Why Government should never be allowed to control your Health care

Hospitals in Germany, UK, and Israel refuse life saving transplant to 3 year old because his parents had not been vaccinated.

Politico EU reports that a 3-year-old Cypriot boy was denied a heart transplant by a hospital in Germany allegedly because his parents weren't "fully vaccinated".

And it wasn't just Germany. The boy was turned away by hospitals in the UK and Israel for the same reason. Finally, a Greek hospital was found to do the transplant, but the story is going viral anyway as the latest example of COVID restrictions run amok.

Remember what the lefties like to say: Government is just the set of things that we all agree to do together.

[spit]

Why do you need an assault rifle?  Because some governmental flunky might want to tell you that your kid is going to die because you committed crimethink.

So what do you do when they stop reporting Covid deaths?

The Fed.Gov is going to stop asking hospitals to report deaths from Covid.  Since all that will be reported is case counts (and possibly hospitalizations, although that is far from clear), what do you do over the next few months?

Retired ER doctor Tim Wolter has an outstanding summary of the current - and likely last - set of actual data and what it means.  I recommend that you read the entire information-dense post and bookmark it.

In particular, the data he shows from Florida are extremely interesting: 7 day moving average of cases in January: 60,000.  7 day moving average of deaths in January: 9.  That's a case fatality rate of 0.015%.

And this is particularly telling:

Digging deeper into [Minnesota] stats you find that the average "case" is 36 years old, the average ICU hospitalized patient is 63 and the average age of those dying from Covid is 80. That stat caught my eye. To have an average age of 80 there must be some real oldsters in the sample set. Indeed, deaths were recorded in patients ranging from age 1 to age 109.

Remember, this data will no longer be reported so it will no longer be possible to use actual death data to show that Covid is a disease that is dangerous almost exclusively to the very old and very sick.  Remember to get your 2 year old quadruple vaxed and always masked up - never mind that she's not yet talking because she's developmentally stunted.  Got to protect those sick Boomers!

It's getting very hard indeed to avoid straying into the fever swamps when you look at the crude propaganda coming from our health care institutions.  Qui bono, indeed?

Note: it's been a while since I've tagged a post with my tag "evil".  But here's an excerpt from that last post which seems more and more to apply to the CDC and other "elite" institutions ostensibly tasked with keeping the population safe:

The ancient Romans were said to make a land into a desert, and then call it peace.  I mean, there were no more folks opposing their rule after they had killed most of the folks, amirite?

The Fed.Gov will make a desert and then call it "health".  This is the end game.  Don't let a crisis go to waste.

* It's not The Virus From Hell.  You want to see a disease from Hell?  Here you go.

Yeah, this is a bit ranty.

The End Game of Covid is socialized health care

So what's driving all the insanity behind the Virus From Hell*?

I mean, "Two Weeks to Flatten The Curve and Save Our Health Care System" has turned into doctors and nurses being fired because they haven't been vaccinated.  This, when Covid deaths are down something like 75% from a year ago when NO health care workers were vaccinated (because there was no vaccine).

So what gives?  How can The Powers That Be be so, well, incompetent?

They're not.  None of this is by accident.  Let me expand on a comment I left over at OldNFO's place:

Doctors and nurses are being fired, leading to an unknown (more accurately: unreported) staffing shortage.  The New York National Guard is being called out to fill in.  Interestingly, you have two chances if a NatGuard doc kills your loved one: slim, and none.  You can't sue the NatGuard.  You might have a better lawsuit against a hospital who just fired 30% of their workers right before your Loved One died of neglect.  Call Morgan and Morgan**, who no doubt will be happy to take your case.

So you sue the hospital, and the hospital is run into bankruptcy.  After all, you are only one of many grieving families who lost loved ones to this reckless management decision, amirite?

So riddle me this, Healthcare Man: what happens when 40% of the hospitals in this Republic shut down?  I mean, it will be a crisis, amirite?  Someone with have to do something, amirite?  And who is ready to do something in a crisis?

Yup.  The Fed.Gov.

They'll take over all these "failed Hospitals", and the Fed.Gov will finally have the socialized healthcare that they've always wanted.  And all it will take is thousands (tens of thousands? hundreds of thousand?  millions?) of dead Americans.

