: Given the president’s “animosity” toward Citizens United, might he have “appreciated or wanted the IRS to be looking and scrutinizing those . . .” Mr. Carney cut off the reporter with “That’s a preposterous assertion.”
Preposterous because, according to Mr. Obama, he is “outraged” and “angry” that the IRS looked into the very groups and individuals that he spent years claiming were shady, undemocratic, even law breaking. After all, he expects the IRS to “operate with absolute integrity.” Even when he does not.
Read the entire article in the WSJ . . .
A version of this article appeared May 17, 2013, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The IRS Scandal Started at the Top.
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Life Lessons From Navy SEAL Training
Adm. William H. McRaven, commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, gave a commencement address . . . that graduates, and their parents, won’t soon forget.
The University of Texas slogan is “What starts here changes the world.”
I have to admit—I kinda like it.
“What starts here changes the world.”
Tonight there are almost 8,000 students graduating from UT.
That great paragon of analytical rigor, Ask.Com, says that the average American will meet 10,000 people in their lifetime.
That’s a lot of folks. But if every one of you changed the lives of just 10 people, and each one of those folks changed the lives of another 10 people—just 10—then in five generations, 125 years, the class of 2014 will have changed the lives of 800 million people.
Eight-hundred million people—think of it: over twice the population of the United States. Go one more generation and you can change the entire population of the world—eight billion people.
If you think it’s hard to change the lives of 10 people, change their lives forever, you’re wrong.
I saw it happen every day in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A young Army officer makes a decision to go left instead of right down a road in Baghdad and the 10 soldiers with him are saved from close-in ambush.
In Kandahar province, Afghanistan, a noncommissioned officer from the Female Engagement Team senses something isn’t right and directs the infantry platoon away from a 500-pound IED, saving the lives of a dozen soldiers.
But, if you think about it, not only were these soldiers saved by the decisions of one person, but their children yet unborn were also saved. And their children’s children were saved.
Generations were saved by one decision, by one person.
But changing the world can happen anywhere and anyone can do it.
So, what starts here can indeed change the world, but the question is: What will the world look like after you change it?
Well, I am confident that it will look much, much better, but if you will humor this old sailor for just a moment, I have a few suggestions that may help you on your way to a better a world.
And while these lessons were learned during my time in the military, I can assure you that it matters not whether you ever served a day in uniform. It matters not your gender, your ethnic or religious background, your orientation, or your social status. Our struggles in this world are similar and the lessons to overcome those struggles and to move forward—changing ourselves and the world around us—will apply equally to all.
I have been a Navy SEAL for 36 years. But it all began when I left UT for Basic SEAL training in Coronado, Calif.
Basic SEAL training is six months of long, torturous runs in the soft sand, midnight swims in the cold water off San Diego, obstacle courses, unending calisthenics, days without sleep and always being cold, wet and miserable.
It is six months of being constantly harassed by professionally trained warriors who seek to find the weak of mind and body and eliminate them from ever becoming a Navy SEAL.
But, the training also seeks to find those students who can lead in an environment of constant stress, chaos, failure and hardships. To me basic SEAL training was a lifetime of challenges crammed into six months.
So, here are lessons I learned from basic SEAL training that hopefully will be of value to you as you move forward in life.
1. Every morning in basic SEAL training, my instructors, who at the time were all Vietnam veterans, would show up in my barracks room and the first thing they would inspect was your bed. If you did it right, the corners would be square, the covers pulled tight, the pillow centered just under the headboard and the extra blanket folded neatly at the foot of the rack—that’s Navy talk for bed.
It was a simple task, mundane at best. But every morning we were required to make our bed to perfection. It seemed a little ridiculous at the time, particularly in light of the fact that we’re aspiring to be real warriors, tough battle hardened SEALs, but the wisdom of this simple act has been proven to me many times over.
If you make your bed every morning you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride and it will encourage you to do another task and another and another. By the end of the day, that one task completed will have turned into many tasks completed. Making your bed will also reinforce the fact that little things in life matter.
If you can’t do the little things right, you will never do the big things right.
And if by chance you have a miserable day, you will come home to a bed that is made—that you made—and a made bed gives you encouragement that tomorrow will be better.
If you want to change the world, start off by making your bed.
2. During SEAL training the students are broken down into boat crews. Each crew is seven students—three on each side of a small rubber boat and one coxswain to help guide the dingy. Every day, your boat crew forms up on the beach and is instructed to get through the surfzone and paddle several miles down the coast.
In the winter, the surf off San Diego can get to be 8 to 10 feet high and it is exceedingly difficult to paddle through the plunging surf unless everyone digs in. Every paddle must be synchronized to the stroke count of the coxswain. Everyone must exert equal effort or the boat will turn against the wave and be unceremoniously tossed back on the beach.
For the boat to make it to its destination, everyone must paddle.
You can’t change the world alone—you will need some help—and to truly get from your starting point to your destination takes friends, colleagues, the goodwill of strangers and a strong coxswain to guide them.
If you want to change the world, find someone to help you paddle.
3. Over a few weeks of difficult training my SEAL class, which started with 150 men, was down to just 42. There were now six boat crews of seven men each . . . Read more . . .
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Life And Death In Russia
Russia’s human capital is in steep decline.
A 15-year-old boy there won’t even live as long as one in Afghanistan.
By Nicholas Eberstadt, WSJ
History is full of instances where a rising power, aggrieved and dissatisfied, acts aggressively to obtain new borders or other international concessions. In Russia today we see a much more unusual case: This increasingly menacing and ambitious geopolitical actor is a state in decline.
Notwithstanding Russia’s nuclear arsenal and its vast territories, the distinguishing feature of the country today is its striking economic underdevelopment and weakness. For all Russia’s oil and gas, the country’s international sales of goods and services last year only barely edged out Belgium’s—and were positively dwarfed by the Netherlands’. Remember, there has never been an “energy superpower”—anywhere, ever. In the modern era, the ultimate source of national wealth and power is not natural resources: It is human resources. And unfortunately for Russia, its human-resource situation is almost unrelievedly dismal—with worse likely in the years to come.
Let’s start with the “good” demographic news for Moscow: Russia’s post-Soviet population decline has halted. Thanks to immigration chiefly from the “near abroad” of former Soviet states, a rebound in births from their 1999 nadir and a drift downward of the death rate, Russia’s total population today is officially estimated to be nearly a million higher than five years ago. For the first time in the post-Soviet era, Russia saw more births than deaths last year.
Yet even this seemingly bright news isn’t as promising as it seems. First: Russia’s present modest surfeit of births over deaths comes entirely from historically Muslim areas like Chechnya and Dagestan, and from heavily tribal regions like the Tuva Republic. Take the North Caucasus Federal District out of the picture—Chechnya, Dagestan, etc.—and the rest of Russia today remains a net-mortality society.
Second: Despite its baby surge, which takes Russia’s fertility level from below the average to just above the average for the rest of Europe, the 1.7 births per Russian woman in 2012 was still 20% below replacement level. According to the most recent official Russian calculations, on current trajectories the country’s population, absent immigration, is still set to shrink by almost 20% from one generation to the next.
But while Russia’s childbearing patterns today look entirely European, its mortality patterns look Third World—and in some ways worse. According to estimates by the World Health Organization, life expectancy in 2012 for a 15-year-old male was three years lower in Russia than in Haiti. By WHO’s reckoning, a 15-year-old youth has worse survival chances today in Russia than in 33 of the 48 places the United Nations designates as “least developed countries,” including such impoverished locales as Mali, Yemen and even Afghanistan. Though health levels are distinctly better for women than men in Russia, even the life expectancy of 61 years for a 15-year-old Russian female in 2012 was an estimated three years lower than for her counterpart in Cambodia, another of the U.N.’s least-developed countries.
How is this possible in an urbanized and educated society? In least-developed countries, life is foreshortened by such killers as malnutrition and communicable “diseases of poverty” such as tuberculosis, malaria and cholera. Data from WHO in 2010 show that in Russia the major threats are cardiovascular disease (resulting in heart attacks, strokes and the like) and injuries (homicides, suicides, traffic fatalities, deadly accidents).
For decades, Russia’s death rates from cardiovascular disease have been higher than the highest levels ever recorded in any Western country. For Russian women in 2010, the rate was over five times higher than for Western European women. In 2008—the latest such global figures available from the World Health Organization—working-age Russian men had the worst cardiovascular-disease death levels in the world. . .
Russia’s “high education, low human capital” paradox also shows up in Russia’s extreme “knowledge production” deficit. Long-term economic progress depends on improving productivity through new knowledge—but this is something Russia appears mysteriously unable to do.
Patent awards and applications provide a crude but telling picture. Consider trends in international patent awards by the U.S. Patent and Trade Office, the world economy’s most important national patent office. Of the 1.3 million overseas patents awarded since 2000, applicants from Russia have taken home about 3,200—a mere 0.2% of the overseas total. In this tally Russia is behind Austria and Norway, barely ahead of Ireland. The Russian Federation’s total annual awards from the Patent Office regularly lag behind the state of Alabama’s. . .
If all this were not bad enough for Moscow, Russia’s geopolitical potential is being squeezed further by the rapid world-wide growth of skilled manpower pools. According to the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis in Austria, in 1990 Russia accounted for nearly 9% of the world’s working-age college graduates; that share is declining and by 2030 will have dropped to 3%. On this front, as on many others, Russia is simply being left behind by the rest of the world.
Despite Vladimir Putin‘s posturing, he is leading a country in serious decline. If his dangerous new brinkmanship is a response to that bad news, then we should expect more of it in the future, possibly much more.
Mr. Eberstadt is a political economist at the American Enterprise Institute. His books include “Russia’s Peacetime Demographic Crisis” (National Bureau of Asian Research, 2010).
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Is Disability Contributing To Women’s Declining Employment?
