Dr. Big Brother Is Watching You?

I am laughing. I mean, rolling on the floor, cackling hysterically, ready-for-the-jacket-with-the-sleeves-that-tie-in-the-back laughing. Read this article and then come back. Go on, I'll wait.

Done? Good. So Rep. Tim Huelskamp is afraid of the Federal Government getting its hands on everybody's private medical records because the Federal Government has a bad track record of securing the privacy of the information it collects. He fears it will lead to the loss of insurance company proprietary information that will undermine their competitiveness. Uh, guy, destroying the competitiveness of the insurance companies in order to drive them out of business and collapse the United States into a single-payer, government-run system that the majority of Americans don't want is the whole purpose of ObamaCare. Are you just now figuring this out?

And he spends the majority of his op-ed piece on these issues. But I can tell you know what the real problem is. Why didn't you make that the main emphasis of your article? Afraid of being singled out as the one who starts calling attention to the man behind the curtain? Not ready for the fires of holy hell to be place beneath your feet?
Let's look at some selected quotes from the piece:

It’s par for the course with the federal government, but abstract terms are used to distract from the real objectives of this idea: no matter which “option” is chosen, government bureaucrats would have access to the health records of every American - including you..... With its extensive rule-making decrees, ObamaCare has been an exercise in creating authority out of thin air at the expense of individuals’ rights, freedoms, and liberties. The ability of the federal government to spy on, review, and approve individuals’ private patient-doctor interactions is an excessive power-grab..... No matter what the explanation is, however, this type of data collection is an egregious violation of patient-doctor confidentiality and business privacy. It is like J. Edgar Hoover in a lab coat.

And then you weasel out at the end with the use of that one last wrong word:

....too many people already know what can result when their confidential information gets into the wrong hands, either intentionally or unintentionally.

The wrong word here is the word wrong. From the point of view of the people creating these rules, they think they are finally getting our private medical information into the right hands. But for those of us who love liberty and our God-given rights, we know that it is the Feds who are the most wrong people. And from all these quotes from the article, it is clear that Rep. Huelskamp is aware of this fact also. So why not just say it in so many words when you have such a bully pulpit to shout it from?

The biggest problem we face is not that the Federal Government might accidentlally release your medical records; it is that the Federal Government itself will do nefarious things with your medical records. Like decide that you don't get treated for your heart failure because you belong to the NRA. Or you're a TEA Party member. Or that you donated money to John McCain or Mitt Romney.

It is this kind of grab for power -- the power over individual life and death itself -- that I recognized instantly was the biggest threat from ObamaCare. And I recognized it before Dear Leader was even elected.
I laugh so hard now because I find it so amazing that it is taking so many people this long to understand this.

But I don't find it particularly funny. No, I don't find it very funny at all.

Repealing Just ObamaCare Is Not Enough

More Federal judges continue to properly find the insurance mandate unconstitutional, though most of them are ignoring the fact that the law being challenged has no severability clause, meaning that technically finding one piece of the legislation unconstitutional should actually negate all of it.  But since when has following the letter of the law mattered to a Federal judge?  Despite the not-unreasonable expectation that the Supreme Court will kill this nightmare once and for all, legislators on the right continue to call for the repeal of "ObamaCare", and the candidates for the Republican nomination for President are falling over each other (at least most of them) to try to make us think that he or she alone is the one who can best accomplish this task.

I must insist, however, that if we are to repeal "ObamaCare", repealing just ObamaCare is not enough.

In order to make myself clear, we must get technical.  When most people, and especially most politicians, refer to "ObamaCare", they are referring to the piece of legislation that is more accurately called the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, or PPACA for short.  This is the law that is undergoing all the legal challenges, and the law that public opinion is increasingly opposed to.  The PPACA is not the entirety of "ObamaCare", and if we are to get rid of "ObamaCare", the repeal bill needs to address all of it.  I have actually discussed this with my Congressman, but it appears that he didn't get the point, as the House has passed a repeal bill for only the PPACA.

There are two additional pieces of legislation that must be disposed of in order to repeal "ObamaCare".  Leaving either one in place provides a framework for the reinstitution of this monster.  What makes this interesting is that Dear Leader had absolutely nothing to do with the passage of one of these pieces of legislation.
Some explanation of how these laws are connected is required to fully understand why repealing the PPACA alone is insufficient.

PPACA is the final implementation of the Obama "healthcare" reform.  It is the law that has everyone so hot and bothered.  It is my considered opinion that the PPACA was never intended to function as it is designed, but is actually a veiled program to drive the insurance companies out of the medical insurance business, destabilize the current medical care system, and then force the imposition of a single-payer, government-run system.  But whether it works as written or as I suspect, it is built on the foundation of two previous pieces of legislation, without which PPACA makes no sense.  Since these two pieces of legislation are fundamental to the intended (or suspected) operation of PPACA, they must be considered to be parts of "ObamaCare".  The first of these is the so-called HITECH Act.

The HITECH (Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health) Act is not a separate piece of legislation but rather a section of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, usually referred to as "the Stimulus Bill".  This section of the stimulus bill is generally considered to be simply an act to promote the use of electronic medical record systems by doctors' offices and hospitals.  Many parts of PPACA do not work without these electronic record systems.  PPACA calls for the creation of "Accountable Care Organizations" and calls for a substantial amount of reporting (to the Federal Government) of healthcare "quality measures", both of which are tremendously burdensome if not downright impossible to comply with without the use of electronic record systems.  Where the insurance mandate is the financial glue that holds PPACA together, these EMR systems are the operational glue that binds your personal health records to the Federal overseers, uh, holds the PPACA together.

While compliance with HITECH is technically voluntary, meaning doctors are not mandated to adopt these EMR systems, in reality there is nothing very voluntary about it.  By offering incentives to act now to install and "meaningfully" use an EMR, and by implementing penalties (in the form of Medicare and Medicaid payment reductions that can be increased without limit if not enough doctors adopt an EMR), few doctors will be able to refuse to comply and still stay in business.  But the catch is the "meaningful" use part; the criteria established at present to "meaningfully" use an EMR (required to receive the incentives) are designed around those things needed to funnel information to the Feds, as well as a few other "feel-good" liberal functionalities that do nothing but get in the way of actually caring for patients.  There is even talk that the informational needs of operating a PPACA-defined Accountable Care Organization may be substituted for the currently proscribed meaningful use criteria.  And if that isn't a way of tying PPACA to HITECH, I don't know what is.

HITECH also makes changes in another, older piece of legislation, making the older bill's penalties stronger.  This older legislation is the bedrock upon which all of "ObamaCare" is built.  This would be the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996.  Yes, good ol' HIPAA, those letters that strung together give us doctors heartburn.  And yes, you read that right -- 1996.

What does HIPAA, the so-called Federal Privacy law, have to do with "ObamaCare"?  Simply put, HIPAA created the Federal "right" to privacy of medical records while at the same time setting down regulations to secure that new "right".  Prior to 1996, the privacy of medical records was a state issue, and HIPAA added no new privacy protections than 50 state legislatures had not already provided; it merely wedged the Federal Government into what had previously been considered a function of the individual states.

So how does HIPAA have anything to do with "ObamaCare"?

HIPAA wedges the Federal Government into medical records privacy and thus into the provision of medical care at all levels, whereas prior to HIPAA the Feds' involvement had been limited to Medicare and Medicaid.  Part of HIPAA was to guarantee the standardization and security of the electronic transmission of medical information between providers and insurance companies.  (Actually this was all HIPAA was really supposed to do regarding medical records, but the enabling regulations written by the Clinton White House went waaaay beyond this.  Don't believe me?  Read the law; subsection F starting on page 87 deals with the security rule.)  With their feet in the door, the Federal Government creates HITECH as another way to standardize and secure such transmissions.  HITECH then serves as the operational conduit of the information that is necessary for PPACA to work as intended (interpret that as you may; you know where I stand on that).  A leads to B leads to C, and if you don't think this was planned, then you have not been paying attention for the last 20 years or so.

