Counterstrike
Reflections on 'Blowback' - Lee Harris
It is simply a myth to believe that only interventionism yields unintended consequence, since doing nothing at all may produce the same unexpected results. If American foreign policy had followed a course of strict non-interventionism, the world would certainly be different from what it is today; but there is no obvious reason to think that it would have been better.
Iran: The wrong options on the table
- Spengler
The neo-conservatives "idealists" in the US had an easy, neat and plausible solution to the Middle East in the form of exporting democracy to the region. They were wrong. Similarly, the "realists", who, judging by the recent intelligence estimate on Iran, are in the ascendancy in the Bush administration, have a neat and easy solution - balance of power and deterrence. They are also wrong. There will not be a happy ending.
The abandonment of the Jews - Caroline Glick
The US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran's nuclear intentions is the political version of a tactical nuclear strike on efforts to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear bombs.
In Praise of Carbon - John BrignellSuch delicious irony. How is that today's twisted eco-fascists have turned the source of all life into the destroyer of worlds?
Road to Bali - Peter FosterThe issue is not whether humanity will succumb to a "climate crisis," ... it's whether the authoritarian enemies of freedom (who rarely if ever recognize themselves as such) will succeed in using environmental hysteria to undermine capitalism and increase their Majesterium.
Television Networks Fade To Black As The U.S. Surge Succeeds In Iraq - Rich NoyesWinning the war? Who cares about that?
How to be a ?dudelike? mum
Zoe Williams? witty and insightful Bring It On, Baby joins a tiny handful of new books calling for solidarity between parents and a war of resistance against patronising parenting propaganda.
Why more and more people feel ?mentally ill?
Yes, the American Psychiatric Association?s DSM is mad, labelling even shyness a disorder. But it didn?t create today?s therapy culture.
Hans Blix?s Stalinist rewriting of history
Far from being anti-war heroes, UN weapons inspectors paved the way for the bombing of the ?bastards? and ?moral lepers? of Iraq.
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The trust thing - July 28, 2010
Conrad Black is out of prison in Florida; the former CanWest papers are acquiring new owners; the JournoList scandal continues in the U.S.; and we sweat through insupportably humid heat, thanks to jetstreams a long way north of where they should b...
Good news - July 25, 2010
Let me record in passing how happy I am that the Harper government is getting rid of the "long form" of the census. Or rather, I wish it were doing so entirely: instead it is replacing one of innumerable arbitrary invasions of the citizen's privac...
JournoLism - July 24, 2010
The word "detachment" has several meanings. It may refer, for instance, to the state of being free of prejudice or bias, to being "disinterested" -- a word that in turn means almost the opposite of "uninterested." But it can also refer to a milita...
The United States and Europe stood up to Serbia. Can they stand up to North K...
The impressive decision last week by the International Court of Justice in The Hague?to reject the claim submitted by Serbia that Kosovo's 2008 declaration of independence was unlawful?was mostly either ignored or reported in articles festooned with false alarmism about hypothetical future secessions. Allow this precedent, moaned many, and what is to stop, say, Catalonia from breaking away?
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Mel Gibson's tirades are the distilled violence, cruelty, and bigotry of righ...
Every time Mel Gibson unburdens himself of a tirade against Jews or "n______s" or uncooperative females, there are commentators on hand to create a mystery where none exists. When he produced The Passion of the Christ, which lovingly and in detail recycled the bloody myth that all Jews are historically and collectively responsible for the murder of Jesus, it was argued by many mainstream Christians that his zeal for the faith might be a touch lurid but that the film itself was mainly devotional. When he was arrested on the Malibu freeway and screamed abuse at a police officer to the effect that Jews were responsible for all the wars in the world, pundits convened on page and screen to speculate whether our Mel had too much to drink that evening. Not long ago, I watched him go completely bug-eyed on television at a Jewish interviewer who asked him about the latter incident. "You've got a dog in this fight, haven't you?" he hissed. And now, in the wake of a Niagara of cloacal abuse directed at the mother of his youngest child, in which we were spared nothing by way of obscenity and menace and nothing by way of paranoid and sexualized racism, there have been those who diagnose Gibson's problem as a lack of anger management skills, combined perhaps with a touch of narcissistic personality disorder.
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Why is the U.S. Treasury Department subsidizing zealots who oppose our foreig...
Has President Barack Obama ever looked more ineffectual than he did last week, sitting almost wordlessly next to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while the latter, on what seems like his 10th trip to Washington this year, lectured us all yet again on the importance of leaving Israel unmolested and even uncriticized? Even as the press conference dragged on, with the words "peace process" coming to sound more hollow and mocking by the moment, bulldozers and settlers were continuing their apparently uninterruptable creation of facts on the ground, all designed to forestall or pre-empt the availability of a geographic space in which even a vestigial Palestinian state could be created. Barely reported was the blatantly expressed view of Netanyahu's thuggish foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman?a man so hostile to diplomacy that he barely travels?that no such state could be expected from the current negotiations in any case. Apparently forgotten is the humiliation of Vice President Joe Biden, whose visit to Jerusalem last March was made laughable when the Israeli housing ministry?currently under the control of the religious Orthodox Shas Party?insisted on pressing ahead with new construction in a hotly disputed neighborhood.