NCPA Brief Analyses No 797 | Women In The Economy | by Pamela Villarreal
Women’s labor force participation rate (LFPR) – the percentage of individuals employed or looking for work – reached an all-time high of 60 percent in 1999, but since then has steadily declined to 57.2 percent in 2012.
Men’s labor force participation has been dropping for decades, yet still remains higher than women’s. Some analysts note that an increasing number of married women have decided a career is not worth it and are opting to stay at home. Others point to the much lower participation rate of younger women (under age 24) than older women. Still others attribute the overall decline among both men and women to baby boomers entering retirement.
Though the labor force participation of women is now the lowest in more than 10 years, record numbers are receiving Social Security disability benefits. Could these two trends be related?
Disability Rolls for Women versus Men. Increases in disability rates were expected as the share of the workforce comprised of women grew and more women worked long enough to obtain the minimum three years of credits required to qualify for Social Security disability. In fact:
· In 1970, women comprised about 28 percent of workers receiving Social Security disability benefits.
· By 2000, when women’s labor force participation started falling, the portion of women receiving disability had increased to 43 percent.
· In 2012, almost half (48 percent) of the 8.8 million workers receiving benefits were women.
· By 2000, when women’s labor force participation started falling, the portion of women receiving disability had increased to 43 percent.
· In 2012, almost half (48 percent) of the 8.8 million workers receiving benefits were women.
The recent growth in female disability beneficiaries has been comparable to men’s. . .
Younger Women Are Receiving Disability. A growing trend is that an increasing number of younger women are receiving disability awards. From 2000 to 2012, men outnumbered women in benefits awarded overall. However:
· In six of the last 12 years, more women ages 35 to 39 were awarded benefits than men.
· In eight of the last 12 years, more women ages 30 to 34 were awarded benefits than men.
The majority of disability claims growth has been among men and women over the age of 50. But the growth of younger females beneficiaries is a concern. Most individuals receiving disability benefits do not work, though recipients can earn up to $770 a month without losing benefits. However, the chances of recipients ever leaving the disability program and returning to full-time work are less than 1 percent. For women in their 30s, this means their careers are short-lived.
The Leading Causes of Disability. In 2000, the leading cause of disability among male and female workers of all ages was musculoskeletal disease [see Figure I]. It remains the leading cause today. Musculoskeletal diseases are conditions that affect muscles, bones, ligaments and tendons. They include but are not limited to rheumatoid arthritis, bursitis, carpal tunnel syndrome, tendonitis and fibromyalgia. Some musculoskeletal disorders are directly linked to work-related injuries. Consider [see the figure]:
· About 13.2 percent of women and 11 percent of men under age 35 awarded disability benefits were diagnosed with a musculoskeletal condition; in 2012, women under 35 still outpaced men in this category.
· For disability recipients ages 35 to 49, one-fourth of the women were diagnosed with a musculoskeletal condition in 2000 compared to one-third of the men; but the percentage of women with these disorders jumped to more than 30 percent by 2012.
· The largest increase in awards was in the 50 and older age group. Nearly 34 percent of women were diagnosed with musculoskeletal disorders in 2000 compared to 29.9 percent of men and, by 2012, the percentage of recipients of both sexes with these conditions had increased 10 percentage points.
In 2000, mental disorders (excluding mental retardation), were the second leading cause of disability for women and men, comprising 23.5 percent of awards. For women 50 and over, disability due to mental disorder diagnoses increased from 11.6 percent in 2000 to 14.2 percent in 2012, but fell about 3 percentage points for men.
The Affordable Care Act and Mental Health. A major requirement of Obamacare is to treat mental disorders on par with physical illnesses:
· Insurers can no longer cancel or deny coverage to individuals based on pre-existing mental or emotional disorders, such as depression.
· There are no lifetime limits on benefits for mental disorders or limits on the number of treatments. . .
If these trends continue, disability that prevents work may become a greater issue for young women than the social and economic factors that apparently inhibit their advancement in the work force.
Pamela Villarreal is a senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis.
Read the entire analysis at http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba797
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HIPAA – The Grand Deception
HIPAA does not protect health privacy
State Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) have been created to share your medical records statewide and in the National Health Information Network, now called eHealth Exchange.
2.2 million entities (600,000 health care providers and 1.5 million business associates) can access your private medical records without your consent.
The government has broad access to your medical records unless a stronger state law exists. HIPAA allows state laws to limit sharing and require consent.
Interoperable computerized medical records allow your data to be shared by health insurers, government officials, the data industry and others.
TAKE ACTION
NOTE: Signing the HIPAA form does not provide you with any privacy or consent rights, but your signature could be used against you if you ever declare that your privacy rights have been violated. Clinics and hospitals could use your signature to argue that you knew your information could be shared.
Take action to protect your health privacy:
Refuse to sign HIPAA acknowledgment forms.
Ask your state lawmakers to pass legislation that protects you from HIPAA and protects your private medical records from being accessed by the government and others without your voluntary informed written consent.
* Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), the federal HIPAA Privacy Rule, and the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH, 2009)
© Citizens’ Council for Health Freedom 2013 651-646-8935 www.cchfreedom.org
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How Social Security Reform Could Benefit Workers
by Liqun Liu, Andrew J. Rettenmaier and Thomas R. Saving
NCPA |Wednesday, July 16, 2014
Congress is once again considering changes to Social Security in an attempt to “save” the program. Social Security benefit payments have exceeded tax revenues since 2010; the funding deficit is growing and, barring reform, will continue to grow indefinitely. Higher tax revenues are necessary to fund benefits as they are currently calculated.
When workers consider the retirement benefits they expect from Social Security they must also consider the taxes paid during their working years. Average-wage workers retiring today have paid more Social Security taxes than they will receive in retirement benefits, so their net benefits are negative. For future workers, who will have to pay higher taxes to finance the program’s growing expenditures, net benefits will dip even lower.
The system is financed on a pay-as-you-go basis where current tax payments are transferred to current retirees. Changing demographics have resulted in a reduction in the number of workers supporting each retiree and a corresponding need for higher tax rates. The Social Security system cannot escape the ongoing demographic shift, but its share of the economy can be reduced and workers can escape the higher taxes necessary to fund the current program if they are willing to take lower Social Security benefits when they retire.
Balancing Benefits and Taxes. How do current and future workers’ lifetime Social Security benefits and taxes compare under the current benefit structure, with the necessary tax increase to pay for those benefits, and an alternative that scales back benefits such that they can be paid in the long run at the current tax rate?
There is a way to provide a common ground to explore the exchange between accepting lower benefits or paying higher taxes. Retaining the current benefit structure will require an immediate and permanent increase in the Social Security payroll tax of 3.3 percent. In contrast, a long-run balanced budget for Social Security could also be achieved by retaining the current tax rate, but making two benefit reforms: gradually raising the retirement age for workers who become eligible for benefits in 2023 and after, and making the benefit formula less generous for higher earning workers through progressive price indexing. Both political parties have proposed reforms with these attributes.
Comparing the Current Program to a Reformed Social Security. Our estimate illustrates that both the current program with the taxes necessary to close its financing gap (the baseline) and the reformed program produce comparable net results for workers across birth years and across income classes. [See the table.] For example,
· With the baseline program, average-earning men born in 1985 will have to pay 13.5 percent of their lifetime income in taxes and receive benefits equal to 9.6 percent of their income, resulting in a lifetime net tax of 3.8 percent (13.5 – 9.6).
· However, the same workers in the reformed program would pay a lower tax rate of 10.2 percent to receive reformed benefits of 8.2 percent, resulting in a lower net lifetime tax of 2.0 percent (10.2 – 8.2).
For very low-earning men, the reforms retain the current program’s progressivity. Specifically:
· In the baseline program, a very low-earning man born in 1985 will pay taxes equal to 13.5 percent of his lifetime income and receive benefits equal to 15.8 percent of income, resulting in positive net lifetime benefits equal to 2.4 percent of his lifetime earnings.
· In the reformed program, this worker would pay a lower tax rate of 10.2 percent of his income to receive reformed benefits of 14.5 percent, producing net lifetime benefits equal to 4.3 percent of his lifetime earnings.
The reformed and baseline programs produce similar lifetime progressivity due to the combination of policies necessary for each to achieve solvency. Under the reformed program, the gradual rise in the retirement age affects all workers regardless of income. However, most of the reform’s savings come through reduced benefits for higher earning workers.
In contrast, the baseline program retains the current benefit formula, but requires a substantial payroll tax increase to achieve solvency. For lower earning workers, these higher payroll taxes outweigh the lower benefits that are due to the higher retirement age component of the reformed program.
Why Reformed Social Security Is Preferable to the Baseline Program. Finally, if the baseline and reformed programs are comparable in terms of net lifetime tax rates within income classes and birth years, is there a reason to prefer one to the other? The current retirement benefit structure could be fully funded with higher taxes to close the $19.3 trillion shortfall (in present value). The funding gap could also be closed with the alternative. The reformed Old-Age and Survivors portion of the Social Security program would be about 25 percent smaller than projections under the program as currently structured (baseline). We suggest that the smaller reformed program is preferable, primarily for the following reasons:
· Given current debt levels along with ongoing and forecast budget challenges, reducing the size of the federal budget is critical in the long run.
· Collecting the higher tax revenues necessary to retain the current benefit formula inevitably produces welfare losses.
· Reducing the scope of a pay-as-you-go financed retirement program will result in the real prepayment of retirement benefits, leading to greater investment and higher national income.
· The reformed program can be complemented with voluntary, individually directed personal retirement accounts.
Liqun Liu is a research scientist, Andrew J. Rettenmaier is executive associate director and Thomas R. Saving is director at the Private Enterprise Research Center at Texas A&M University.
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A Tale Of Two Bridges
The SF Oakland Bay Bridge open in 2013 and is showing water damage and rust its first year.