Repeal only PPACA, and HITECH and HIPAA remain to allow the creation of another monstrosity like PPACA at any time in the future.  Repeal PPACA and HITECH, but leave HIPAA, and the Federal Government remains inside the medical house, ready to grow like kudzu.
Only by repealing PPACA, HITECH, and HIPAA can we be truly free of what we refer to as "ObamaCare".  Of course, this means that "ObamaCare" really has nothing to do with Obama, as it has been in the works now for over 15 years.

Only after ALL of "ObamaCare" is repealed can we get down to the business of truly fixing what is wrong with our medical care system.

Remembering

Today, the 10 year anniversary of the 9-11 attacks upon our nation, is a good time for remembering.

I had just gotten out of the shower that morning 10 years ago.  As I was drying off, I turned on the TV in my bedroom.  This TV was old and the sound came on before the picture.  I heard the news anchor say that a plane had struck the World Trade Center in New York.  I looked at the screen and as the picture came on, I saw smoke and flames coming from both of the Twin Towers.  My mind did the arithmetic before the anchor could repeat the facts.  One plane could not have hit both towers.  Two planes could not be an accident.  Someone had deliberately attacked the United States.

As I continued to get dressed, the news reports came quickly.  When a preliminary report came that there were reports of an explosion inside the Beltway in Washington D.C., I said to someone in my home, "My God, how many of them are there going to be?"  This was before the news media had confirmed the plane crashing into the Pentagon. 

As I ate a quick breakfast, I continued to watch the unfolding events.  I observed and commented on the collapse of the first tower before Peter Jennings could stop pontificating long enough to tell us what was happening right before his eyes.  As I left to go to my office, I asked the person staying at my house to call me when the second tower collapsed.  Not if, but when.  The damage to both buildings was identical; to my mind, the collapse of the second tower was inevitable.  That phone call came while I was meeting with my bankers to go through the annual review of the office retirement plan.

When I arrived at my office, I told my office staff what was going on.  Most of them had left for work and arrived at the office before the first plane had struck, so they were completely unaware of what was happening.  It took me a bit of convincing.  They all thought that I was pulling some sick practical joke on them.  It was only when we got a radio on (the only station we could find covering the event was of all things NPR!) that they really believed me.  It was on the radio that we heard the first confusing reports of the explosion in southern Pennsylvania that turned out to be the crash of Flight 93 and its heroic passengers.

At noontime I managed to get a TV brought to the office and was able to watch the reactions of my employees as they saw those horrible images for the first time.  Throughout the day, my patients (and unbelievably, I had no cancellations or no-shows that day) could discuss almost nothing else.  That afternoon, as I left the office, I looked up at the clear blue sky and saw two parallel, curving jet contrails arcing across the southern sky.  By that time all the commercial traffic was on the ground.  Those jet trails could only have belonged to the sky cap being flown around Houston.  After completing my evening hospital rounds, I came home and watched many hours of the TV coverage that had been recorded for me, repetitive scene after scene of the aftermath of this vicious attack. 

That is my 9-11 story.  As such stories go, it is not much.  I am fortunate to have not personally known anyone who was killed on that day. A couple of the doctors from my community were in Washington and were on their way to go on a tour of the Pentagon that morning. But for the grace of God and timing, they might have been in the building when the plane crashed into it and my connection to the attacks could have been more personal.  These events remain ingrained into my psyche nonetheless, and I doubt that I will ever forget them. 

But even more than the events themselves, I remember how they made me feel.  I was angry -- royally pissed off -- that someone, anyone, had dared to do this to us.  Late that evening, when President Bush finally got the Secret Service to let him off Air Force One and make a statement to the nation, I was comforted by his statement that those who had done this to us would be brought to justice.  I was comforted because I then knew that we had a President that understood, who was just as angry, and would be resolute in his response, something that I felt his predecessor would not have been.  This has taken a lot longer than most of us wanted it to, and that task is still not finished.  But I suspect that President Bush and his advisers knew then that we had been forced onto a path the end of which would require decades to reach, but wisely kept this to themselves.

And now we have reached the end of the first and the beginning of the second decade of that journey, and many American are already weary of it.  I did not get to watch much of the coverage of the anniversary memorials today, though I expect that I will see parts of them over the coming days.  I don't need to have seen much of them to know that they were heavy with remembrance and memorialization of the innocent dead and the heroes who died trying to save them as well as the heroes who followed who have died or been permanently injured in defense of our country and all of her citizens.  And that is as it should be.  I am equally sure that they were not heavy at all in recalling how we all felt on that day and the days that followed, and that is not how it should be. 

Already the horrors of that day are being glossed over so that we can remember the dead but not the anger, and that is not right.  We should be reminded regularly of that anger, we should be shown regularly the horrors without editing of the most gruesome parts, so that we can never forget that anger.  Not until all of those who did this to us or would do something similar are either apprehended, killed, or so overwhelmed by our resolve that they abandon any further attempts.

For it is when we stop remembering this that it will happen again.  And 12-7-41 and 9-11-01 will have a new date of infamy join them.

Waking Up

This blog has been awake for far too long.  Time for it to wake up!

Boldly Not Going Where No Man Has Gone Before

On Tax Day this year, April 15th, Dear Leader gave a speech at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida in which he announced his plans to end, for all intents and purposes, the American space program.

His announcement of the cancellation of the Constellation program (as misguided as that was; for a better idea, look at Direct Launcher), with no suggestion of a real plan for a replacement for the program, means the end of the American manned space program. The idea of "repurposing" the Orion crew capsule as an escape capsule for the International Space Station is worse than a joke -- since it will be an escape capsule that could not be used; without the Ares I booster, we will have no way of getting Orion to the ISS. Ares I was just barely powerful enough to lift Orion, and then only after Orion's weight was substantially reduced. Does NASA have another booster that can lift that much mass into orbit? (If the answer to this is yes, then why did they need to design Ares I in the first place?)

Dear Leader tossed out a lifeline in the form of a new heavy launch vehicle. But with nothing but vague plans for when it might be built or used, he more or less forgot to hold on to the other end of the lifeline, letting it drift off into space. The minimal increase in NASA's budget, directed to the design of the new heavy launch vehicle and new robotic space probe missions (most of which are climate research satellites), is also another maneuver being used to destroy the American space program.

Why do I say this? Because I remember what happened after the Apollo program was discontinued in the 1970's. While we waited for the space shuttle to make its maiden voyage, NASA's plans for unmanned probes to the planets were slowly, one-by-one, pared down or canceled. The shuttle itself was pared down as well, in addition to being twisted from its original design to satisfy the military who then never used it, leading to some of the obvious difficulties that the STS system has demonstrated over the years -- its high operational cost and slow turn-around time being two of the more obvious ones. In fact, at one point, the entire shuttle program was in danger of being scrapped. (Of course, if that had happened and the technology had been diverted into something similar to Direct Launcher, we would likely be much farther along in space exploration and at a lower cost, but that's a 'what if' that can be endlessly debated for a long time.) I also recall that a number of different interplanetary probes were scaled back or canceled under Clinton; the New Horizons mission to Pluto would have been one of these if not for the public's outcry. For some reason, the American people are very curious about Pluto. Maybe because it's on the frontier, and the frontier spirit of America has yet to be extinguished.