The ancient Romans were said to make a land into a desert, and then call it peace.  I mean, there were no more folks opposing their rule after they had killed most of the folks, amirite?

The Fed.Gov will make a desert and then call it "health".  This is the end game.  Don't let a crisis go to waste.

* It's not The Virus From Hell.  You want to see a disease from Hell?  Here you go.

** They are an ambulance chasing Law Firm who carpet bomb the Florida airwaves with their commercials.

No more Juan Restrepos

I must gently disagree with my co-blogger and brother-from-another-mother ASM826.  This is not the time to send in more Marines to a lost cause in Afghanistan.  We don't need more dead marines like Juan Restrepo.

Yes, this is Jimmy Carter 2.0.  Yes, this administration is going to cause the death of many of our former allies (and their families).  No, none of this is worth a single Marine's life.

This is the end of a bi-partisan f**k-up that goes back to George W. Bush and Colin Powell and runs through Barack Obama and John F. Kerry to Slow Joe Biden and whichever intellectual midget is SecState today.  If Trump were still in the Oval office then the withdrawal likely would have been better handled, but the Democratic Party is clearly not about good governance these days.

The thing for everyone to remember is when the next GOP critter plants his butt in the chair behind the Resolute Desk - assuming there will ever be another free election in this Republic - and when the next terrorist strike hits New York City: remember this day.  Adam Piggott sums the war up well:

The war in Afghanistan, which from the very beginning existed for no tangible military or political reasons, was a complete success for those that waged it. They rolled the dice and got twenty years. That’s twenty years of unmitigated profit in arms sales, corporate fees, expert consulting and every other aspect of the cost of running an expensive war and pretend nation building exercise in an alien land half a world away. And the poppies, don’t forget the poppies. The lucrative narcotics trade was completely taken over by the CIA and its proxies, a war on drugs indeed but not the kind of war that Nixon originally promised.

No more blood for lost causes, or to get four star Generals seats on General Dynamic's Board of Directors.

And remember Juan Restrepo.

So how does a COVID death not get counted as a COVID death?

Remember how the 'rona death count went from "death from COVID" to "death with COVID"?  Remember the guy killed in a motorcycle crash who was listed as a COVID death?*  The panic caused an inflation of the death count, with every death breathlessly reported.  So what does it take to make sure a death is not reported as from COVID?

When the death is caused not by the virus, but by the government's reaction to the virus.  COVID didn’t kill Rita at age 95, despair and loneliness did:

Rita Thomas was a victim of COVID-19, but she never had the disease.

The vivacious and outgoing 95-year-old, who lived independently until last year and celebrated her most recent birthday in February with friends at a Pasco County diner, willed herself to die two weeks ago because she could no longer handle the pandemic-imposed isolation.

“She said to me: ‘Linda. I’ve had a good life. I am ready to die. I don’t want to live this way anymore. I stopped eating,’ ’’ her daughter Linda Gardner said, recalling the conversation she had with her mother in August. Weeks later, her mother was hospitalized for complications from malnutrition.

The Miami Herald almost called it straight.  She was a victim of Government Policy.  I say that even thought I generally think that Gov. DeSantis has done a better job on this than most Governors.

Her cause of death was listed as "failure to thrive".  In reality, the State killed her graveyard dead with their unreasonable lockdown.  What's unusual about Mrs. Thomas' case was that her story got published.  We should ask ourselves how many other people have died, not from the virus, but from the Government's reaction to the virus.  We should ask if more people are now dying from the reaction than from the virus.  An honest approach to public policy would strive to give us answers to those questions.  Of course, we will never have an honest assessment of the Government's reaction.  

At least we're seeing a little goalpost moving: World Health Organization says lockdowns don't work.  And a new study of infection rates at Amazon show no correlation between lockdowns and infection rates. And more studies show no benefits from masks than show any benefits (hat tip: Lawrence).  Hey, don't be a Science Denier!

But this bit from the article made me see red:

When Rita Thomas finally saw her daughters after more than six months, “She wouldn’t let go of my hand,” said her daughter, Nan Thomas.