The old rusty bridge it replaces was built in 1936 and has survived earthquakes.
|
http://www.quebecoislibre.org/11/110915-9.html
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The End Result Of Medicare And Medicaid Is Happening NOW
Taking the Government Out of Health Care
By Avik Roy | September 8, 2014
The government takeover of our health care system didn’t happen with the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, says Avik Roy, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. It happened in 1965, he writes, with the creation of Medicare and Medicaid.
Even without the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the federal government would be spending trillions of taxpayer dollars on single-payer health care entitlements:
· Even before the passage of the ACA, per-capita spending on health care by the U.S. government (at $3,967) was higher than per- public spending in all but three countries in the world.
· In 2022, federal spending on health entitlements, not including Obamacare, are set to reach $1.5 trillion.
· The ACA will increase that spending by 16 percent.
Countries like Switzerland and Singapore, on the other hand, have the lowest per-capita public health spending, with Switzerland spending $1,628 per person and Singapore $813. How do they keep costs so low? According to Roy:
· Both countries use the power of private markets.
· Switzerland has no government-run insurers, though 20 percent of its population receives government premium subsidies.
· Singapore uses health savings accounts and high-deductible insurance plans to keep costs low.
The systems are hardly perfect, writes Roy, but they are superior to United States’ government health care programs. Using Singapore and Switzerland as a model, Roy developed his own plan to replace Obamacare — as well as Medicare, Medicaid and the Veterans Health Administration. The plan would:
· Replace government-run health care programs with a system of tax credits, allowing individuals to purchase high-deductible health plans with health savings accounts in the private market.
· Reduce federal spending by $10.5 trillion over three decades.
· Reduce the cost of individual health insurance policies by 17 percent.
· Repeal the Obamacare tax hikes as well as the individual mandate.
According to Roy, his model would increase the number of insured Americans by 12 million. However, his plan has also received criticism, with many labeling it a refinement of Obamacare rather than a repeal.
Source: Avik Roy, “Don’t Just Replace Obamacare-Replace the Great Society,” Weekly Standard, September 4, 2014.
http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=24825
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A Campus Crusade Against The Constitution
Limiting First Amendment rights for Christians undercuts rights for everyone else.
By Harvey A. Silverglate | WSJ | Houses of Worship | Sept. 18, 2014
In my lifetime I have been fortunate to see private associations within civil society promote astonishing social and political advancements in civil rights for African-Americans, women and gays. The voices of a like-minded minority, when allowed to associate and present a unified message, can be powerful. Yet we cannot pick and choose which groups have rights. Thus the current controversy surrounding evangelical Christian organizations on college campuses is a test of our commitment to liberal and constitutional ideals.
Earlier this month the California State University System “de-recognized” 23 campus chapters of the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF). This decision stems from a December 2011 chancellor’s executive order stating that “No campus shall recognize any . . . student organization unless its membership and leadership are open to all currently enrolled students.”
The new policy has insidious implications. Any student may attend IVCF meetings or participate in its activities regardless of belief. But because IVCF asks its leaders to affirm their adherence to evangelical Christian doctrine—a “belief” requirement—California state-university administrators have deemed the group discriminatory. IVCF chapters will no longer have use of certain campus facilities and benefits available to other groups. This policy guts the free association right that was enshrined in the First Amendment precisely to protect minority or unpopular views.
It is obvious why IVCF would want to restrict leadership to true believers. It would be anomalous for a conventional religious group of any kind to open its top leadership to, say, atheists who would want to change the group’s beliefs and activities. The pope has to be Catholic, after all.
Yet this concept of associational rights is apparently foreign to college administrators, especially regarding religious students who hold out-of-favor views about marriage and abortion rights. As contentious as these issues are—especially within the ideological rigidity of the college campus—it is the constitutional right of students to hold unpopular beliefs and collectively espouse them.
The battle over the status of evangelical and other orthodox religious groups was long resolved in favor of the rights of such students to organize and enjoy equal access to colleges’—especially public colleges’—facilities. But this changed in 2010 when a narrowly divided Supreme Court decided Christian Legal Society v. Martinez.
In a confused 5-4 decision, the justices held that a public university did not violate the Christian Legal Society’s First Amendment rights in depriving equal access to campus funds and facilities—as long as the university adopted an “all comers” policy that required all student organizations to accept all students as voting members and leaders, regardless of belief. Martinez was decided in the same muddled spirit as the California state-university policy, with all the same pitfalls. . .
Given the heat that surrounds discussion of gay marriage and abortion, out-of-the-ordinary disruptive tactics—by either side against the other’s organizations—are a realistic concern. This is one reason why in an earlier era beleaguered minority groups like the NAACP and gay-rights groups were most in need of, and usually received, official protection from those who would undermine them.
In more recent years on college campuses the tables have turned, and religious groups that were once conventional now find themselves in need of protection. The Martinez ruling inadvertently compromised, rather than protected, the rights of minority groups.
The Martinez case and the plight of IVCF on campuses calls to mind an incident in 1995, some months after a wiser Supreme Court decided Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Group of Boston. The Hurley court held that a socially conservative organization that for decades had sponsored Boston’s St. Patrick’s Day parade had the right to exclude a gay-liberation group from marching while displaying its own gay-rights banners and placards.
Writing for the unanimous court, Justice David Souter declared that “a speaker has the autonomy to choose the content of his own message” and that the conservative Boston group didn’t have to include marchers who would “alter the expressive content of their parade.” The parade was a form of expression, and organizers didn’t have to include off-message contingents.
One of the lawyers who lost in Hurley told me that he came to have a better understanding, and even an appreciation, of the ruling: He told me he had cited the Hurley opinion as precedent while representing a gay-rights group that went to court to prevent neo-Nazi brownshirts from marching in full regalia in the gay group’s parade. Only when the First Amendment is applied equally to everyone can it fulfill its crucial role.
Mr. Silverglate, a Boston criminal-defense and civil-liberties lawyer, participated in the filing of a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of the Christian Legal Society by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, of which he is chairman.
Read the entire Article in the WSJ column: Houses of Worship . . .
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Anglicanism And Women Bishops
Hello ladies, goodbye Communion?
The Economist | Print Edition | Nov 19th 2014 | by B.C
AMID loud sighs of relief in many quarters, and muffled moans from a traditionalist minority, the Church of England has cleared the last procedural obstacle to the appointment of women bishops. At a meeting on Monday of the church’s General Synod, only around 30 of the 480 people present raised their hands against the necessary change in canon law. This means that a woman could be wearing episcopal purple by the end of the year, and a lady could join the ranks of the “lords spiritual”—Anglican prelates who sit in the upper chamber of Parliament—by next spring.
This was a big but expected landmark; a Synod vote two years ago, in which the measure narrowly failed to gain the approval of lay delegates, looks in retrospect like a rather weird anomaly. The change was overwhelmingly favoured by the leadership of the church, the clergy (one-third of which is female), and by public opinion—which matters for a church which aspires to be the spiritual voice of a whole nation, however diverse or secular. The feelings of low-church evangelicals who oppose women bishops have to some degree been assuaged by a promise that one of their number will be appointed to high office; among high-church opponents, quite a few have taken up an offer to join the Roman Catholic church. So hard-line opposition to ladies in purple has gradually faded. . .
Nobody can deny that Justin Welby, who is leader both of England’s established church and worldwide Anglicanism, has tried his best keep the family intact. As he told the Synod, he has visited 36 fellow “primates” of Anglican provinces in the past 18 months, covering virtually the entirety of an institution that functions in every corner of the world, especially places where the British flag once flew. And although he was well received almost everywhere, he had to acknowledge that:
There are enormous problems. We have deep divisions in many areas, not only sexuality…Our divisions may be too much to manage. In many parts of the Communion…there is a belief that opponents are either faithless to the tradition, or by contrast that they are cruel, judgemental, inhuman. I have to say that we are in a state so delicate that without prayer and repentance, it is hard to see how we can avoid some serious fractures.
In even plainer language, the division between (roughly speaking) northern and especially North American liberals, and traditionalists whose biggest stronghold is Africa, has become or is about to become unmanageable. As the archbishop implied, the split is mainly but not purely over same-sex relations. At one end of the spectrum, the Episcopal Church of the United States has consecrated an openly lesbian bishop; at the other end, African bishops have supported harsh anti-gay laws. By comparison with same-sex relations, the issue of female clergy and bishops is not especially divisive, though Nigeria stands out as a large Anglican province where women are not ordained to any clerical rank. But developing-world conservatives are also dismayed when their northern colleagues make liberal theological noises—by suggesting, for example, that Jesus Christ might not offer the only path to salvation.
In his latest speech, Archbishop Welby acknowledged for the first time that the Lambeth conference—a once-in-a-decade gathering of Anglican bishops—might never happen again. Nor, he made clear, was it even certain whether the basis existed for convening another “primates’ meeting”—a global gathering of slightly lesser status which would normally take place every couple of years. In any case, he was no longer prepared to take sole responsibility for deciding such matters; instead there should be a “collegial model of leadership” with Anglican leaders from around the world deciding which meetings were worthwhile.
Despite all this, the archbishop gallantly insisted, reports of the global club’s death were exaggerated. “The Anglican Communion exists and is flourishing in roughly 165 countries.” That may be sort-of true as far as it goes, but it is rather like the Queen saying that the Commonwealth exists. Of course it does, in the sense that nobody has abolished it, and not many people have left it. But post-imperial arrangements can lose salience very gradually, to the point where the boundary between existence and non-existence becomes almost imperceptible.
Read the entire article in The Economist . . . http://www.economist.com/blogs/erasmus/2014/11/anglicanism-and-women-bishops
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How Bad Is Censorship Getting?
Liberals Are Killing the Liberal Arts
This is how bad censorship is getting:
Discussions of what can’t be said come with a ‘trigger warning.’
By Harvey Silverglate, WSJ Nov. 9, 2014 5:59 p.m. ET
On campuses across the country, hostility toward unpopular ideas has become so irrational that many students, and some faculty members, now openly oppose freedom of speech. The hypersensitive consider the mere discussion of the topic of censorship to be potentially traumatic. Those who try to protect academic freedom and the ability of the academy to discuss the world as it is are swimming against the current. In such an atmosphere, liberal-arts education can’t survive.