And that's what's going to happen to all these proposals. The robotic missions will be designed and planned but never built or launched -- except, of course, the climate research satellites, which are unnecessary. The heavy launch vehicle will never get off the drawing boards before the budget funds are diverted (to the climate research satellites) or canceled. The ISS will eventually become a victim of the budget ax, all in the name of "deficit reduction" while the US government spends ever more money on union-supporting 'stimulus' bills, 'corporate' bailouts, the exponentially malignant costs of abominable ObamaCare program, and climate research satellites that will show what we already know, that AGW is a myth.

Why? Because the Democrats don't have any desire to explore space. It has been the goal of every Democratic President since Kennedy to kill the space program. (Except for Johnson, who begrudgingly continued the space program as tribute to Kennedy. If he had known that Kennedy's only reason for supporting the space program was its Cold War propaganda value, and that his real attitude was that if not for that reason "we shouldn't be spending this kind of money, because I'm not that interested in space", Johnson may have killed Apollo from the outset and mankind might even now not yet have set foot upon the Moon.)

This decision will also lead to significant increases in unemployment (at a time when jobs are already scarce) -- not just at NASA, but in all the companies that build the rockets and probes and support systems for the missions, and then cascading out into the companies that provide the parts for the other companies, then to the raw material providers, and finally out into the retail an service sectors which will no longer be getting the monies spent by all these newly unemployed workers. Government spending on the space program is the only place where that spending actually does create jobs. So naturally this is the program that Dear Leader wants to cut.

The other ridiculous part of Dear Leader's plans is the idea that we are going to let private companies take over the job of providing access to low earth orbit (where ISS resides). This ideas is bone headed in many ways. First off, only one company, Space Exploration Technologies (aka SpaceX) has ever launched anything into orbit, and they have a 40% success rate. You want to be an astronaut on top of that rocket? Didn't think so. Only the government can accept the liability of a manned space program, and without some kind of legal protection, probably the unmanned variety as well. Let just one of these private companies kill an astronaut or, God forbid, drop a booster onto a populated area, and the resulting court judgements will effectively kill the entire private space industry instantaneously. I live right along the path where the pieces of Columbia came to Earth after it disintegrated on reentry, and I can assure you it was only by the grace and mercy of God that no one on the ground was hurt or killed. So it can, and will, happen.

There are several commentaries on the Web praising Obama for his bold new plan. For example, look at The Martian Chronicles, Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy blog, and at Quantum Rocketry. These are written by people who haven't seemed to learn that what Dear Leader promises and what he delivers are two very different things. (Transparency and bipartisanship ring any bells?) Other sites such as National Review Online and Gizmodo (here and here). I particularly agree with the opinions at the first Gizmodo link about the benefits from the technological investment in the manned space program that we will lose under this new program and the loss of any kind of inspiration for our society for anyone to want to go into this field. I also will direct you to the comments in this link, especially the one from "Stevox" who says:

Let me put it this way: to assume that private industry could properly step in and replace in any meaningful way the space-travel capabilities of NASA would be like saying that some dude in his basement could take over some of Google's cloud-computing needs with a broadband connection and a few networked VPS'es.

Go to the National Air and Space Museum's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles Airport in D.C. and stand underneath the Enterprise in absolute awe of the sheer size of the Shuttle and you'll know exactly what "Stevox" is talking about.

We put men on the moon; we routinely hurl small skyscrapers into orbit; and soon, we'll be reduced to watching popguns toss little cargo packets into the air while the Russians carry up our astronauts. Yeah, I know, the process that led to this state of affairs began long before Dear Leader got involved. His new plan simply seals the deal for decades into the future.

Time To Light Up the World Again

Short notice here, but the WWF is once again sponsoring that ridiculous event, Earth Hour, at 8:30 PM local time.

As I have commented on before, this is nothing more than a feel-good notion, something to try to manipulate people into believing -- or at least pretending to believe, which is no better -- in the socialist-inspired, scientifically-unsound, so-called theory of AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming, for those of you who haven't wandered deep into my older rantings).

So, like I said last year, it's time to light up the world. Turn on the lights! Run the A/C and the heat together! Mow your lawn -- well, it'll be nighttime, so just run your lawn mower! Idle your car in the driveway with the lights on bright! Fire up the barbecue grill!

I'm going to also have all my outdoor lights on and be standing outside. Maybe the astronauts on the International Space Station can take my picture.

Senate "Health Care" Reform Bill Passes; American Health Care to Follow

The House of Representatives passed the Senate "health care" reform bill today, and it is a certainty that President Obama will sign it. The only thing that will delay that signature is arranging the ceremony in the Rose Garden. Whether or not the "fixes" in the so-called reconciliation bill pass or not, this marks the darkest day for American medical care ever, even darker than the day Medicare was passed in 1965.

I have expounded my initial thoughts on this 'momentous' occasion on my companion blog on RedState. It will hopefully get a wider readership there.

In a related vein, I also direct you to this from Walter Williams, re-emphasizing what I have said previously.

There is now a much more important target for my ranting:

OBAMACARE DELENDA EST!!!!!

Coming Down to the Wire -- Stop ObamaCare NOW!!!

Sometime this week, supposedly, the House of Representatives will vote upon the previously passed Senate "health care" reform bill. The time to stop this obscenity is now. Contact your CongressCritter now -- call, write, email, text, Tweet, send up smoke signals, whatever. Tell them not just to vote no, but what you will be doing for them if they do not vote no, namely voting for whoever is running against them this November.

While you're at it, do the same for your Senators, and if your Senator(s) voted for this monster, let them know that you hope that they have enjoyed their time in the Senate for it will soon be coming to an end.

American Solutions has linked a video from a new organization of physicians and surgeons called Docs 4 Patient Care. This group was formed last year as a response to the AMA's incomprehensible support for ObamaCare and to let the public know that the majority of doctors in this country do NOT support this reform plan. In addition to the video linked by American Solutions, I would recommend this video, made by the organization's founder and president, Dr. Hal Scherz.

I encourage everyone to spread the word and these videos as widely and as quickly as possible.

There is no time to waste.

Snow Falling on Never-Actually-Endangered States

Yes, I'm reusing a post title. The pun is too good not to reuse.

Courtesy of Marc Sheppard at American Thinker comes this notification of the fact that on Feb. 12, 2010 an unprecedented event occurred. There was measurable snowfall on the ground in all 50 states of the United States.

University of Oklahoma meteorology graduate student Patrick Marsh is assembling a slide show of photographs of the snow in each state. So far he has pictures from 49 of the 50 states. The only unphotographed snow is in Hawaii, where there are apparently small patches on the steep north slope of Mauna Kea; photographs of this snow are still being sought and/or verified.

Mr. Marsh is going to place these photos on Google Earth eventually. For now, they are viewable at his blog.

My only question is how many years in a row are we going to have to have winters like this one before the AGW zealots give up on their cockamamie theory? Especially since even the revelation that the data and research supporting their theory was essentially cooked up out of sheer desperation and is wholly unreliable? (If you haven't heard about the Climategate scandal by now, no link from me is going to help. Use Google. Or Bing. Or Yahoo. Take your pick.)

They Took Health Care Reform Out Back and Shot It in the Head

I made the comment yesterday that following the miraculous and historic election of Scott Brown (R-MA - just had to type that to see what it felt like!), they (meaning the Democrats) took 'health care' reform out back and shot it in the head.