We had to destroy the village to save it.  The bastards who did that to Mrs. Thomas have a lot to answer for, in this life or the next.

* Yeah, I know, Snopes.  But even they say that this happened, although they try to spin it.

The "Knock Out Game" comes to Castle Borepatch

Well, not Castle Borepatch itself, but within its shadow.  Some "youths" killed a guy at the Frederick County (MD) Fair.  A group surrounded him, one distracted him by asking for a dollar, and the hero of the group cold cocked him from behind.  While he was lying on the ground, another "youth" spit on him.

They flew him to the shock and trauma center in Baltimore where he died.  He was 59 years old.  The local newspaper has been giving this pretty good coverage.  There was a video of the incident posted to snapchat but it looks like it has been scrubbed from the 'net.  This local TV coverage is decent.



The kids involved are 15 and 16, but the District Attorney says that they will be charged with manslaughter and tried as adults.

This all happened ten miles from Castle Borepatch, in a nice middle class town in broad daylight.

The coverage has been evolving over the last 3 or 4 days.  The initial shock led to the media reporting things in plain language, but now there are more and more weasel words as the story gets massaged to fit the narrative.  Both the stories and the District Attorney have started saying that this wasn't a hate crime, even though we know that a group of white teenagers attacking a black man would be described as precisely that.  And despite the video showing one kid spitting on the man when he was on the ground.

Initially there was a lot of talk about the "knockout game", but that's been swept down the memory hole.  It's not The Narrative to talk about how groups of black teens target whites to sucker punch them, although this is why The Queen Of The World and I have not been to Baltimore's inner harbor - it's just not safe.

And Maryland is a "May Issue" State, and the police won't give carry licenses unless you're politically well connected.

Quote of the Day, Stupid Gun Control edition

Sean Sorrentino brings clarity to the "do it for the children" debate:

How many years in Federal PMITA prison does AOC, ‘The Squad,’ Douche Nukem, and the rest of the Left think should gun owners get for ordinary gun owning behavior?

Make them defend sending Uncle Andy to the Federal slammer for loaning his turkey gun to his neighbor. Make them defend sending Cousin Mike to the Big House for teaching his friend’s wife to shoot. Make them defend it in public and on the floor of the House of Representatives.

Yup.

The War On Drugs takes down Oklahoma

I've been very vocal for a very long time about how the stupid War On Drugs is destroying much of this country.  Now we can add Oklahoma to the list.  The Oklahoma State Attorney General sued Johnson & Johnson because (a) there are a lot of Okie opioid deaths and (b) J & J make and sell prescription opiods.  Never mind that science has shown that overdose deaths do not result from prescription medication, an Okie judge awarded the State a half billion dollars in damages.  There are something like 1,000 other lawsuits lined up on the taxiways as other States are salivating for all the shake-down dough.

Buh-bye, Johnson & Johnson.

Aesop has a fine rant about this and you should go right now and read it.  I particularly like this part:

It will start with J&J ceasing all opiate sales to Oklahoma, in perpetuity.
(Hint: they should institute that policy tomorrow. Then refer the howling from hundreds of thousands of agonized senior citizens to Judge Fucktard, and post his home phone number and that of the OK AG on the J&J website for complaints.)

Then every other drug company should follow suit, and will.

His point that this will end up driving firearms manufacturers out of business hits center mass as well.

The one thing that I would add is that this is the modus operandi we should expect from the government: they are incompetent to do their assigned task (win the stupid War On Drugs; sure, it's unwinable but they're the ones who want to fight that battle so this is on them).  Rather than get better at their job, they look for someone innocent to blame while they shake down cash and prizes that is fed right back into their patronage mill.

Pretty sweet scam, right there.  It would have a medieval robber baron taking notes.  Of course, the problem is the same as that faced by the robber baron: you steal half of the merchant goods passing by your castle and soon there won't be any merchant goods passing by your castle.  It's killing the goose that lays golden eggs.

The price of prescription opioids is fixin' to skyrocket, just like the price of cigarettes skyrocketed after the tobacco settlement of the 1990s.  Poorpeople will have to choose whether to eat or to live in pain.  Some will decide to go to the local dealer for the street fare because it will be a penny on the dollar compared with the script their Doc writes.  Some of these will OD.

