MEDICAL MAYHEM

Lies, Lies Lies: "Obesity is fast becoming one of the world's leading reasons why people die" See here for the real story.

Hating the life-savers: Perhaps no one is more consistently demonized for doing more good today in the United States than the pharmaceutical companies. The Food and Drug Administration recently approved the new drug Avastin, which shrinks tumors. The medicine helps patients with advanced bowel cancer. Yet in the view of many Americans - not to mention politicians like Kerry - the pharmaceutical companies are the enemy.... Even the Vatican seems to have joined in know-nothing drug industry bashing. The firms demonstrated a "lack of social conscience" by making massive profits on AIDS drugs, charged Rev. Angelo D'Agostino, a Jesuit. But AIDS medicines exist only because of profit-making companies that conduct drug research. In the early 1980s, the disease was a death sentence, taking some 28 million people to their graves. Today, AIDS patients survive and even thrive because private companies have developed scores of medicines.

Drug fanaticism: "Here's a bit of legal information that may interest Rush Limbaugh: Under Florida law, illegally obtaining more than 28 grams of painkillers containing the narcotic oxycodone -- a threshold exceeded by a single 60-pill Percocet prescription -- automatically makes you the worst sort of drug trafficker, even if you never sold a single pill. Even if, like Richard Paey, you were using the drugs to relieve severe chronic pain. Although prosecutors admitted Paey was not a drug trafficker, on April 16 he received a mandatory minimum sentence of 25 years for drug trafficking."

Sowell on socialized medicine: "Britain, which has had government-run medical care for more than half a century, has to import doctors from the Third World, where medical school standards are lower.... Only the patients will find out, the hard way, what declining quality means. I saw a vivid example of what bureaucratic medical care meant back in 1959, when I had a summer job at the headquarters of the U.S. Public Health Service in Washington. Around 5 o'clock one afternoon, a man had a heart attack on the street near our office. He was taken to the nurse's room and asked if he was a federal employee. If he was, he could be sent to the large, modern medical facility there in the Public Health Service headquarters. But he was not a government employee, so an ambulance was summoned from a local hospital. By the time this ambulance made its way through miles of downtown Washington rush-hour traffic, the man was dead. He died waiting for a doctor, in a building full of doctors. That is what bureaucracy means".

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ELSEWHERE

I have a motto at the top of my blog and a rubric at the bottom of each day's posts which makes the point that Leftists owe much of their success with voters to their claim that they are "compassionate" -- a claim which the history of Leftist deeds shows to be a fraud. Whenever they get complete power (e.g. Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot), Leftists are in fact ruthless murderers and have no concern for anybody but themselves. But few people know much history (and Leftist teachers do their best to keep it that way) so the Big Lie about Leftist compassion is often believed. A recent letter from a reader that Keith Burgess-Jackson posted on his blog is in my view an example of that effect. The writer is obviously a very good and kind man who votes Democrat because he thinks that they are more like him than conservatives are. Random Observations has however pointed out another important failure in the letter-writer's thinking. He points out that the letter-writer has committed a variant of what logicians call the ad hominem fallacy -- judging the truth of a statement by the person who utters it. The letter writer sees Leftists as kind people and conservatives as unkind people and infers therefore that conservative POLICIES must be unkind in their effects too. Adam Smith, of course, pointed out centuruies ago that selfish deeds by selfish people can and do have BENEFICIAL effects. So the letter-writer really IS a Leftist in one important respect -- he thinks very simplistically. It is the actual effect of the policies that matters, not who proposed the policies.

How un-Islamic! "A University of Illinois research team is working on turning pig manure into a form of crude oil that could be refined to heat homes or generate electricity."

Michael Moore doesn't understand the First Amendment works both ways. Disney doesn't have to publish his stuff if they don't want to

There is another mention here of the seeming paradox that one of the world's most pro-American places is Iran.

Halliburton: Odd profiteers. "But here's the funny thing. So far, the Iraq war hasn't proved much of a boon for Halliburton's shareholders. Because of incompetence, the chaos of working in the war zone, and a contract that limits profits, KBR's margins on its hazardous work are pretty marginal".

As a keen Chaucerian, I have got to give econoblogger The Man Without Qualities a plug. In his postings of May 3rd, he actually managed to find some wisdom about Iraq in Chaucer!

Dick McDonald has some good posts on the prisoner-abuse panic.

Che is Gay is an amusing site. I liked this comment: "It is ironic that the 'pro tree' element is usually 'anti Bush'. Work that one out!"

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

All politicians seek power but conservatives bring with them some concern for the welfare of their country. Leftists bring only their hate-filled Stalinist hearts and their pretend compassion. Voters, unfortunately, often believe the compassion is genuine

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