Consider what happened after Smith College held a panel for alumnae titled “Challenging the Ideological Echo Chamber: Free Speech, Civil Discourse and the Liberal Arts.” Moderated by Smith President Kathleen McCartney in late September, the panel was an apparent effort to address the intolerance of diverse opinions that prevails on many campuses.
One panelist was Smith alumna Wendy Kaminer—an author, lawyer, social critic, feminist, First Amendment near-absolutist and former board member of the American Civil Liberties Union. She delivered precisely the spirited challenge to the echo chamber that the panel’s title seemed to invite. But Ms. Kaminer emerged from the discussion of free speech labeled a racist—for defending free speech.
The panel started innocuously enough with Ms. Kaminer criticizing the proliferation of campus speech codes that restrict supposedly offensive language. She urged the audience to defend the free exchange of ideas over parochial notions of “civility.” In response to a question about teaching materials that contain “hate speech,” she raised the example of Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” arguing that students should take it as a whole. The student member of the panel, Jaime Estrada, resisted that notion, saying, “But it has the n-word, and some people are sensitive to that.”
Ms. Kaminer responded: “Well let’s talk about n-words. Let’s talk about the growing lexicon of words that can only be known by their initials. I mean, when I say, ‘n-word’ or when Jaime says ‘n-word,’ what word do you all hear in your head? You hear the word . . .”
And then Ms. Kaminer crossed the Rubicon of political correctness and uttered the forbidden word, observing that having uttered it, “nothing horrible happened.” She then compared the trend of replacing potentially offensive words with an initial to being “characters in a Harry Potter book who are afraid to say the word ‘Voldemort.’ ” There’s an important difference, she pointed out, between hurling an epithet and uttering a forbidden word during an academic discussion of our attitudes toward language and law.
The event—and Ms. Kaminer’s words—prompted blowback from Smith undergraduates, recent alumnae and some faculty members. One member of the audience posted an audio recording and transcript of the discussion, preceded by what has come to be known in the academic world as a “trigger warning”:
“Trigger/Content Warnings: Racism/racial slurs, abelist slurs, anti-Semitic language, anti-Muslim/Islamophobic language, anti-immigrant language, sexist/misogynistic slurs, references to race-based violence.”
One has to have imbibed this culture of hyper-victimization in order even to understand the lingo. “Ableism,” for example, is described at ableism.org as “the practices and dominant attitudes in society that devalue and limit the potential of persons with disabilities” and that “assign inferior value (worth) to persons who have developmental, emotional, physical or psychiatric disabilities.”
The contretemps prompted articles in the newspapers of Smith College and neighboring Mount Holyoke College, condemning Ms. Kaminer’s remarks as examples of institutionalized racism. Smith president Ms. McCartney was criticized for not immediately denouncing Ms. Kaminer. In a Sept. 29 letter responding to the Smith community, she apologized to students and faculty who were “hurt” and made to feel “unsafe” by Ms. Kaminer’s comments in defense of free speech.
A rare academic counter-current to the vast censorial wave came from professor of politics Christopher Pyle at Mount Holyoke. He wrote in the Mount Holyoke News that readers of the paper were misled by a report that “a Smith alumna made racist remarks when speaking at an alumnae panel.” He criticized the condemnation of Ms. Kaminer for her willingness to challenge the tyranny of “sanitary euphemisms.”
Smith is not the epicenter of hostility to free speech. On university campuses nationwide we are witnessing an increasing tide of trigger warnings. They are popping up on syllabi, in discussions of public art, and even finding their way into official school policies.
On Oct. 27, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology circulated a survey questionnaire to its entire student body on the issue of sexual assault—a so-called “climate survey” to try to determine and expose the extent of the problem at the school. Remarkably enough, the survey itself came accompanied by, guess what:
“TRIGGER WARNING: Some of the questions in this survey use explicit language, including anatomical names of body parts and specific behaviors to ask about sexual situations. This survey also asks about sexual assault and other forms of sexual violence which may be upsetting. Resources for support will be available on every page of the survey, should you need them.”
Hypersensitivity to the trauma allegedly inflicted by listening to controversial ideas approaches a strange form of derangement—a disorder whose lethal spread in academia grows by the day. What should be the object of derision, a focus for satire, is instead the subject of serious faux academic discussion and precautionary warnings. For this disorder there is no effective quarantine. A whole generation of students soon will have imbibed the warped notions of justice and entitlement now handed down as dogma in the universities.
Mr. Silverglate, a lawyer and writer, is the co-founder and current chairman of the board of directors of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Wendy Kaminer is a member of FIRE’s board of advisers.
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America And The Barbary Pirates
An International Battle Against an Unconventional Foe
by Gerard W. Gawalt
Ruthless, unconventional foes are not new to the United States of America. More than two hundred years ago the newly established United States made its first attempt to fight an overseas battle to protect its private citizens by building an international coalition against an unconventional enemy. Then the enemies were pirates and piracy. The focus of the United States and a proposed international coalition was the Barbary Pirates of North Africa.
Pirate ships and crews from the North African states of Tripoli, Tunis, Morocco, and Algiers (the Barbary Coast) were the scourge of the Mediterranean. Capturing merchant ships and holding their crews for ransom provided the rulers of these nations with wealth and naval power. In fact, the Roman Catholic Religious Order of Mathurins had operated from France for centuries with the special mission of collecting and disbursing funds for the relief and ransom of prisoners of Mediterranean pirates.
Before the United States obtained its independence in the American Revolution, 1775-83, American merchant ships and sailors had been protected from the ravages of the North African pirates by the naval and diplomatic power of Great Britain. British naval power and the tribute or subsidies Britain paid to the piratical states protected American vessels and crews. During the Revolution, the ships of the United States were protected by the 1778 alliance with France, which required the French nation to protect “American vessels and effects against all violence, insults, attacks, or depredations, on the part of the said Princes and States of Barbary or their subjects.”
After the United States won its independence in the treaty of 1783, it had to protect its own commerce against dangers such as the Barbary pirates. As early as 1784 Congress followed the tradition of the European shipping powers and appropriated $80,000 as tribute to the Barbary states, directing its ministers in Europe, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, to begin negotiations with them. Trouble began the next year, in July 1785, when Algerians captured two American ships and the dey of Algiers held their crews of twenty-one people for a ransom of nearly $60,000.
Thomas Jefferson, United States minister to France, opposed the payment of tribute, as he later testified in words that have a particular resonance today. In his autobiography Jefferson wrote that in 1785 and 1786 he unsuccessfully “endeavored to form an association of the powers subject to habitual depredation from them. I accordingly prepared, and proposed to their ministers at Paris, for consultation with their governments, articles of a special confederation.” Jefferson argued that “The object of the convention shall be to compel the piratical States to perpetual peace.” Jefferson prepared a detailed plan for the interested states. “Portugal, Naples, the two Sicily’s, Venice, Malta, Denmark and Sweden were favorably disposed to such an association,” Jefferson remembered, but there were “apprehensions” that England and France would follow their own paths, “and so it fell through.”
Paying the ransom would only lead to further demands, Jefferson argued in letters to future presidents John Adams, then America’s minister to Great Britain, and James Monroe, then a member of Congress. As Jefferson wrote to Adams in a July 11, 1786, letter, “I acknolege [sic] I very early thought it would be best to effect a peace thro’ the medium of war.” Paying tribute will merely invite more demands, and even if a coalition proves workable, the only solution is a strong navy that can reach the pirates, Jefferson argued in an August 18, 1786, letter to James Monroe: “The states must see the rod; perhaps it must be felt by some one of them. . . . Every national citizen must wish to see an effective instrument of coercion, and should fear to see it on any other element than the water. A naval force can never endanger our liberties, nor occasion bloodshed; a land force would do both.” “From what I learn from the temper of my countrymen and their tenaciousness of their money,” Jefferson added in a December 26, 1786, letter to the president of Yale College, Ezra Stiles, “it will be more easy to raise ships and men to fight these pirates into reason, than money to bribe them.”
Jefferson’s plan for an international coalition foundered on the shoals of indifference and a belief that it was cheaper to pay the tribute than fight a war. The United States’s relations with the Barbary states continued to revolve around negotiations for ransom of American ships and sailors and the payment of annual tributes or gifts. Even though Secretary of State Jefferson declared to Thomas Barclay, American consul to Morocco, in a May 13, 1791, letter of instructions for a new treaty with Morocco that it is “lastly our determination to prefer war in all cases to tribute under any form, and to any people whatever,” the United States continued to negotiate for cash settlements. In 1795 alone the United States was forced to pay nearly a million dollars in cash, naval stores, and a frigate to ransom 115 sailors from the dey of Algiers. Annual gifts were settled by treaty on Algiers, Morocco, Tunis, and Tripoli.
When Jefferson became president in 1801 he refused to accede to Tripoli’s demands for an immediate payment of $225,000 and an annual payment of $25,000. The pasha of Tripoli then declared war on the United States. Although as secretary of state and vice president he had opposed developing an American navy capable of anything more than coastal defense, President Jefferson dispatched a squadron of naval vessels to the Mediterranean. As he declared in his first annual message to Congress: “To this state of general peace with which we have been blessed, one only exception exists. Tripoli, the least considerable of the Barbary States, had come forward with demands unfounded either in right or in compact, and had permitted itself to denounce war, on our failure to comply before a given day. The style of the demand admitted but one answer. I sent a small squadron of frigates into the Mediterranean. . . .”