Basically, with the restoration of the Republican minority's ability to filibuster any attempt to pass an obnoxious 'health care' reform package, the impetus for all Democrats to fall in line and support the bill disappeared. Those few Democrats that were not happy with the bills being debated, for whatever reason, now no longer feel compelled to respond to the arm twisting from the Democratic leadership. Thus, you are now seeing enough Democrats backing away from these bills that there is no longer enough votes to pass them. Just like in 1993-94, the 'health care' reform process is dying the slow death of progressive overreach, as well as the fact that the hyper-liberals can never gain enough support for a bill that is communistic enough to suit them. Couldn't be happening to a nicer piece of legislation.

I think we must all continue to listen for the footsteps of the process coming back to life, zombie-like. But the chances are slim; the momentum has been reversed, and all the steam is leaking out of the engine that was driving it forward. The Republic is saved, at least for now.

Referring back to my call for brinkmanship, I am a little concerned that this 'victory', such as it is, might result in defusing the anger at the overreach and overspending of the Democrats. This is something we simply must not allow to happen. Even though this process may have been stopped for now, we must go on as if it has not. The only difference is that where before we had the threat of imminent socialism, we now have only the spectre of the threat. Don't think for a moment that if the progressives are not beaten back now, that they will not very quickly be back for another attempt to try again.

It is helpful that that Democrats cannot help but give us new ammunition to replace that we just lost. The Democrats are now debating a bill to increase the federal debt ceiling by another $1.9 trillion dollars to a staggering total of $14.3 trillion.

The Democrats complained that George W. Bush ran up massive deficits. As you can see here, Bush raised the debt by $1.885 trillion in his first term and another $3.014 trillion in his second, for a total of $4.889 trillion in his 8 years as President. President Obama has increased the debt by $1.573 trillion in his first 365 days as President; when combined with the $1.9 trillion increase now under debate, he will have reached $3.473 trillion in under 13 months.

That's 71% of Bush's increase in essentially just his first year!! And no substantial improvement in economic performance or unemployment has come from it.

I'd call that some pretty powerful ammunition, wouldn't you?

The Fundamental Flaw of ObamaCare in a Nutshell

Ken Blackwell made a startlingly succinct appraisal of the current plans by the Obama Administration to 'reform' the medical care system in a post on RedState today. I think the reason that so many people in this country are opposing this plan is really on the basis of this particular aspect of it -- they feel in their hearts and souls what is wrong with it without being able to put it into words. Ken Blackwell has found the words.

In a post discussing the special election for the U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts left open by the death of Ted Kennedy (I will not call it Kennedy's seat; that seat belongs to no one person)between Martha Coakley (D) and Scott Brown (R), Blackwell was discussing the statement made by Coakley that Roman Catholics should not work in certain jobs in health care because of their conscientious objections to certain procedures (read abortion):

Pittman specifically asked Coakley about the rights of conscience of health-care providers, and segued into a query on Roman Catholics in Massachusetts’s hospitals....

(Coakley's) response to Pittman was to denounce the idea of any allowance for individual conscience in federal healthcare legislation. Then she uttered the line that alone ought to sink her campaign: “The law says that people are allowed to have that. You can have religious freedom but you probably shouldn’t work in the emergency room.”

Blackwell responds by stating:

The logical consequences of Martha Coakley’s statement are both grotesque and stupid.

Martha Coakley does not exist in a vacuum. Her belief that conscience and its protections must be forced out of the healthcare sector are tightly bound up with the ideology underlying the President’s push for healthcare reform. That reform threatens ever-greater government involvement in healthcare, and probably portends its takeover if passed.

With that comes the precedence of government priorities — and there’s little room for individual conscience then..... President Obama is taking the first step toward forcing healthcare professionals to follow the government’s ethical agenda rather than their own.

And it won't just be 'health care' professionals' ethical positions that will be subjugated to that of the ruling party (as it will be the ruling party, not the "government" making these ethical decisions). The ethical positions of every individual patient must also bow down to the edicts of those who have placed themselves over us because they are convinced they know better how to run our lives than we ourselves do.

This is the ethical, nay the moral bankruptcy of the reform plans that are being rammed down our throats and of all of those who are doing the ramming and anyone else who does not stand up against this travesty.

Almost every action taken so far from Dear Leader has had at its core this issue, but in the 'health care' reform debate, it is openly, glaringly clear:

We are engaged in a fundamental battle between liberty and tyranny.

And in this war, there is no middle ground, no fence to sit on.

I know which side of this battle I am on. Which side do you choose?

A Time for Brinkmanship

The third chapter of Ecclesiastes begins:

1To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
2A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
3A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
4A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
5A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
6A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
7A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
8A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

To this I feel it is time to add "a time for brinkmanship.

Through discussions with various people, I have discovered that not many people really know this word, much less what it means. So, from Dictionary.com:

brink⋅man⋅ship 
–noun
the technique or practice of maneuvering a dangerous situation to the limits of tolerance or safety in order to secure the greatest advantage

I suspect that many of my loyal readers (especially my first and so far only Follower!) have been wondering where I have been lately, considering the intense debate that has been going on over the matter of 'health care reform'. Well, I have been away, tending to another project and doing my day job (you were aware that more people get sick in the winter?).

Besides, after my first round of fury at the AMA's insane endorsement of H.R. 3200 and the Senate's protracted debate over their much-different 'reform' bill, I realized that to expend a great deal of breath, energy and angst extolling the dangers of these bills while they were being bent and twisted and melted and metamorphosed into their final forms would not be terribly productive. It is the final bill, the merger of the House and Senate bills, which really matters and which should be the target of all of our criticisms. What this final bill will look like after it emerges from the ping-pong match between Senator Reid and Speaker Pelosi (but not from anything as open as a Conference Committee, oh no, not for this 'transparent' administration) is anyone's guess; my guess is that it will be a blend of the worst parts of both earlier bills. And given how our august bodies of legislators have been behaving lately, we will have precious little time in which to criticize it, for I suspect this will be another one of those pieces of legislative legerdemain that simply must be voted on before the bill can actually be read (or even seen) by those voting on it, much less the rest of us.

I have, moreover, come to another realization over the past month or so. The legislation isn't really the problem. Now before you think I've gone completely mad (note to my readers: having gone postal long ago, I left 'completely mad' behind some time in the Cretaceous period), let me tell you that I have not changed my mind about what Dear Leader and his ilk are trying to do to our medical care system and the rest of the economy. But I have determined that the 'health care reform' legislation and the so-called stimulus bill and the 'cap-and-trade' carbon tax and all the rest are just the symptoms of the disease. And to fight only the symptoms of the disease is doomed to failure, just as much as if all you did for someone's pneumonia would be to give them Tylenol for their fever and neglect to give antibiotics to treat the real cause of the disease.

So if the legislation is just the fever, what is the disease? Socialism, communism, statism -- take your pick; they are all equally noxious. And continuing the pneumonia metaphor, we need to direct our criticism -- our antibiotics -- at the bacteria of all these noxious -isms, namely, the legislators and the supporters of the legislators who are pushing this socialist agenda. To put it most bluntly, our target is the Democratic Party.

So where does brinkmanship come into play? The Tea Party movement and the raucous townhall meetings of this past summer should give you an idea. These protests were caused by the rising anger of a large segment of the American people at what our elected representatives are trying to do to us instead of for us. This anger comes from an unconscious (but becoming increasingly more and more conscious) realization that the socialist movement is trying to subvert the fundamental principles upon which the American nation is founded. In other words, the people are beginning to see that the country they live in and love is being systematically dismantled and turned into a something else that they did not sign up for and decidedly do not want!