Nice going, Oklahoma.  You've just about fucked up the situation in every possible way imaginable.

So Aesop, can we now declare victory on the stupid War On Drugs and bring the troops home?  Or should we keep burning the village down to save it?

Prescription pain killers do not lead to addiction or overdose death

So says a 20 year study in Germany:

The newer study, published last March in Deutsches Arzteblatt International, estimates that in 2016 there were 166,294 "opioid-addicted persons in Germany." The researchers add that "comparisons with earlier estimates" indicate the number was about the same two decades before then, prior to the dramatic increase in opioid prescriptions. In other words, a large increase in consumption of narcotic pain relievers did not lead to a surge in addiction, whether to those drugs or to illicit opioids such as heroin.

What's more, OECD data compiled by J.J. Rich, a policy analyst at the Reason Foundation (which publishes this website), show that deaths involving licit and illicit opioids did not rise in Germany either. In fact, both the number of deaths and the death rate declined during the same period when prescriptions were climbing.

So what does the brutal crackdown on prescription pain killers accomplish (other than to keep Americans in chronic agony)?   Well, it keeps the loot from Asset Forfeiture rolling into Law Enforcement coffers: Law Enforcement Took More Stuff From People Than Burglars Did.

The War On Drugs is stupid, and is being run by stupid people.

Prisons are denying books on programming to inmates

I'm not sure how many inmates want a life of grinding code, but this seems a bit cruel to deny them the chance of getting a high-skill job when they get out:

The Oregon Department of Corrections has banned prisoners from reading a number of books related to technology and programming, citing concerns about security.

According to public records obtained by the Salem Reporter, the Oregon Department of Corrections has banned dozens of books related to programming and technology as they come through the mail room, ensuring that they don’t get to the hands of prisoners.

At least in official department code, there is no blanket ban on technology-related books. Instead, each book is individually evaluated to assess potential threats. Many programming-related books are cited as “material that threatens,” often including the subject matter (“computer programming”) as justification.

Rejected books that are geared towards hacking, such as Justin Seitz’s Black Hat Python, may represent a clearer threat to the Department of Corrections, which fears that prisoners could use those tools to compromise their systems. But how did books such as Windows 10 for Dummies, Microsoft Excel 2016 for Dummies, and Google Adsense for Dummies (marked as posing "clear and present danger"), fail the prison’s security test?

The Iron Law of Bureaucracy is in full force here, I see.  But it will be totes different when the Democrats ram their "Democratic Socialism" down our throats ...

Slouching towards Civil War 2.0

It's long been said that Republicans think that Democrats are stupid, while Democrats think that Republicans are evil.  So what happens when you combine stupid with evil?

Act the first: The Stupid, it burns!

Dugas works as a retail security manager, so he went back into the mall to look at surveillance footage of the parking lot. 

At 12:40 p.m., a car parked next to his SUV. Four women got out. Two of them peered into his vehicle — where there was a red "Make America Great Again" hat on the console.

The women went into a store, reappeared seven minutes later and got into their car. But a minute later, the driver and front passenger got out again.

There's a special type of stupid in slashing someone's tire because they have a MAGA hat on their dashboard.  It's a double dose of stupid when it's in a place where there's pretty ubiquitous surveillance. Nick Dugas worked for Mall security and so he had access to the camera footage, but any customer who was victim of a crime would have had Mall Security's full cooperation.  The perp was going to get caught, and caught easily.  Over a MAGA hat and a hair trigger temper.

Like I said, stupid.  But there's more.

Act the second: Evil is as evil does.

Dugas saw this kid sleeping on his belly and the 6-foot-6 man bent down to help him. He fed him, gained his confidence, and learned the truth. 

Bland wrote, "The boy began to talk. His mom took off when he was 2. He lived with his dad. But he had run away a week ago. He told him why. 

"Dugas listened in silence. He had grown up in Portland, Oregon, with attentive parents and a big sister in a nice house. They had taken family vacations and camped every summer. While he might not have had everything he wanted, he had everything he needed.
"Sitting at the table, the boy had inched up his shirt to show Dugas his back. There were lash marks, 63 of them, where he had been hit with a broken car antenna." 