The American show of force quickly awed Tunis and Algiers into breaking their alliance with Tripoli. The humiliating loss of the frigate Philadelphia and the capture of her captain and crew in Tripoli in 1803, criticism from his political opponents, and even opposition within his own cabinet did not deter Jefferson from his chosen course during four years of war. The aggressive action of Commodore Edward Preble (1803-4) forced Morocco out of the fight and his five bombardments of Tripoli restored some order to the Mediterranean. However, it was not until 1805, when an American fleet under Commodore John Rogers and a land force raised by an American naval agent to the Barbary powers, Captain William Eaton, threatened to capture Tripoli and install the brother of Tripoli’s pasha on the throne, that a treaty brought an end to the hostilities. Negotiated by Tobias Lear, former secretary to President Washington and now consul general in Algiers, the treaty of 1805 still required the United States to pay a ransom of $60,000 for each of the sailors held by the dey of Algiers, and so it went without Senatorial consent until April 1806. Nevertheless, Jefferson was able to report in his sixth annual message to Congress in December 1806 that in addition to the successful completion of the Lewis and Clark expedition, “The states on the coast of Barbary seem generally disposed at present to respect our peace and friendship.”
In fact, it was not until the second war with Algiers, in 1815, that naval victories by Commodores William Bainbridge and Stephen Decatur led to treaties ending all tribute payments by the United States. European nations continued annual payments until the 1830s. However, international piracy in Atlantic and Mediterranean waters declined during this time under pressure from the Euro-American nations, who no longer viewed pirate states as mere annoyances during peacetime and potential allies during war.
Gerard W. Gawalt is the manuscript specialist for early American history in the Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
The Thomas Jefferson Papers
Explore the entire manuscript and others athttp://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/jefferson_papers/mtjprece.html#page_content
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Feature Article
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Why Do We Pay Our Administrators So Much Money?
Hospital administrators are being paid two to ten times as much money as they pay their physicians in the groups they are purchasing and managing. Perhaps it is time that physicians read Malcolm Gladwell’s piece in the New Yorker: Why do we pay our stars so much money?
There was a time, not so long ago, when people at the very top of their profession—the “talent”—did not make a lot of money. In the postwar years, corporate lawyers, Wall Street investment bankers, Fortune 500 executives, all-star professional athletes, and the like made a fraction of what they earn today. In baseball, between the mid-nineteen-forties and the mid-nineteen-sixties, the game’s minimum and highest salaries both fell by more than a third, in constant dollars. In 1935, lawyers in the United States made, on average, four times the country’s per-capita income. By 1958, that number was 2.4. The president of DuPont, Crawford Greenewalt, testified before Congress in 1955 that he took home half what his predecessor had made thirty years earlier. (“Being an honest man,” Greenewalt added wryly, “I think I should say that when I pointed the discrepancy out to him he replied merely that he was easily twice as good as I and hence deserved it.”) That era was an upside-down version of our own: when society gazed upon captains of industry and commerce, it marveled at how ordinary their lives were. . .
The truly rich in the nineteen-fifties and sixties were people who had inherited money—the heirs of the great fortunes of the Gilded Age. Entrepreneurs who sold their own businesses could also become wealthy, because capital-gains taxes were relatively low. But the marketplace chose not to pay salaried professionals and managers a lot of money, and society chose not to let them keep much of what they made. On income above two hundred thousand dollars a year, the marginal tax rate was as high as ninety-one per cent. Formerly exclusive occupations, meanwhile, were opening themselves to new talent, as a result of the expansion of the public university system. Economists of the era were convinced, as one analysis put it, that there was a “connection between economic growth and the advance of democracy on the one hand and the worsening economic status of the intellectual and professional classes on the other.” In 1956, Roswell Magill, a partner at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, spoke for a generation of professionals when he wrote that law firms “can no longer honestly assure promising young men that if they become partners they can save money in substantial amounts, build country homes and gardens for themselves like their fathers and grandfathers did, and plan extensive European holidays.”
And then, suddenly, the world changed. Taxes began to fall. The salaries paid to high-level professionals—“talent”—started to rise. Baseball players became multimillionaires. C.E.O.s got private jets. The lawyers at Cravath, Swaine & Moore who once despaired of their economic future began saving money in substantial amounts, building country homes and gardens for themselves like their fathers and grandfathers did, and planning extensive European holidays. In the nineteen-seventies, against all expectations, the salaryman rose from the dead.
The story of how this transformation happened has been told in many different ways. Economists have pointed to the globalization of the world economy and the rise of what Robert Frank and Philip Cook call the “winner-take-all” economy. Political scientists speak of how the social consensus changed in favor of privilege: taxes came down, and the commitment to economic equality eroded. But there is one more crucial piece to the puzzle. As Roger Martin, the dean of the Rotman School of Management, at the University of Toronto, argued in the Harvard Business Review a few years ago, people who fell into the category of “Talent” came to realize that what they possessed was relatively scarce compared with what the class of owners, “Capital,” had at their disposal. People like O’Rourke and Mr. C and Roswell Magill “woke up”—in Martin’s phrase—to what they were really worth. And who woke them up? The Marvin Millers of the world. . . .
To read who the Marvin Millers of the world are, go to Malcolm Gladwell’s treatise: The Talent Grab http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/11/talent-grab
Physicians: Wake up to the fact that the knowledge we possess is also far more scarce and thus far more valuable compared with what the class of hospital owners, administrators, HMOs, are really worth. Let MedicalTuesday wake you up!
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Feature Article
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Doctors And Nurses Vs. Administrators On Patient Satisfaction. Who’s Right?
| PATIENT | MAY 30, 2015
I’ve been volunteering in an emergency department of a Southern Californian community hospital for five years. I clean gurneys, stock shelves, provide support for RNs and EMTs and translate for Spanish-speaking patients. Since my job requires minimal intellectual effort, I’ve had considerable time to observe the staff and contemplate the inspiring work they do.
I’ve watched them perform heroically with sick babies, agitated psychiatric patients, full cardiac arrests, and everything else from stroke to strep. I love what they do and who they are.
Over time, I’ve also became acutely aware of frustration among ER practitioners with increasing pressure to boost patient satisfaction scores. I began to share their skepticism about the validity, reliability and consequences of satisfaction surveys.
Wasn’t it self-evident that the surveys were bogus? We all knew that a patient might be happier if we order up that MRI his brother-in-law recommended for his backache, if we hand out antibiotics for likely viruses, or write a narcotics prescriptions for malingering addicts, or decline to tell obese problem drinkers that they need to quit the vodka and eat fewer Big Macs. Giving patients exactly what they want will score satisfaction points, but it’s often costly to the system and detrimental to individual and public health.
Then about a year ago, I was asked by our hospital’s quality department to be a patient advisor on the medical-surgery floors. My task was to administer a survey on hospitalist physicians and inquire in general about the quality of the patient and family experience. When I saw questions on the survey like, “Did the doctor sit down when visiting you?” I knew I had entered an alternate universe with values skewed in a way folks in the ER wouldn’t readily comprehend.
I found that although everyone’s priority is quality care for our patients, ER docs and nurses spoke a different language than the quality geeks. Sometimes they talked right past each other. “A hospital isn’t a hotel; patients shouldn’t expect to be pampered,” said the ER nurse. “We should learn from the hospitality industry, and patients should be treated like guests at a four-star hotel,” said the quality administrators.
The disconnect was profound. Even the peer-reviewed studies on outcomes seemed to arrive at contrasting conclusions. One study suggested a negative correlation between patient satisfaction and clinical outcomes. Others claimed the opposite.
Quality experts argue that honing in on tiny measures for improvement bump overall satisfaction scores and cumulatively transform hospital culture to one of overall patient-centered excellence. But nurses’ advocates warn, “Patients can be very satisfied and dead an hour later.” Or they cite the case of an RN who had been disciplined because a patient complained the hospital didn’t have Splenda sweetener.
So who is right? The docs and nurses who practice tough love on recalcitrant patients or the warm and fuzzy hospitality administrators who emulate business class flight attendants and remind us that Medicare reimbursement is inextricably tied to patient satisfaction?
What I’ve learned from both working in the ER and visiting patients on the floors is that real quality is not a zero-sum game. Quality is multidimensional and nuanced; we can’t sacrifice or neglect one dimension for another. Splenda fixation is a surface symptom that alludes to a deeper discontent. When patients are dissatisfied with the minutiae of care, their real message is that their emotional needs are not being met. They may feel disrespected, confined, vulnerable, fearful and lonely. These are all 10s on the scale of painful emotions. Not treating them interferes with healing.
To improve clinical outcomes, we have to pay attention to everything. We can’t supply Splenda on demand, but we can engage in honest conversation about the details of care so that patient and family understand we take them seriously and that the emotional quality of their experience matters. Such conversations foster intimacy; they are empowering for the patient and inspiring for the practitioner; they lead to genuine improvements.
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The Key For Patient Satisfaction Is Physician Satisfaction
In these early days of pay for performance (P4P) reimbursement, as the size of your paycheck begins to reflect your patient satisfaction scores, let’s have a frank discussion about three important topics all healthcare providers and organizations must understand going forward.
1. How your performance will be measured
2. How to get the highest patient satisfaction scores and be a happier doctor at the same time
3. The first step to improving performance (in a healthy way) for you and your organization
How your performance will be measured
A large component of your performance ratings will be based on patient satisfaction surveys very much like the HCAHPS inpatient or Press Ganey out patient satisfaction surveys currently in use. Here is a link to the HCAHPS patient satisfaction questions where you can see the three doctor specific patient satisfaction measures that are already publicly reported on the Medicare Hospital Compare website.
It is important that we get granular here so that you understand exactly how your own personal patient satisfaction is both scored and reported.
The satisfaction surveys ask several questions the patient answers on a 4 or 5 point Lickert scale where the top score represents the word/phrase “always”, “strongly agree” or “outstanding”.
You may naturally assume that your personal physician rating is an average of the scores from individual patients. You would be completely wrong in that assumption.
Here’s how your satisfaction ratings are actually scored — it is not an average.