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Whatever happened to humane medicine?
It is scandalous that doctors are refusing treatment to patients who smoke, drink or eat junk food.
Rob Lyons
Doctors in the UK, prompted by policy changes by government, are increasingly refusing to treat patients because they smoke, drink or weigh too much. Who the hell do they think they are?
In the latest example of this trend, health chiefs in Norfolk and Newcastle-under-Lyme have decided to refuse certain kinds of non-urgent surgery to smokers – including hip and knee replacements. Both NHS areas are in financial crisis and are looking for ways to save money – and the government’s relentless campaigning against our bad habits have made smokers, drinkers and the overweight an easy target for these bean-counters.
The head of the Norfolk primary care trust (PCT), Dr John Battersby, defended the decision: ‘There is increasing evidence that smokers have three times the number of complications as non-smokers. What we are proposing is that if someone who smokes is being referred for surgery, we would instead want them to be referred to a smoking cessation clinic and give them three months to stop smoking.’ (1) After the three months are up, those who have stopped will proceed to surgery, while those who still smoke will be considered on the basis of ‘clinical need’.
In November last year, East Suffolk PCT barred obese patients from having similar surgery until they tried to lose weight. The argument was that replacement joints are more likely to fail if the patient is heavier; although as Brian Keeble, the trust’s director of public health, admitted: ‘We cannot pretend that this [decision] wasn’t stimulated by the pressing financial problems of the NHS in East Suffolk.’ (2) In December 2005, a patient at Lincoln County hospital was refused treatment on the arteries in his leg until he gave up smoking. A spokesman for the hospital said: ‘To proceed with treatment while patients smoke gives the wrong message, as it condones the habit.’ (3)
All these decisions in turn rely on a change of policy by the government’s National Institute for Clinical Excellence (or, ironically, NICE for short) that allowed health authorities to take patient lifestyles into account when deciding whether a particular treatment would be effective. While there may be medical logic in not going ahead with a procedure if it would be doomed to failure (it is wrong to put a patient through unnecessary pain if such treatment would not ultimately help them) it is quite another to refuse it on the grounds that it would cost more. From this perspective, we could see a complete recalculation of waiting lists along strictly utilitarian lines, with younger, fitter patients, who lead the ‘right’ kind of lifestyle, prioritised over those who might be more expensive to treat.
Frankly, the doctors behind these various decisions should be struck off. Their thinking is in direct contradiction to the spirit of medicine going right back to Hippocrates. When the Greek physician swore to ‘prescribe regimens for the good of my patients according to my ability’ there was no rider along the lines of ‘unless I don’t approve of the way they live’.
It is not for doctors to judge their patients’ foibles but to give them the best treatment in the circumstances. As the microbiologist Rene Dubos noted in the 1960s: ‘In the words of a wise physician, it is part of the doctor’s function to make it possible for his patients to go on doing the pleasant things that are bad for them – smoking too much, eating and drinking too much – without killing themselves any sooner than is necessary.’ (4)
Whatever happened to humane medicine? It is one thing to advise a patient that giving up smoking or losing a few pounds will aid their recovery or increase the chances of success. It is quite another to refuse treatment altogether.
There is also the small matter of patient autonomy. While rationing of one form or another has been ever-present in the NHS, there has been the general principle that patients will be treated on a first come, first served basis, regardless of their income or lifestyle. Using access to public services to modify behaviour is something more closely associated with dictatorial regimes. The result is a peculiar form of torture. Those who require hip or knee replacement operations are clearly in pain, and usually severely hampered by their condition. This is coercion through healthcare, as surely as twisting someone’s arm. The defence of autonomy, our freedom to live as we choose rather than as our government or our doctors see fit, is far more important than balancing the books of a cash-strapped NHS.
It is bad enough that we should be harangued at every turn about the way we live to the point where our pleasures are ruined by guilt at every puff, sip and mouthful. To force people to live in pain till they fall into line should be a cause for national scandal. It is a measure of how browbeaten we have become in matters of health that it is not.
(1) Give up or we won’t operate, smokers told, Daily Mail, 23 October 2006
(2) NHS cash crisis bars knee and hip replacements for obese, Guardian, 23 November 2005
(3) Hospital refuses to treat smoker, BBC News, 19 December 2005
(4) The Mirage of Health, by Rene Dubos, quoted in The Tyranny of Health by Dr Michael Fitzpatrick
reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/1979/
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