In order to stop this process, there has to be a clear majority of people willing to stand up and not just say but shout "No more! This stops now!" But the inertia of the masses is great and it will take a tremendous motivation to get them all up and shouting. That's where the idea of brinkmanship comes in -- maneuvering a dangerous situation to the limits of tolerance or safety in order to secure the greatest advantage. So the maneuvering that I propose is this:

Let the Democrats pass the 'health care reform' bill. Oh, we'll protest and complain, but let them pass it. (If they can marshall their votes, they'll be able to pass it regardless of our protests.) Let that bill be the most bloated, government-regulated, tax-laden, expensive bill they can imagine. Let it pay for abortion on demand, sex-change operations, and health care for illegal aliens. Let it be packed with truckloads of obnoxious pork to cater to whims of the elitist Senators and Representatives who, like Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska, have to have their egos stroked in order to secure (read 'buy') their votes. Let it slash Medicare and Medicaid to the bone, establishing the need for rationing and the subsequent 'death panels' that such rationing will require. Let it pass with the minimal number of votes necessary in the House and the minimum number in the Senate. And let's make sure that every one of those votes is that of a Democrat.

And while they're at it, they (the Democrats) can go ahead and pass the multi-trillion dollar, industry-destroying, economy-collapsing 'cap-and-trade' carbon tax; a second government-make-work stimulus bill; and any other boondoggle program they can think of. (Anything and everything except Card Check.)

Let them pass all the bills they are debating, which are crafted to piss off the greatest number of people possible -- and particularly the senior citizens of this country, who are the single most reliable voting bloc in the electorate.

And let them do it all by the end of January. Or at least February.

What we do then is spend every waking moment after that until the November 2010 elections making sure that everyone knows and no one forgets just how much control of their own lives they have just lost, how much of their Constitutionally-enshrined freedoms have been forcibly taken from them, and how much they and their children and their children's children and their children's children's children's children's grandchildren will be paying for this unique privilege for the foreseeable forever. And of course, we must also make sure that everyone who is made furious by this knows just exactly who to blame for all of it, and what they can do about it.

My goal with this game of brinkmanship is not to stop a piece of legislation. It is not to just take back the House or the Senate or even both.

My goal is to break the back of socialism in this country for this century and even longer by breaking the Democratic Party. I want the backlash against the Democrats to be so huge and pervasive that the conservative and the moderate members of the party have to bail out of the party to try to save their political hides (though such will likely be a futile maneuver). I want the Democratic Party to become so unpopular that it will be left representing only the 15-20% lunatic leftist fringe in this country who have taken control of the current party and have set it on this path of destruction. I want the word 'Democrat' to properly assume the pejorative connotation that 'Communist' now enjoys (since they have become basically synonyms anyway). The rest of us, the majority, can then go ahead with fixing all the things that these Communist-Democrats have screwed up, starting with repealing all the legislation that was used to engender the flames of fury that were used to break the Democrats.

But don't think for a moment that the proper alternative to the Democrats are the Republicans. For most of the last 20 years or longer, the Republicans have been just as bad as the Democrats, only not quite so much. Just who will be the alternative I cannot at this time say, but I think we may be living in historic times in which we will see the birth of a new and long-lasting political party, something that has not happened in over 170 years.

I am not alone in thinking that the seeds of anger at the destruction of American liberty have been sewn, are growing, and have a chance at coming to fruition in order to save the system that our Founding Fathers created more than 22 decades ago. And the only way this will happen is if the anger that is building is not dissipated by something like the defeat of this or that bill, or the apparent rebirth of Republican 'conservatism'. It is going to take a lot to push the American people to finally go through with the oft-expressed plan to "throw all the bums out", but since that is what is required for the salvation of American liberty, and by extension, liberty throughout the world, the great risk of such political brinkmanship is necessary.

If you want to understand a little bit more about one (in my opinion, fairly astute) person's analysis of the Tea Party movement and what it is really all about, read "Obama’s Atomic Bomb:The Ideological Clarity of the Democratic Agenda" by John David Lewis at The Objective Standard. It's a long essay but well worth the read. For a detailed look at what the Founding Fathers created for us and what we are allowing the socialist-statists to cast asunder, read The 5000 Year Leap: A Miracle That Changed the World. This book is not sub-sub-titled Principles of Freedom 101 for nothing. If you can read this book and not be absolutely furious (or even a little bit postal) about what is going on in Washington not just now but for most of the past 100 years, then you have no conception of what America is really all about.

Cross-posted at Redstate.com

Baffled By Their Own Minds

This is just too precious to pass up.

In an article entitled "Climatologists Baffled by Global Warming Time-Out", Spiegel Online International reports that climatologists are puzzled as to why global temperatures have not been rising over the last ten years. With climate centers (staffed by those that long ago ingested the AGW koolaid) around the world reaching the same conclusion, that the average global temperature increase over the last decade is exactly zero degrees, even leading experts are now saying things like "We don't really know why this stagnation is taking place at this point." (Very soon they will be forced to admit that they don't really know what is going on, period, and that that is why they made their ridiculous predictions in the first place.)

But even with the documented global temperature change standing indisputably at zero, there are those that still think the planet continues to warm. There is a reason I have in the past and continue now to refer to these people as zealots.

Some of these mental giants are even now publicly admitting that no one can really predict what the climate will be like in even 5 0r 6 years, much less 50 or 100 years, because of the "natural factors" that are involved. Natural factors like the ocean currents, volcanoes, and the sun itself. Exactly what we deniers and critics have been trying to tell these geniuses all along.

The article even states: "The fact is that the sun is weakening slightly. Its radiation activity is currently at a minimum, as evidenced by the small number of sunspots on its surface. According to calculations made by a group of NASA scientists... this reduced solar activity is the most important cause of stagnating global warming." Allow me just one moment to speak off the record: No shit, Sherlock! The sun is the energy source for everything that goes on on this planet, which automatically makes it the most important cause for any climate change, and you guys are just now figuring this out???

But do you think that this will change what they intend to do at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen next month? Not on your life.

A Chill Wind Blows From Copenhagen

An international conference is set to begin in Copenhagen in December of this year, regarding the United Nations Climate Change Treaty, scheduled to be signed in Copenhagen. Lord Christopher Monckton, the noted AGW skeptic who has repeatedly and so-far unsuccessfully challenged Al Gore to a climate change debate, spoke recently about this meeting and this treaty, and what he had to say was chilling. The following link is to the blog Global Climate Scan, and I thank them for posting this:

http://www.globalclimatescam.com/?p=572

The video is only about 4 minutes long and I encourage you to listen to it.

Lord Monckton is concerned that this treaty will create a "world government" that will serve to redistribute wealth from the richer, developed nations to the poorer, less developed ones. It also will supersede our own Constitution, according to his interpretation of Article VI, paragraph 2. This interpretation, unfortunately, is shared by other constitutional scholars and by many judges, and there are judicial precedents establishing the fact that treaties can override state and Federal laws and even the Constitution itself. (See this discussion of the failed Bricker amendment from the 1950's.)

I have skimmed the draft copy of the treaty linked by Global Climate Scam. The treaty establishes a set of international goals and obligations, among which is the diminishment of CO2 production by the developed nations and the provision of funds to the less developed nations to develop energy sources that are CO2 friendly as well as provision of funds to help the less developed nations with adaptation to the adverse effects of "climate change", as these less developed nations will likely be the ones most seriously affected by the predicted effects of such "change".

The word "government" is used in the sense of setting up a governance system to control the vast bureaucracies overseeing the large number of carbon mitigation programs, compliance programs, financial funds for various projects, and adaptation processes called for in the treaty. There is no call for anything that one would recognize as a government, with bodies like a legislature, judiciary and the like. Rather there is the "Conference of the Parties", a reference to a committee to be made up by representatives of the signatories to the treaty.