Dugas took the kid in. This required filing paperwork, getting cleared by the state as a foster parent, and getting permission from the father to take the kid in. Dugas and eventually adopted him. Last June was his first Father's Day as a father.

That was the man who was seen as so evil (for having a MAGA hat) that someone slashed his tire.

This is the sort of story that makes me wonder if this Republic can survive.  Democrats have seen Republicans as evil for a long time, but now they're acting stupidly.  Violently and stupidly.  And that is perhaps causing Republicans - who have long seen Democrats as stupid - to now see them as evil as well.

The middle ground of shared "we're all in this together" that has been a core of political life in this Republic as long as I can remember is fraying.  Once those bonds snap, it will get very ugly.  Plausibly you could make the argument that we're already in a shooting war, although I don't think that I'd go that far.

Not yet.  But going into next year's election campaign we can expect things to get worse, not better.

But it doesn't matter whether you're a good citizen or a good neighbor.  Not if you have a MAGA hat on your dashboard.  This will not end well.

You know that the Green New Deal has already been tried?

Southern Australia has been trying it good and hard for ten years or more.  The latest madness is a judge refusing to authorize the construction of a coal fired electricity plant because of "Climate Change".  So the GND madness is not unique to these shores.

So what are the fruits of that tree?  You know, no fossil fuels, 100% reliance of "renewable" energy?  That sort of thing?  A billion dollars for a single day's power bill:

The cost of electricity on Thursday in two states of Australia reached a tally of $932 million dollars for a single day of electricity. Thanks to David Bidstrup on Catallaxy for calculating it. 

... 

In Victoria, per capita, that means it cost $110 for one day’s electricity. For South Australians, Thursday’s electricity bill was $140 per person. (So each household of four just effectively lost $565.) In both these states those charges will presumably be paid in future price rises, shared unevenly between subsidized solar users and suffering non-solar hostages. The costs will be buried such that duped householders will not be aware of what happened. Coles and Woolworths will have to add a few cents to everything to cover their bills, and the government will have to cut services or increase taxes. No one will know how many jobs are not offered or opportunities lost. This is the road to Venezuela. 

If Hazelwood had still been open, the whole bidstack would have changed, quite probably saving electricity consumers in those two states hundreds of dollars. Eight million Australians could have had a weekend away, gone to a ball, or bought brand new fishing gear. And this is just one single day of electricity. If Liddell closes, things will get worse, no matter how much unreliable not-there-when-you-need-it capacity we add to the system. Indeed, the more fairy capacity we add, the worse it gets. NSW will soon join the SA-Vic club. 

This is what happens when an electricity grid is run by kindergarten arts graduates who struggle with numbers bigger than two.

$500 per family for a single day's electricity.  There's your Green New Deal.  The only question is why Australians are not rioting in the streets and burning their politicians in effigy.  Maybe the reason is that we see voters going for this madness here, too: Georgetown Texas household electricity bills rise by $1200/year due to "100% renewable" power.

Frankly, I can't think of a more regressive tax - it falls heaviest on the poor and the only benefit is to let smug upper middle class liberals feel even smugger.  Tagged with the post tag "evil" because, well, you know.  What a nasty class war tax it all is.

The Catholic Church has a swamp that needs to be drained

In a time of universal (dare we say catholic) deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.  Click through and read the entire document which is damning.

The response so far is fascinating.  The Pope says he won't talk about it, and Cardinal Cupich says that this whole sorry mess is just a distraction keeping the Church from talking about climate change. That's what a swamp looks like.

So just what's in the report on the Pennsylvania priests?

The Czar of Muscovy reads through it for us.  Wow.

The scandal isn't just in the Catholic Church - it's also in the Media

Peter describes the Catholic Church's situation in Pennsylvania, cutting through the fog of words to the heart of the crimes:

The reality of that abuse in the hearts and minds and souls of the victims is simply indescribable.  I invite all of you to try to put yourselves in the shoes of a child as he or she (in the context of the Catholic crisis, usually he) is stripped naked, fondled, abused, raped . . . and then told, by the perpetrators - those he's been taught by his parents are spiritual authorities - that it's his fault, or that he mustn't talk about it, or that God will be angry if he doesn't allow future abuses.  That reality is so ghastly, in the mind of a child, as to defy description. [Peter's emphasis]

There is a reason that this is a crime.