Your scores are reported as a “percentage of top”. This means the percentage of patients who gave you the top score. In other words, only the top scores count. Anything less than 5 out of 5 is thrown out. “Good” or “Above Average” is meaningless to these scoring systems.
Now that you understand how your performance will be rated and reported in the near future, I invite you to take just a moment to recall your last personal experience with a customer satisfaction survey of any kind.
– Are you a person who gives a 5 out of 5 under any circumstances? (most doctors are not!)
– When did you last give a retail transaction or online customer service top marks?
– What did they have to do to earn that rating from you?
Imagine the experience your patients will expect and you will have to consistently provide to receive the all-important “5”. This is exactly how you will be rated by your patients more and more frequently in the years ahead. Soon these patient ratings will determine a portion of your pay as well.
How to get the highest patient satisfaction score and be a happier, healthier doctor at the same time
First you must understand what most healthcare administrators do not. Physician satisfaction is the only lasting foundation for patient satisfaction. It takes happy doctors and staff to have happy patients — in that order.
To understand this fundamental fact, let me ask you the following question.
How can we reasonably expect a patient to give a doctor a 5 out of 5 score on satisfaction when if we asked that doctor to rank their personal satisfaction with their workplace on that same day, they would score it a 3 out of 5?
Your administration might be able to goose patient satisfaction numbers temporarily by cracking the whip and teaching some communication tricks to you and your staff. It won’t last.
As P4P and the closely related “value based purchasing” become more common in your marketplace, organizations that create a healthier, happier, less stressful workplace environment for their staff and doctors will establish a strong competitive advantage.
– Patients will want to be seen there.
– Quality doctors will want to work there.
– Your patient satisfaction scores will reflect the efforts to keep physicians and staff healthy and get systems out of the way of patient interactions.
Your first step to higher physician and patient satisfaction
Here is a question to get you and your leadership team going.
Start by looking back on the last 3 months in your own practice. What average score would you give your personal satisfaction level with your day-to-day practice experience on that same 5 point scale? Take a moment to actually give it a number.
1=very low | 2=low | 3=OK | 4=Good | 5=Excellent
What is your physician satisfaction number? Keeping your score in mind:
– What is the first thing you would change at work to improve your personal satisfaction score? Even if you have given up on this change being possible, what is the one thing that would make all the difference for you?
– What is the first step in making that change – the smallest step to making progress in the direction of a better work day?
Now grab your medical director (or your team if you are the medical director) and get on it.
This simple process identifies a piece of low hanging fruit for you and your organization to improve three things all at once:
– Your personal satisfaction
– Your patient satisfaction scores
– Ultimately, the size of your paycheck down the road
Dike Drummond is a family physician and provides burnout prevention and treatment services for healthcare professionals at his site, The Happy MD.
http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2013/03/key-patient-satisfaction-physician-satisfaction.html
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Feature Article
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Business Schools Now Have An Anti-Business Curriculum
My Antibusiness Business Education
Liberal politicians might say the economy is ‘rigged.’ But a business school?
By
MATTHEW T. TICE | WSJ | Feb 19, 2016
Since the 2008 financial crisis, the business world has come under fire, with public attacks on Wall Street greed, big banks and wealthy Americans. With the 2016 election just nine months away, there is a growing chorus that the entire U.S. economic system is “rigged.” While you might expect such antibusiness rhetoric from left-leaning politicians, it is now part of the curriculum at many business schools.
I am a recent graduate of Bentley University, a small business-oriented college located in Waltham, Mass., just outside Boston. The school typically ranks among the top 25 undergraduate business programs in the country. Like many other business schools, Bentley prides itself on an advanced business curriculum infused with “the richness of a liberal arts education.” Yet rather than providing a solid grounding in the classical humanities—which would be very useful in the business world—many of the nonbusiness courses I took espoused an illiberal attitude toward American capitalism and business in general.
In sociology, we were lectured on how the richest 1% of Americans control more than 50% of the wealth in the country but don’t pay their “fair share” of taxes. We were also informed that the average pay for the CEO of a Fortune 500 company is more than 344 times the average salary for workers in their firms. In expository writing, for our final paper in the class, we had to compose a persuasive essay on why the American dream is dead in the 21st century.
In biology, rather than dissecting fetal pigs or frogs, we watched “documentaries” such as “An Inconvenient Truth” and “Gasland” to learn about global warming, climate change and the environmental dangers posed by hydraulic fracturing and fossil-fuel companies. Almost every one of my elective history and literature courses seemed to dwell on some low point of capitalism, including the trustbusting era of the late 1800s, the decadent Roaring 1920s, the Great Depression and, of course, the 2008 financial crisis and the ensuing “Great Recession.”
Many of these themes were reinforced in my general business classes. In my introductory accounting and finance course, we learned the basics by studying all of the major corporate frauds of the past two decades, including Enron, Sunbeam, WorldCom and Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. In business law and ethics, rather than specific statutes and individual integrity, we focused on whether the goals of corporate sustainability and social responsibility were compatible with profit maximization, along with another review of the rogues’ gallery of Jeff Skilling, Al Dunlap and the Bernies—Ebbers and Madoff. In human behavior and organizations, instead of organizational theory, we discussed social justice issues such as the glass ceiling, equal pay and racism in the workplace.
I majored in Finance, and it was only in these more quantitative core courses that I was able to find a safe space from the ideological indoctrination. Bentley has a first-rate trading room supported by cutting-edge technology and real-time market data feeds. This provided the perfect learning environment for dissecting corporate 10-K filings, building discounted cash-flow models, analyzing technical trends and studying the global economy and financial markets.
Unfortunately, only 20% of the 122 credits that I needed to graduate went toward satisfying the requirements for my Finance major, while more than half of the courses that I took seemed designed to turn me into a self-loathing Finance major. . .
For some business students, like me, the antibusiness bias of some courses serves as a distraction but doesn’t derail one’s career focus. For others, particularly undecided undergraduates, such messaging will become internalized and transmitted over time from the college campus to the working world, which is probably the long-term goal.
For all students, though, it waters down their business degree and raises the overall cost of a college education by tacking on superfluous and superficial courses that displace valuable technical learning. This is particularly troubling given today’s weak job market for graduating seniors and the fact that most college educations are financed with student debt. One would think that a business college would be run more like a business, focused on creating the best value-added, cost-effective product for its targeted consumer market. . .
Mr. Tice is an investment research analyst and a 2015 graduate of Bentley University. WSJ Feb 19, 2016
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Feature Article
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Voter Fraud: The Problem of Duplicate Voting
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The Government Accountability Institute (GAI) attempted to obtain public voter roll information from all 50 states to independently test for duplicate voting in the 2016 presidential election. Duplicate voting is one type of voter fraud, defined as an individual casting more than one ballot. There are currently no government agencies or private entities that compare all state voter rolls to detect duplicate voting fraud. (more…)
Feature Article
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The Fight for Civilization
The fight for life is not about my faith, or even yours.
Yes, my faith fully supports the right to life, and I know that yours does too.
Brian Johnston
But this is a battle over something much, much bigger than our personal theological beliefs. It is much bigger than any issue – in my opinion – any issue our nation has yet faced. And yes, our nation has seen a lot and has been considered, ‘the leader of Western civilization.’
You see, this is literally a fight for Civilization. And our state of California is the deepest, darkest, most desperate corner in this fight. “Scientifically advanced” barbarian philosophies control our state. Such evil ideologies have tried to control Civilization before. These philosophies embodied and praised truly evil practices twisting both science and medicine to their purpose. (more…)
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Past Issue
The Woman Who Could Be Our Next President
No woman in America’s political history has had more scandals attributed to her than Hillary Rodham Clinton. WND TV lists the number at 22 and that was in May 2015. They follow her like fleas on a dog, often two or three simultaneously.
Right now, Hillary Clinton is dodging four: The death of four Democratic colleagues in Benghazi over whom she had protective responsibilities as Secretary of State; her use of a private home server as Secretary of State, passing classified intelligence messages abroad in violation of the Federal Records Act; the Clinton Foundation scandal of raising money by offering State Department favors to nations providing high dollar contributions to it; and, the most recent, the Democratic National Convention emails (presumably authorized by Hillary) designed to derail Bernie Sanders in his race for the presidency.
But these are only a few of many.
What is most amazing with respect to these scandals is that she always gets a pass even when the evidence seems bulletproof as, for example, in Whitewater in the 1990s and the FBI’s summary of her guilt in the email scandal.
Instead of jail time, as would be the case for you or I doing the same thing, Clinton is elevated to even higher positions of power. Today, her party and the establishment media is working vigorously to make her the nation’s first female president.
Returning to the Bill and Hillary Clinton Administration of the 1990s may give us our best measure for their return to power. After Bill’s election, he announced that America had gotten two for the price of one, indicating that Hillary would be a key advisor. Hillary has already announced that Bill will serve as her economic advisor should they return to the White House.
Absent from the political dialogue in this presidential election are the scandals so present the last time this couple served. Space only allows detail for Whitewater. Although the intrigue was of a different issue, time and place it had all the drama of today’s Benghazi or the email scandal. There is death and everyone associated goes to jail except the Clinton’s.
The Clintons, while governor and first lady of Arkansas, joined with Jim and Susan McDougal to form the Whitewater Development Corporation. The four purchased 230 acres of undeveloped land on the White River, intending to create vacation home lots for retirees. It is alleged that Bill Clinton used his influence as governor to pressure David Hale to lend $300,000 to Susan McDougal in the land deal.
At the time, Jim McDougal was Gov. Clinton’s economic adviser and later created his own bank, the Madison Guaranty, to fund the project, hiring attorney Hillary Clinton of the Rose Law Firm to make everything legal.
The four equal partners were intricately connected. The scheme collapsed in 1989. Ultimately, 15 people associated with this fraudulent land deal, which ended costing many retirees their life savings and the taxpayers some $73 million, went to jail. Everyone except the Clintons. Even Jim Guy Tucker, the governor succeeding Bill, served time, so extensive did Whitewater become.