This webwork of bureaucracies and what-not, controlled by the Conference of the Parties, would have under their thumbs a vast portion of the economies of the world. It wouldn't be a complete world government, but it would be a governing structure over a significant portion of the world's economies and thus its peoples. And it would not be directly responsive to any elected body or body of electors. A democracy this isn't; it isn't even close to a democratic republic. But it sounds like it could easily become a demagogic oligarchy.

The draft treaty is 181 pages of scintillating prose --not! It is mind numbing. As a document to establish a government, it is not anywhere near as inspiring as our Constitution, and certainly not as brief. It is also full of placeholders and alternate clauses and even alternate goal levels, which I'm sure are thing that are intended to be finally determined during the meeting in Copenhagen in December. But the overall framework is easy to see (if you don't fall asleep too often while reading it). Let's look at some of the more memorable passages.

Any lack of full scientific certainty should not be used as a reason to postpone or scale down action on adaptation.

Acknowledging that current atmospheric concentrations are principally the result of historical emissions of greenhouse gases, the most significant share of which has originated in developed countries.

Further acknowledging that developed countries have a historical responsibility for their disproportionate contribution to the causes and consequences of climate change, reflecting their disproportionate historical use of a shared global carbon space since 1850 as well as their proposed continuing disproportionate use of the remaining global carbon space.

Warming of the climate system, as a consequence of human activity, is unequivocal.

These are just a few examples of the heavy-handedness of this document. In actuality, the document is separated into sections, and each section has a preamble of sorts in which these ideas are repeated with only minor modifications in the wording. 'Climate change is real, dammit! Man is responsible! And especially those evil developed countries!'

So what are the developed nations to do? A lot, actually. This is a treaty to reduce CO2 levels, and it sets out these goals ad infinitum, but without getting into technical details. If they did that, they'd need to talk to the engineers and the real scientists, who would tell them they have their craniums firmly placed up their rectums, that what they're planning isn't possible. But let's not let technical possibility get in the way of feel-good notions.

For this purpose, Parties shall collectively reduce global emissions by at least 45 per cent from 1990 levels by 2020 and by at least 95 per cent from 1990 levels by 2050.

The long-term global goal for emission reductions should be set as a statistically robust ceiling for the average global temperature increase strictly attributable to anthropogenic interference having a global effect, of [x] degrees Centigrade above mid-19th century levels, with per capita accumulative emission convergence between all Parties.

By global emissions they mean CO2. If we have to reduce CO2 emissions to 95% of 1990 levels by 2050, can we do this and still let all 400+ million (by that time) of us breathe? If not, who gets to exhale and who doesn't? Or will we do it on an odd-even day rotation based on birthdates? And when they set that temperature target of x degrees Celsius (come on guys, get with it -- Centigrade was disposed of a couple of decades ago) above mid-19th century levels, I hope they remember that there was a mini-Ice Age just ending in the mid-19th century.

Guess who gets to pay for all this, by the way? If you guessed the developed countries, you win! Now take a look at your prize. These are just at few of the proposals that are offered in the treaty, and I wouldn't be surprised it they decided to use all of them.

An assessed contribution from developed country Parties based on the principles of equity, common but differentiated responsibilities, respective capabilities, GDP, GDP per capita, the polluter pays principle historical responsibility of Annex I Parties, historical climate debt, including adaptation debt, amounting to [[0.5–1][0.8][2] per cent of gross national product] at least [0.5–1 per cent of GDP]].

Assessed contributions [of at least 0.7% of the annual GDP of developed country Parties] [from developed country Parties and other developed Parties included in Annex II to the Convention] [taking into account historical contribution to concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere]

By 2020 the scale of financial flows to support adaptation in developing countries must be [at least USD 67 billion] [in the range of USD 70–140 billion] per year. [Sources of new and additional financial support for adaptation [must meet the full agreed incremental costs of adaptation and initially be within a minimum range of USD 50–86 billion per annum and regularly updated in the light of new emerging science, financial estimates and the degree of emission reductions achieved.]

A uniform global levy of USD 2 per tonne of CO2 for all countries with per capita emissions higher than [1.5][2.0] tonnes of CO2; the LDCs shall be exempt.

A [global] levy of 2 per cent on international financial market [monetary] transactions to Annex I Parties.

Agreed penalties or fines on non-compliance of developed country Parties with their commitments to reduce emissions and provide support in the form of financial resources, technology transfer and capacity-building.

Limited/reduced time patents on climate friendly technologies.

Those first three look like they are the same thing, and they are. But they are mentioned in the funding process of different parts of the treaty, so I would assume that we are talking about national levies of anywhere from 2-3.5% of GDP, plus hundreds of billions more. The US GDP in 2008 was 14.4 trillion dollars, so 2-3.5% of that would be in the range of 280-500 billion dollars. If I'm wrong and the maximum is only 0.8% of GDP that would still be 115 billion dollars. Per year.

Calculate your carbon footprint! Mine is at least 18 tons of CO2 per year. I was disappointed. I thought it would be bigger than that. My business activities aren't included, however, which is why I said at least 18 tons. Take your number and multiply it by $2. That's your share of the United States' carbon levy. Do you think the USA will pay this for you? Or do you imagine that it will be added on as a line on your 1040?

The limitations on patents is designed to facilitate (read steal) CO2 reduction and energy efficiency technologies so that they can be given to less developed nations to exploit. And of course there would be provisions to fine countries who aren't following the rules.

But what do the less developed countries get to do? They're exempt from the CO2 levy, they (supposedly; think China) don't have CO2 emissions to reduce. So what is their responsibility under this treaty?

Recalling that economic and social development and poverty eradication are the first and overriding priorities of the developing countries.

So why do these nations get this Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card?

Recognizing that the right to development is a basic human right that is undeprivable.

Funny, I don't remember seeing that one in our Constitution. Our Constitution only guarantees us liberty with which we have the freedom to develop through our own efforts, but not on the backs of anyone else. But I forget that this is being written by the refugees from the discredited global communism movement.

The good news is that none of this nonsense applies to any nation sensible enough to tell these idiots where they can put their freaking treaty. But our President is Barack Obama, and our Senate is dominated by whacked-out weirdo liberal Democrats.

We have been worried about "health care reform" and the Cap and Tax scheme. This lunacy tops them all. We all must do everything in our power to fight this. And we only have a couple of months to do it in.

Blog Action Day 10-15-2009 --- Climate Change, or AGW Twists in the Wind

Blog Action Day #3 is now upon us, and the operators of the movement have chosen, supposedly by a user vote, climate change as the topic for this year. (This did not get my vote.) Though my views on this will not surprise any regular readers (you are out there, aren't you?), I will soldier on. Let's see now -- year 1 was the environment, year 2 was poverty, and now we have climate change. I'm beginning to think that this movement is being run by a bunch of leftists.......

The AGW proponents are running for cover. The cover, in this instance, is by renaming their pet theory climate change as opposed to anthropogenic global warming. The reasons are fairly obvious. First, climate change is shorter, easier to remember and easier to spell, and the supporters of this poor idea certainly have little enough gray matter to spare on such trivial concerns. Second, as the underpinnings of their original theory, that the Earth is rolling up an exponential temperature curve, is giving way beneath them as the planet has been cooling off over the past decade, they can no longer decry the crisis of global warming and not get ridiculed. Third, calling it climate change gives them the ability to claim that they were correct no matter which way the thermometer moves.

That third point so amply demonstrates the absolute bankruptcy of their position ('no matter what happens, we're right, and we all have to do as we say to make things better') that I really don't have to go any further in discrediting them. However, as I am a firm believer in the flogging of dead horses and the blistering incineration of willful ignorance, I shall go on.