I was living in the People's Republic of Massachusetts in 2002 when a similar scandal broke, and I'm struck by the difference in media coverage between then and now.  16 years ago, the coverage was almost hysterical, and went on for months.  Today, it looks like this will have dropped from the headlines by the end of the week.  That's something to make you go "hmmmm".

There is a story that is not being told here.  Eric Raymond went into this way back in 2002 in The Elephant In The Bath-House:

That there is a pattern in the national media of political correctness and spin on behalf of preferred `victim’ groups isn’t news, nor is the fact that homosexuals are among those groups. But get this: Richard Berke, the Washington editor of the New York Times recently said “literally three-quarters of the people deciding what’s on the front page are not-so-closeted homosexuals”. There you have it in plain English; gays run the “newspaper of record”. Berke made these comments before a gay advocacy group — not merely admitting but outright asserting, as a matter of pride, that the Times engages in gay-friendly spin control. And it has already been well established by statistical content studies that the national media tend to follow where they’re led by the Times and a handful of other prestige newspapers, all broadly similar in editorial policy.

If you want to read more about Richard Burke, here's a place to start.  It may be that I remember much more intense news coverage then because I lived at ground zero.  The Boston Globe was all over this story, but perhaps it was considered a local story by the editorial board at the Times.  Pretty clearly, this is going on today.  But there's very likely a reason that the editorial board wants this to go away:

Gay men, or at least the sort of university-educated gay men who wind up determining what’s on the front page of the New York Times and spiking stories like the Dirkhising murder, know these facts. How surprising would it be if they interpreted most victims’ charges of abuse as a product of retrospective false consciousness, implanted in them by a homophobic and gay-oppressing culture? By suppressing the homosexual identification of most of the accused priests, gays in the media can protect their own sexual and political interests while believing — perhaps quite sincerely — that they are quietly aiding the cause of freedom.

Media bias most clearly manifests itself not in slanted reporting, but rather in what is never reported at all.  The murder of Jesse Dirkhising wasn't reported at all, while the murder of Matthew Shepard was front page news for weeks.  But Raymond dissects the politically correct spin and cuts to the heart of the matter, reaching the same conclusion that Peter does:

The trouble with this comforting lullaby is that, even if NAMBLA is right, coercion matters a lot. As Ms. Eberstadt reports, the pederastically and pedophilically abused often become broken, dysfunctional people. They show up in disproportionate numbers in drug and alcohol rehab. They have a high rate of involvement in violent crime. Worse, they end to become abusers themselves,perpetuating the damage across generations. 

... 

It may turn out that the consequences of sympathizing with NAMBLA are almost equally ugly. If a climate of `enlightened’ tolerance for consensual pederasty and pedophilia tends to increase the rate at which boys are abused, that is a very serious consequence for which gay liberationists will not (and should not) soon be forgiven. The homosexual gatekeepers at the Times may be making themselves accessories before and after the fact to some truly hideous crimes.

And this is where we come back to the priestly-abuse scandal. Because a theme that keeps recurring in histories of the worst abusers is that they were trained in seminaries that were run by homosexual men and saturated with gay-liberationist subculture. Reading accounts of students at one notorious California seminary making a Friday-night ritual of cruising gay bars, it becomes hard not to wonder if gay culture itself has not been an important enabler of priestly abuse.

This has been known for decades.  None of this is a surprise to anyone who has remotely been paying attention, whether that "anyone" is a Bishop or on the NYT Editorial Board.  And Raymond now circled back to where Peter stands:

Now it’s time to abandon the catch-all term abuse and speak plainly the name of the crime: sexual coercion and rape.

Speaking plainly is the foundation of communication, and anyone who will not speak plainly presumably does not want to communicate.  The same words and spin are being used today as were used back in 2002.  The fog of words never allows the expression child rape because that would be a strong wind of clarity, blowing away the fog of political correctness.

Let me say again: None of this is a surprise to anyone who has remotely been paying attention, whether that "anyone" is a Bishop or on the NYT Editorial Board.