By the time everything came to a head, the Clintons were in the White House and had legions of defenders and records were strangely hidden or misplaced.
Independent Counsel Robert Fiske ordered the Clintons to surrender documents relating to the corrupt Madison Guaranty. The Clintons reported them as missing. But, two years later, they mysteriously reappeared, found on the desk of Hillary’s personal secretary.
By this time, much of the heat was off and the story was largely undermined by a sympathetic Clinton press. Besides, the special prosecutor for Whitewater, Robert Fiske, was chosen by President Clinton to be his new attorney general.
Kenneth Starr continued the Whitewater investigation, but leading witnesses Susan McDougal, Jim Guy Tucker and Clinton’s former AG Webster Hubbell, a Rose Law Firm friend of Hillary Clinton, refused to cooperate as key witnesses against the Clintons, with the latter pleading the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination.
President Bill Clinton later pardoned Susan McDougal and Jim Guy Tucker. The story later faded away, replaced largely by the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal.
The mysterious death of the Clinton Deputy White House counsel, Vince Foster, added much intrigue to the story. He had been the special friend of Hillary and a Rose Law Firm associate, and was charged with defending the Clintons on Whitewater charges. He was murdered or committed suicide, at Fort Marcy Park, Virginia.
But Whitewater is only one of a good number of scandals in which Hillary is a leading participant. Perhaps another column will be necessary outlining her involvement in File Gate, Cattle Futures Gate, Travel Gate, and half dozen more.
She and her devoted followers would say that it is just the “vast right conspiracy,” but there are far too many of these to feel comfortable with that explanation.
Dr. Harold Pease is a syndicated columnist and an expert on the United States Constitution who lives in Cedar City. He has dedicated his career to studying the writings of the Founding Fathers and applying his knowledge to current events. He has taught history and political science for more than 25 years at Taft College in California. On the web: www.LibertyUnderFire.org.
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Feature Article
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Britain’s Independence Follows 240 Years After Our Independence
Irony 2016: Will the U.S. Follow Britain’s Lead on Freedom and Independence?
Posted On Jun 27 2016
By : Sheri Sharp
Tag: Brexit, British, EU, Politichicks, Sheri Sharp
On June 23, 2016, the citizens of the United Kingdom (UK) voted for independence from the European Union (EU). This vote represents a historic change in the direction of sovereignty and self-governance for the UK.
This is refreshing news that has left many “stunned” at the decision made by the British people. Many media-types are breathless in their worries about currency and markets. But many people are elated at this show of independence. Brexit, as this effort was called, has proven to be the outlet for the voice of the British people in 2016.
In an ironic twist, 240 years ago, the United Stated overcame the tyranny of a British king and fought for freedom, sovereignty, representation, and self-governance. In less dramatic fashion, the British have found it in themselves to break away from a government they did not elect; a government that has dictated immigration policy and economics to the people of the UK.
Perhaps most ironic, however, is that, in 2016, the British may ultimately have a hand in teaching America to again seek independence from its own big government chains and the ideologically-driven march by the American Left towards open borders.
As we wade through the last of Obama’s eight years and a tumultuous election season in the United States, this showing of support for independence in the UK is a bright light! It will inevitably have a ripple effect throughout the world. The British people have spoken and what they are saying is they are tired of being ruled by the elites in the EU where they are not well-represented. They want change away from open borders, threats to their national identity, stifled trade, and increased payments to the EU that supposedly “level the playing field” for other EU countries.
Despite the positive example this vote sets for freedom and national sovereignty, Barack Obama, of course, does not support the UK leaving the EU. Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton has not offered support for it either. Clinton and Obama adhere to a Leftist view that believes in “the world” with less concern for what is best for the United States or other individual countries. But Obama and Hillary are on the losing side of this movement along with the other elitists in the world. According to Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party: “An opinion poll in the Netherlands said that a majority there now want to leave, so we may well be close perhaps to Nexit … Similarly in Denmark a majority there are in favour of leaving so we could be quite close to Dexit….And I’m told the same may apply to Sweden and perhaps Austria and perhaps even Italy too…The EU is failing, the EU is dying, I hope that we’ve got the first brick out of the wall.” This historic vote will have a domino effect in Europe. . .
The effect that the Obama administration has had on America is analogous to the effect the European Union has had on the UK and, arguably, other EU members. The forces of Obama’s anti-American policies have created open borders, fading sovereignty, additional taxation, and socialist spending policies.
Obama’s arrogance toward the rule of law and respect for American citizens also adds to the negative effect this administration has had on our county. . . After a ruling by the Supreme Court that shut down Obama’s executive amnesty, we witnessed an angry President who vowed that this ruling will not force him to deport those in America illegally. Obama has chosen to buck the rule of law, the American people, and the Supreme Court after losing. PM Cameron actually arranged for Brexit and took a gamble that the people would choose to remain in the EU. Cameron lost on June 23, quickly conceded defeat while respectfully acknowledging the will of the people, and then he announced his planned resignation. The contrast is striking! Prime Minister Cameron and the citizens of the UK have set a great example for America.
As one of our biggest allies, Obama should be embracing this choice made by the UK. The Obama administration should extend its hand proactively on free trade and support for the UK as a sovereign entity. Such a move would represent a bold and much-needed statement for freedom and national identity. The fact that Obama has already said he would push the UK to the “back of the queue” on trade with the US tells you everything you need to know about Obama’s continued indifference, if not disdain, for the affairs of the UK.
Perhaps we can take a page out of the British book in 2016. Let’s vote for positive change. Let’s take America back to freedom, sovereignty, borders, and smaller government. Ironically, let’s follow the British lead on independence this time around!
Read the entire commentary in the WSJ . . .
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Feature Article
Past Issue
The West And Islam
Mark E. Mishanie and Michael S. Swisher – Editorial
The following is an exchange is between Mark E. Mishanie, a subscriber to The St. Croix Review, and Michael S. Swisher, the Chairman of the Board of Religion and Society, the foundation that publishes The St. Croix Review.
Islamic ideology must be ultimately defeated. ISIS, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, etc., are only outgrowths of it. Sad to say, most people are still ignorant about this.
They talk about radical Islam as being the problem. That is wrong. The problem is with Islamic culture. The way Westerners view it, there is a problem with a minority of Muslims, the terrorists. The rest are good and peace loving. Look at Islamic countries. Look how they treat women: Women have no voice. They are forced to wear veils, forced to have children, raped, beaten, not given any political voice. They can stone to death a woman for adultery. They can jail and kill a person for being gay. They can chop a person’s hand off for stealing. Beheadings are normal. Jews and Christians are viewed as enemies in their midst with ties to infidel Europe, America, and Israel.
What to do? Condemn them for the way they live and think and don’t stop. End the tolerance of their barbaric practices. It is time to call out their ideology and bring them into the modern world. We cannot be afraid to speak the truth.
I am not saying that there should be no Islam. We need to destroy its archaic belief system and bring them into our world. Until that is done, we will have problems, America will have problems, Europe will have problems, Israel will have problems. If this is not done, destroying ISIS will have few consequences in the long run.
—Mark E. Mishanie
There is truth in what Mr. Mishanie says but the solution he advances is easier said than done.
Religions aren’t just the words of their sacred scriptures or liturgies (whatever those may be) but also the experience and traditions that have been accumulated by their followers over centuries and millennia.
Judaism has survived Pharaonic Egypt, the Babylonian captivity, the empire of Alexander the Great, and the Roman Empire, complete with Titus’s punitive expedition and Hadrian’s destruction of Jerusalem. This in turn led to Jewish Diaspora and many subsequent persecutions. Christianity suffered initial persecution by the Romans, much schism and conflict even after it became an established religion under Constantine; it underwent a Reformation, followed by wars of religion culminating in the terrible Thirty Years’ War, and an Enlightenment that challenged its philosophical bases. These experiences have made Judaism and Christianity what they are today.
Islam has never had a Reformation, and it never had to meet the challenges of an Enlightenment. It is still very much as it was in the seventh century, when it first swept out of the Arabian peninsula to conquer the ancient civilizations of Egypt, the Levant, Asia Minor, and Persia. Its reverses have mainly been military defeats, as when its forces were repulsed at Tours, Granada, Lepanto, and Vienna. It has learned nothing by these events, but rather retains its desire for conquest. It’s revealing that Islamic terrorists like Osama bin Laden and the leadership of ISIS have referred to Spain as “al-Andalus” – they still regret its loss (in 1492!) and dream of recovering it.
I don’t know how we “destroy its archaic belief system and bring them into our world.” It seems to me that Islam is at a point in its historic development that parallels where Christianity was in the sixteenth century, if that. It took more than a century of warfare after the Reformation to arrive at the agreement sealed by the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) – providing that the nations of Europe would no longer go to war over religious differences. And that, of course, did not stop European rulers from engaging in internal persecutions. Just as one example, the Spanish Inquisition was not abolished until the early nineteenth century.
Is Mr. Mishanie prepared to accept the centuries of warfare that may be necessary to achieve his goal?
Hilaire Belloc devoted the fourth chapter of his book The Great Heresies (1938) to Islam, which he viewed as an offshoot of the Arian heresy. He predicted that Islam would be an enemy to Western civilization long after Bolshevism had vanished. Considering that he wrote that book when Bolshevism was riding high – just as Stalin was about to conspire with Hitler to carve up Poland – it seems well-nigh prophetic.
The Cold War lasted fifty years, occasionally breaking out into hot warfare in places ranging from Korea to Vietnam to Cuba, Nicaragua, and Grenada, before the Soviet Union collapsed. My feeling is that our conflict with Islam will last much longer, even if we do not actively seek a fight, as Mr. Mishanie proposes. This is a situation in which, as Lenin is supposed to have observed, “you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”
My own preference, for whatever it is worth, is for a policy of exclusion and containment. We should not accept any more Muslim immigrants; we should search out and deport all those who entered the country illegally, as well as any obvious troublemakers. We should have as little as possible to do with Muslim countries. The only worthwhile thing they have to offer us is their oil. They have to sell it to someone. Our contact should be limited to this commercial purpose, with only short-term visas issued to their nationals as may be necessary to facilitate trade. These visas should be restricted to certain areas, with most of the country being off-limits to them. We should at the same time strive to reduce our dependence on oil imported from the Islamic world by a vigorous program of domestic energy development.