To begin, we'll start with recent headlines. Bloomberg News reports: U.S. Northeast May Have Coldest Winter in a Decade. From KTVB.com in Idaho: Quick Cold Snap Fills Up Homeless Shelters -- Boise, ID is already having sub-freezing temperatures before October 1. In Daytona Beach, FL the record low of 58 degrees F was tied on October 1, 17 days early compared to average. Port Huron, MI broke a 74 year old low temperature record on the same date. Both Montana and Idaho are also breaking cold temperature records already this early in the year. Even Pennsylvania is being forecast to have a "possibly damaging early-season snow" at the end of this week.

Game 3 of the MLB National League Division playoff between the Colorado Rockies and the Philadelphia Phillies, scheduled to be played in Denver on October 10, had to be postponed because of bitter cold, sleet and snow. The temperature dipped to 17 degrees F, easily breaking the 104 year old record of 25 degrees set in 1905.

Yes, this is climate change -- changing back to what is normal from more than a decade of abnormally warm temperatures. But since the CO2 levels are not dropping, why are temperatures decreasing? Because the temperature increases had nothing to do with the increased CO2 levels in the first place. (More on this below.)

Two prominent meteorologists have recently gone public in a big way regarding their opposition to the theory of AGW.

Matt Rogers of The Washington Post's Capitol Weather Gang blog a Top Ten list of why he questions the 'consensus' view of AGW. Among these are many items I have covered in previous posts, such as the lack of warming over the last 10 years despite continued increases in CO2 levels, the inadequacies of the AGW computer models (which he believes "are over-estimating anthropogenic (human) forcing influences and under-estimating natural variability (like the current cold-phase Pacific Decadal Oscillation and solar cycles)", and the recent lowering of solar irradiance as indicated by the profound lack of sunspots recently. He adds in a few new wrinkles, like the effect of chaos theory making long-term predictions extraordinarily problematic. And like a true scientist, he complains about the vehement way that any dissenters from the AGW dogma are treated.

Joe Bastardi, Expert Senior Forecaster at AccuWeather and considered to be one of the premier meteorologists in the country, was on The O'Reilly Factor in late September showing several pieces of hard evidence debunking the AGW theory, primarily by revealing that real-world data are contrary to what the AGW computer models say they should be. (The video of that appearance is at the bottom of the page of that link.) In a followup statement posted as an open letter to AccuWeather.com readers, he went on to say:

Unlike many people, I am well acquainted and respect the co2 warming idea, but in its pure form, which actually allows for the cooling coming now! Therein lies the problem. We can't know till after the period that is coming up through 2030 whether co2 is really a player or not. The threat of not only oceanic cycles cooling the earth, but the suns lack of intensity and increased volcanic and seismic activity could mean that as some papers in the early 90s (and dismissed by many) opined we would be as cold as back in the early 1800s. What you see now may just be the beginning. One thing we do know, that we should be skeptical of any future event, no matter what we believe.

I will leave you with this. Common sense dictates that a trace gas needed for life on the planet would not be the cause for destroying life on the planet. Common sense dictates that what has happened before without man can happen again with man. Common sense would dictate that you not believe me, or any one else, but go look for YOURSELF. If its important enough for you to be happy with what I said, or to be mad as all get out at what I said, you owe it to yourself to go read all sides of the argument. To be informed, and not to simply throw stones.

The response of the AGW zealots was what one would expect from zealots. They resorted to name-calling ("Deniers!"), questioning of the intelligence and credentials of the critics, and continued pronouncements that the science is settled without engaging in any kind of reasoned debate. In other words, they simply threw stones. Or they simply refuse to defend their own views against reasoned criticisms:

In what organizers said was a rarity, Gore took half a dozen questions from journalists, including one from Phelim McAleer, an Irish filmmaker who asked Gore to address nine errors in his film identified by a British court in 2007.

Gore responded that the court ruling supported the showing of his film in British schools. When McAleer tried to debate further, his microphone was cut off by the moderators.

The BBC asks "What Happened to Global Warming?" They go on to elaborate that the predicted warming hasn't happened and then to discuss why. They mention solar scientist Piers Corbyn who "claims that solar charged particles impact us far more than is currently accepted, so much so he says that they are almost entirely responsible for what happens to global temperatures. He is so excited by what he has discovered that he plans to tell the international scientific community at a conference in London at the end of the month." (I wish I could hear more about this now!) Next they mention Professor Don Easterbrook from Western Washington University, who believes that ocean cycles, particularly the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, are responsible for most of the temperature changes that we have observed so far and what we will see in the future. Says Professor Easterbrook:

The PDO cool mode has replaced the warm mode in the Pacific Ocean, virtually assuring us of about 30 years of global cooling.

From down-under New Zealand/Australia way comes a study by Chris de Freitas (University of Auckland in New Zealand), John McLean (Melbourne) and Bob Carter (James Cook University) which states that “little or none of the late 20th century global warming and cooling can be attributed to human activity". It is discussed in more non-climatologist language here. The gist of the study is that a shift in the climate in the Pacific Ocean in 1976 altered El Niño and La Niña patterns, resulting in more warming El Niños and fewer cooling La Niñas, thus producing the changes in the observed global temperatures over the last 50 years. This phenomenon of alternating El Niños and La Niñas, called ENSO [El Niño-Southern Oscillation], has been occurring with varying intensities for at least 300 years (see the section on Cultural History and Pre-historic Information), so it seems unlikely that it is being caused solely by the current increase in atmospheric CO2 levels, though scientists continue to debate what actually does cause the phenomenon.

The effects of El Niño and La Niña are well known to even laymen and the two year study has concluded that ENSO is directly related to global temperature rises in recent decades. The authors have been able to directly correlate the past 50 years of average global temperatures with ENSO cycles. Temperatures were found to have lagged ENSO events by approximately seven months consistently. De Freitas said, “We have shown that internal global climate-system variability accounts for at least 80% of the observed global climate variation over the past half-century.”

Our Southern Hemisphere neighbors also criticize the current state of computer climate models, stating:

Co-author McLean drew attention to the fact that current climate models cannot even accurately reproduce known temperature changes. Previous studies have shown that the climate models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) fall outside acceptable scientific boundaries. McLean said, “When climate models failed to retrospectively produce the temperatures since 1950 the modelers added some estimated influences of carbon dioxide to make up the shortfall.”

They further conclude:

If ENSO is indeed responsible for 80% of global temperature changes, manmade contributions to global warming would appear to be highly insignificant, much like a growing chorus of scientists have been claiming for some time. Australia, much like the United States, is considering cap and trade legislation that would attempt to limit carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by forcing businesses to buy credits for their emissions.

Concerns about the cost to consumers and the negligible effect it would have has the measure stalled in the United States Senate for the time being. Carter specifically addressed carbon trading schemes saying “No scientific justification exists for emissions regulation, and that, irrespective of the severity of the cuts proposed, ETS (emission trading scheme) will exert no measurable effect on future climate."

So what are the geniuses in the U.S. Senate up to? Why, proposing an emission trading scheme, of course! And that particular genius-who-would've-been-President John Kerry said this:

I don't know what 'cap and trade' means. I don't think the average American does. This is not a cap-and-trade bill, it's a pollution reduction bill.

Willful ignorance, Mr. Kerry, willful ignorance. Sure, you don't know what cap and trade means. Because you know it's really a hidden tax, and one of the biggest taxes the Congress has ever considered. So you want to call it a pollution reduction bill, thinking that might hide its true nature. Sorry, Senator, the American people are smarter than that.

Climate change, indeed!