I agree 100% with Peter that the enablers in the Catholic hierarchy need to go.  But the Media that airbrushes these crimes from the newspaper is as complicit in the crimes as the Bishop who quietly reassigned a priest to a different parish.  Both did it for what they perceived as a higher purpose, and both are just one more flagstone laid on the road to some other child's personal Hell.

I encourage you to read both Peter's and Raymond's articles in full.  The institutional rot goes deep.

Digging for Hitler

Wow.  This is more than a little creepy.  Tacitus thinks that he may have helped excavate a battlefield where Adolf Hitler served in World War I.  This is very thought provoking, and highly recommended.

The past isn't dead.  It isn't even past.

- William Faulkner

Scientists: Post-birth abortion is super duper OK

Ignore for the moment that we have a perfectly fine word for "post birth abortion" (infanticide), this is pretty bold:

The article, published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, says newborn babies are not “actual persons” and do not have a “moral right to life”. The academics also argue that parents should be able to have their baby killed if it turns out to be disabled when it is born.

...

The article, entitled “After-birth abortion: Why should the baby live?”, was written by two of Prof Savulescu’s former associates, Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva.

They argued: “The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus in the sense that both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual.”

Rather than being “actual persons”, newborns were “potential persons”. They explained: “Both a fetus and a newborn certainly are human beings and potential persons, but neither is a ‘person’ in the sense of ‘subject of a moral right to life’.

Unsurprisingly (but hysterically) the scientists complain that they're getting death threats.  Hey Doc, what makes you think that you yourself are a person, subject of a moral right to life?  Pot, meet kettle.

But let's take this idea and run with it.  After all, this concept is as old as time, and the the old Roman Pater Familias had life and death power over his children.  And all the kids marching for gun control is pretty annoying right now, so why don't we just extend co-blogger ASM826's excellent idea of no rights for kids until they turn 21 to allow post-birth abortion of them until they are 21?

I mean, the idea is no more stupid than the one that just got published in a Journal that deigns to call itself "Medical Ethics".  And scientists wonder why the public trusts them less than in years past.

William Blake (verse) and Sir Hubert Parry (score), Jerusalem

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

- William Blake, Jerusalem

William Blake was a revolutionary, a supporter of the French revolution, and was actually tried (and acquitted) of High Treason and Sedition in 1804 England.  Considered borderline mad by his contemporaries, he became highly regarded in later years.  His writings became a core of the Fabian Socialists, and this hymn (put to music in 1916 by Sir Hubert Parry) became a favorite with working class socialists.

And still is today.  Socialist Review opens their article on the hymn with this:

For Danny Boyle, on the left, Jerusalem created the opportunity to include industrial workers in the Olympic opening ceremony. For David Cameron, on the right, Jerusalem is an expression of distinctively English nationhood. For many ordinary people Jerusalem offers a welcome alternative to the depressing, jingoist dirge of God Save the Queen.

Jerusalem is open to many interpretations. William Blake was a complex character and his works can be difficult to read - but one thing Blake was not was a nationalist of any kind. He was a revolutionary.

This hymn is more complicated for today's left to swallow because of the Nationalist themes.  In contrast, Beethoven's annexation of Schiller's Ode To Joy in his Ninth Symphony is universalist and so is acceptable to socialist organizations like the Olympics or the European Union, both of which have adopted it as their anthem.  International organizations must needs adopt universalist symbols.

But in Britain, no such constraints are felt, and since the triumph of socialism in that land is complete, this hymn remains popular.  It touches a deep nerve, and the words fail describe the never sleeping mania of the Left:

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.

Scientists and experts would plan, and workers would compete with zeal, until the New Jerusalem stood in England's green and pleasant land.  That was the ideal.

The reality is, if not quite as grotesque as the other socialist experiments behind the Iron Curtain and elsewhere, plenty grotesque.  A bumbling National Health Service is revered by the populace as it intentionally kills their children.  Attempts by desperate parents to seek care outside England's green and pleasant land are blocked by police; the Sword indeed does not sleep in their hand.  It's not enough that the NHS doesn't provide care, no others must be allowed to either.