Perhaps we can protect ourselves by such steps without inviting the terrible loss of American blood and treasure that now seems to have been wasted to no lasting effect.
—Micheal S. Swisher
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The St Croix Review
Mission Statement
Our mission is to reawaken American pride: of being a joyous part of the vast adventure of living in a great, good, and growing nation as free-born individuals.
The St. Croix Review acquaints readers with a wide spectrum of conservative thought. We hope to sharpen our readers’ perception of passing events, so that they can discern the just cause. The Review is a specific voice in the conservative medley, a voice wide ranging in its outlook, having something cogent to say about economics, the countryside, about high culture, and about the life of ideas. By showing varieties of conservative thought, we make the Review a foremost magazine of conservative opinion.
We promote a broad-based American culture, with a rich history and precious traditions that point to a future full of promise. We emphasize American resilience, independence, creativity, and compassion.
We explain free enterprise, showing how millions of intelligent Americans create prosperity for themselves. We show how honesty, honor, kindness, and generosity are essential virtues infusing each American institution with the spark of life.
Our format is simple and direct; we emphasize clarity of expression. We are not bound to the news cycle, not caught up in media feeding frenzies. We explore basic principles. We cover events as they are: moments in the course of a slow, deep, winding river—the true stream of life.
Founder — Angus MacDonald came to the U.S. in 1946 from Australia with a degree from the College of the Bible (Victoria, Australia). He obtained a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Columbia University in New York City, and served as a Congregational Minister for twenty-five years, finally settling in Minnesota in the 1960s.
It was during the turbulent 1960s (1968 to be exact) that Angus MacDonald thought the nation needed another conservative journal, as the national newspapers, radio, and television were dominated by a left-leaning point of view. Alternative voices were ridiculed, and the country had only a couple of alternative publications so he launched The St. Croix Review.
From the earliest issues the editorial board has included a who’s-who list of prominent conservatives: Henry Hazlitt, economist and journalist; Russell Kirk, author of the Conservative Mind; Thomas Molnar, Catholic philosopher and historian; Henry Regnery, Publisher of conservative books; William F. Rickenbacker, prominent writer for the National Review; and Peter Stanlis, Professor Emeritus of English at Rockford College and author of Edmund Burke and the Natural Law; and Yale Brozan, economist and advocate of free markets.
Angus MacDonald was an early publisher of Milton Friedman, economist at the University of Chicago, and recipient of Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. The following are some of Milton Friedman quotes:
If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.
History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition.
Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.
Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.
The 45-year history of The St. Croix Review resembles that of a self-sufficient farmer on the edge of the American frontier. All the various tasks involved in publishing the journal were done by Angus: to cut expenses he bought a printing press and printed the next issue, even though he had never printed before. He typeset the articles, kept track of subscribers on index cards, typed addresses on each label and sent them out (computers didn’t exist in 1968). Each issue of the journal for 25 years was printed, folded, collated, stitched and cut, sorted and addressed by hand in house. And of course Angus wrote editorials the whole time.
It has taken tenacity to survive, and the coming of the computer age has been a blessing, allowing much greater ease and efficiency in publishing. But the perspective of the review has remained the same: common sense, enterprise, and honesty.
The following is a summary of the December/January 2015/6 issue of The St. Croix Review:
In “The West and Islam,” Mark E. Mishanie remarks on the nature of Islamic ideology and Michael S. Swisher responds.
Don Lee, in “I Will Discriminate,” distinguishes between politically correct notions and common sense judgment.
Thomas Martin, in “Who is in Charge Here?” offers Platonic wisdom.
Paul Kengor in , “Paris, Brussels, and Twenty-first Century Europe,” sees post-Christian Europe as extremely vulnerable to Islamic conversion; in “Cherry-Picking Pope Francis,” he makes the point the Pope is neither liberal nor conservative, but he is a dedicated proponent of the traditional family; in “Pope Francis vs. the ‘Demon’ of Gender Theory,” he shows the Pope’s passionate reinforcement of traditional views on gender; in “Surviving Hitler’s ‘Hell-Hole’ . . . Remembering Frank Kravetz,” he retells the story of how an airman kept his spirits up while he was a POW.
Mark Hendrickson, in “Feeling Good About America on a Chilly Autumn Evening,” reminds us of the ties that bind us together; in “Thoughts on Jeb Bush’s Tax Plan,” he considers the pros and cons of the plan and looks beyond just the economic factors; in “Hillary Clinton’s ‘New College Compact’ Raises an Important Question: Did She Ever Take Econ 101?” he sees layer upon layer of error; in “The ‘Not Enough Jobs’ Scenario: An Economic Fallacy,” he contests the recurring arguments for more government interference by showing that economic freedom is the source of our prosperity.
Herbert London in, “The Iran Deal Is a Turning Point,” he considers strategic consequences and ends with an intriguing question; in “Why Government Has Grown,” he sees weakness in the mediating institutions that used to infuse vitality into society: the family, the schools, the churches, and the civil associations; in “Russian Attacks on U.S. Backed Rebels,” he compares Russian goals and actions and President Obama’s embarrassing ineffectiveness; in “Israel Defending Itself,” he considers the perils Israel is facing due to President Obama’s deal with Iran and Russia’s aggressive posture in the region; in “Blindness in the Rationalist Tradition,” he describes the mindset of President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry who refuse to recognize evil and who downplay the words “Death to America.”
Allan C. Brownfeld, in “‘White Privilege’: Not a Term Generations of Hardworking Immigrants Would Understand,” points to the difficulties Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants had upon their arrival in America, and he highlights the historical ethos of America – through hard work anyone can succeed; in “The Sin of Contemporaneity: Cleansing History by Applying Today’s Standards to Our Ancestors,” he cites the world-wide prevalence of slavery throughout history and at the Founding of America; in “Remembering a Time When Our Leaders Risked Their Lives and Fortunes for What They Believed,” he compares the wisdom and courage of our Founders with the cravenness of modern politicians.
We have learned that John A. Howard, the former President of Rockford College and veteran of W.W. II, passed away this August at the age of ninety-three. John Howard was a long-time supporter of and a greatly appreciated author for The St. Croix Review. We are publishing “Some Reflections on Choosing a College,” as tribute to him: he writes about the need to transmit the virtues necessary for self-governance to the young, and he explains how well our universities are doing (not well).
In “Obama’s College ‘Scorecard’ Doesn’t Measure Up,” Paul J. McNulty, the current President of Grove City College, in Grove City Pennsylvania, shows how Grove City College is truly a school a cut above the rest.
Philip Vander Elst, in “Resisting Socialism in Early 20th Century Britain,” shares the history of the Anti-Socialist Union, formed in 1908, as a pioneering organization promoting classical liberalism.
Alvin Shane, in “Political Outlaw,” assesses Hillary Clinton’s character.
Jo Ann Gardner, in “Reading Genesis from the Ground Up,” presents a reading of the bible including the symbolic importance of shepherds.
Jigs Gardner, in “Letters from a Conservative Farmer: My Days as a Hedge Vet,” tells delightful stories about a neighbor and caring for farm animals.
Jigs Gardner, in “The Scarlet Letter,” considers Nathaniel Hawthorne’s great novel.
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Hillsdale College
Hillsdale College was founded in 1844 by men and women who proclaimed themselves “grateful to God for the inestimable blessings resulting from the prevalence of civil and religious liberty and intelligent piety in the land,” and who believed that “the diffusion of sound learning is essential to the perpetuity of these blessings.”
Hillsdale was the first American college to prohibit in its charter any discrimination based on race, sex, or national origin. Associated with the anti-slavery movement from its earliest days, it attracted to its campus anti-slavery leaders such as Frederick Douglass and Edward Everett, who preceded Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg. Several of the College’s leading men were instrumental in founding the new Republican party up the road in Jackson, Michigan, in 1854. And Hillsdale sent a larger percentage of its students to fight for the Union in the Civil War than any other American college or university except West Point. Two of those Hillsdale veterans helped carry Lincoln’s casket to the slain president’s final resting place in Springfield, Illinois.
Hillsdale’s modern rise to national prominence began in the 1970s, when the federal government attempted to impose a host of regulations on the College—including racial quota requirements that violated Hillsdale’s principled policy of nondiscrimination. When the Supreme Court upheld these regulations in the 1980s on the basis that Hillsdale students received federally funded grants and loans, the College decided to refuse even this indirect form of federal aid, replacing all federal student aid with privately funded grants, loans, and scholarships.
Hillsdale’s Board of Trustees pledged first that the College would continue its long-standing policy of nondiscrimination, and second that it would not accept any encroachments on its independence. It is a pledge that has been renewed several times in subsequent years and stands to date.
Today an independent, coeducational, residential liberal arts college with a student body of some 1,450 undergraduates, the College continues to carry out its original mission. With a core curriculum that comprises about one-half of courses a student needs to graduate, Hillsdale maintains its strong fidelity to the liberal arts.
In its outreach, too, the College teaches those same ideas that advance “civil and religious liberty.” Its many programs include the Center for Constructive Alternatives, one of the largest college lecture series in America; the Hoagland Center for Teacher Excellence, which holds seminars for high school teachers of civics and history; the National Leadership Seminars; the Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship, in Washington, D.C.; and Imprimis, a monthly newsletter that reaches over two million people.
Opened in the fall of 2012, the Hillsdale College Van Andel Graduate School of Statesmanship offers an M.A. and a Ph.D. in politics.
For more information about Hillsdale College, please visit www.Hillsdale.edu.
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