And so the New Jerusalem is indeed built, but it is a ruin.  It is perhaps best described by another English poet who lived a century after Blake.  In The Wasteland, T. S. Eliot painted a very different vision of England's future.  It's a little uncanny how the opening line is extra poignant today:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

But he is only warming up.  Here is his vision of the New Jerusalem that was being built, even as he wrote:

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.

The NHS remains quite popular despite the furious sacrifice of toddlers on Socialism's altar.  The national propaganda effort has borne fruit, although like propaganda in all mature socialist societies it is very strange:

Theodore Dalrymple explained this well.

"In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is...in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to," he wrote.

Yet another English author, C. S. Lewis explains the poisoned fruit of the Fabian Socialists who now rule the realm and who direct the NHS:

We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

But at least the public holds the NHS in high esteem.  England is screwed.  The English people are screwed, but at least they seem to like it.  Pretty music, though, and nice pictures of a land now lost.  Pictures from an England that is in the place that Great Britain used to be.

NHS Death Watch, Day 3

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— Sal the Agorist (@SallyMayweather) April 26, 2018

The sacrifice of the children

There was in their city a bronze image of Cronus [Ba'al] extending its hands, palms up and sloping toward the ground, so that each of the children when placed thereon rolled down and fell into a sort of gaping pit filled with fire.

- Diodorus Siculus (1st Century BC)

Ancient Carthage was founded by Phoenicians, who brought their religion of Ba'al with them.  You may be more familiar with their Canaanite cousins: Beelzebub from the Bible is the Hebrew's view of the same deity, and they roundly condemned its worship.  In particular, they wrote of the practice of sacrificing infant children to the god.  The Carthaginians continued this practice, seemingly even after their conquest by Rome.

In addition to many ancient written sources that discussed this sacrifice, there is archaeological evidence.  The site of Carthage has cemeteries full of urns.  The urns contain the charred bones of infant children, and even children as old as two years.

Image via El Wik

Tertullian, writing around 200 AD tells of how a Roman governor had priests of Ba'al crucified for continuing this practice.  Even as ruthless and stoic a people as they blanched at this ritual slaughter of the innocent.

Oh, for modern-day governors cut from that same cloth.  Children are still being sacrificed on the alter today, only this time it is the altar of socialized medicine:

Alfie Evans, the severely ill toddler whose life support machine was switched off on Monday, could immediately be flown to a children’s hospital in Rome for treatment if a last-ditch appeal succeeds, a solicitor involved in the case has said.

The child’s parents were granted an emergency hearing before a high court judge on Tuesday afternoon after they said the 23-month-old boy had been breathing unassisted since his life support was removed.

His father later said that water and oxygen had been restored.

Read that last sentence again, if you have the stomach to.  His father later said that water and oxygen had been restored.

Doctors cut off water from a baby.  How could that have happened?

The religion of socialized medicine rules the land that used to be Great Britain.  That religion has a priesthood, trained in the Universities and ruthless in their demand to be appeased.  They control the purse strings of the hospitals, and therefore the doctors.  Their sacred writ (the "Liverpool Pathway") is enforced - and they pay cash money for sacrifices, to the tune of millions of pounds sterling each year.

The priesthood's rule is so complete that the parents were forbidden to take their baby out of the country, even though there were other countries willing to take him.  Italy made Alfie a citizen, entitling him to healthcare in that land.  The Pope himself offered free hospital care, and appealed personally to the priesthood in the British Isles.

We shall see how this plays out.  It played out badly last year for little Charlie Gard, a baby in the same locale who met a bitter fate on the altar of Ba'al the NHS.  Because that god is a cruel one, with an unending appetite for human sacrifice.  How very odd that Progressives think they're inventing new and better paradigms, when they are merely reverting to the old and discredited.

Remember, these people look down on you as incompletely civilized.  With me, the feeling is mutual.

He [Cato] never gave his opinion in the Senate on any other point whatsoever, without adding these words "And in my opinion, Carthage should be utterly destroyed". [Delenda est Carthago]

- Plutarch, Lives of the Noble Romans

UPDATE 24 April 2018 19:05: Word:

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— Sal the Agorist (@SallyMayweather) April 24, 2018