The only climate change we need right now is one where the scientific process once again supersedes ideological dogma, and that scientists are free to announce their findings without ending up in the hot seat. Unfortunately, it seems like it will be a cold day in Hell before that happens anytime soon.

Senate Committee Passes Baucus Bill

The Senate Finance Committee today passed a "health care" reform bill, commonly referred to as the Baucus Bill, along straight party-line votes. (Yes, I know that Olympia Snowe voted for the bill, but as she is only nominally a Republican, my comment stands correct as far as I'm concerned.)

I haven't said much about this bill so far. This is mainly because it's hard to comment on a bill that isn't technically written yet, even after it has been voted on. Who knows what will be in the bill when a paper version of it finally shows up? From what little concrete information I have heard about it, it sounds like a pot pourri bill -- let's throw a little bit of everything into a pot and stir it up and see what we get! Unfortunately, since most of what was thrown in the pot was old, worn out, rancid, decaying, or just plain rotten, what they got was something that just smells bad. I've also refrained from paying much attention to this bill as I realize it is simply a starting point for debate, and that the final bill that will ooze out of the Senate to the House-Senate Conference Committee will likely bear little resemblance to the Baucus Bill but will rather be quite like the odious monster that is H.R. 3200.

National Review Online has two good articles currently regarding the current debate.

The first is entitled Obamacare Dissected: Ten things that probably will be in the health-care bill (but shouldn’t), written by Stephen Spruiell. It discusses ten of the more major flaws in the proposals currently being debated (all collectively being referred to as Obamacare, as a convenient shorthand). I'm sure that Mr. Spruiell could write a sequel tomorrow with ten more problems that would be just as critical.

The second is called Real Health-Care Reform: Ten things that ought to be in the health-care bill (but probably won’t), written by Kevin Williamson. Mr. Williamson takes the opposite tack, listing those things we need in a "health care" reform bill but which the Left won't allow or even consider. The first few paragraphs of this article constitute one of the best and easiest-to-understand arguments for why a free-market approach to "health care" reform would be superior that I have ever seen. Wish I'd written it! I do, however, have to laugh when in point# 7 he mentions "the AMA's cartel status" (a cartel that only controls 17% of the market ain't much of a cartel) and "an AMA-certified physician" -- where did this idea that the AMA certifies anything come from? For God's sake, the AMA is a professional association -- it's more like a fancy club than anything else. It has no regulatory authority, and never has had any. And regarding his point #9, Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert has already introduced legislation to try to get this to happen, though that bill won't go anywhere in the current Congress.

Both of these articles are must-reads. So go read them now.

While your there, read this article as well. It has nothing to do with health care, but everything to do with where we are as a country right now, and exactly in how much of the wrong direction we are heading.

Another Potential Casualty of ObamaCare -- Nobel Prizes

Three Americans were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine today for their work in discovering the mechanism of how chromosomes protect themselves from degrading when cells divide.

Aaron Gee at American Thinker (be sure to read the comments!) makes some very interesting observations regarding how President Obama's proposed 'health care' reforms will jeopardize the winning of future Nobel Prizes by Americans. His basic point is that we are winning the preponderance of the Nobels for medicine because so much medical research is done here. And so much medical research is done here precisely because the profit margins of the private marketplace for new medical innovations provide both the motivations and the capital with which this research can be done.

I loved his statement of the fact that "The top 10 U.S. hospitals that conduct clinical trials carry out more trials than all the hospitals in the rest of the world - combined." That gives you an idea of just how far ahead of the rest of the world we are in this regard -- the rest of the world here meaning, for all practical purposes, Europe. (Once you exclude Japan, Israel, and probably Australia, the remainder of the non-European world contributes little to this field.)

So why is Europe so far behind? Gee says it's because "No other country has a working structure that has as much potential for medical research as the US." But the main reason for this is European price controls on the products (drugs, devices, and the like) of that research. It is these price controls that make the European 'health care' systems appear to be so much less expensive than ours. However, one can now see that there is a very substantial hidden cost (to Europe) for being so penny-wise and pound-foolish. (And if you think about it, that expression, referring to pennies and [British] pounds [sterling], coming as it does from England, is just so doubly ironic.)

Gee concludes saying, "The other symptom of a broken marketplace you should expect is fewer US Nobel Laureates in the field of Medicine." But it's what that portends that is more ominous. Not just fewer accolades from Stockholm. Obama's desire for the US to have a more European-style medical care system will mean we'll also have a more European-style medical research system.

By taking away the profit system that funds the research machine of the United States, the advancement of medical innovation will slow to a virtual standstill. No new medicines, no new technologies, no new surgeries will be forthcoming. The continuous increase in life expectancy we have come to expect will come to a grinding halt and may start moving backwards as the waiting lines and rationing this plan must result in leads to delays in and even prevention of life saving care.

How do I know that this is part of the actual goal of the reform plan? Because one of its main developers, Obama 'health care' advisor Tom Daschle, said so much in his book, Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis. As explained in the book, one of the goals is to slow the development and use of new medications and technologies because they are driving up costs.

Mr. Daschle and Mr. Obama have absolutely no conception of what price they are going to make all of us pay for their "cost-savings".

But Aaron Gee does. And now so do you.

Why 'Health Care' Reform Cannot Work

I have for several months now been referring to the current national debate as a 'health care' reform debate --using quotation marks around the words health care. Though I have made oblique references as to why I am doing this, it is time now to explain why.

But first you have to take a little trip with me.

That trip is one in both time and space. The time is June 2009. The place is Nashville, Tennessee.

One of the hospitals in my community is in the multi-year process of installing a fully-electronic health information system, with the ultimate goal of becoming as paperless of a hospital as a hospital can be. And they embarked on this path even before the HITECH Act was even thought of, much less passed. The time had come in this process to start gearing up for the conversion to computerized physician order entry, or CPOE. As part of that endeavor, the computer vendor sent a delegation from the hospital to a seminar at Vanderbilt University. This seminar involved more than just how to set up CPOE; it involved the why of CPOE and how to start thinking in a CPOE way. As a member of the information technology advisory council, I was a member of this delegation. In fact, I had to finagle my way onto the trip, as I was not one of the physicians originally chosen to go.

(As an aside, let me say that this seminar was one of the most innovative, exciting, thought-provoking conferences that I have ever had the good fortune to attend. I don't want to mention the name of the software vendor involved, but if you, dear reader, ever get a chance to go to this seminar [if you get involved with this company, you will hear of this seminar as it's an important part of booting up their CPOE], fight, scrape, and claw your way onto the trip. It's worth it.)

At this conference, one of the 'why' lectures was being given by one of the first people to start seriously thinking about the need for computers in medicine. The basic gist of the talk was that, due to the increasing depth of medical knowledge and medical technology, the number of pieces of information necessary to make a rational medical decision is increasing. And it is increasing at a rapid pace; so rapid, in fact, that within 5 to 10 years, the number will exceed the ability of the human brain to hold all that information and do anything with it. And it will still keep on increasing with no end in sight. So we will need computers to keep track of all that information and organize it in a way that our brains can make sense of it.

While the professor was lecturing, one of his associates was writing on a huge mark-sense board behind him. Ostensibly he was charting the important points, but about half of what he wrote on the board was only peripherally related to the talk at hand. The following is a near-direct quote of one of these peripherally related comments:

The U.S. spends $3k-$4K more per capita on our health care than France does. We have the best rescue care system in the world, but we are no better at treating chronic disease than is France.

I read this, and then I read it again and again. It wasn't just a light bulb that went off in my head -- it was a full-blown supernova. I even lost track of the lecture for a few moments. In that moment, with that statement, the true nature of the national debate became apparent. And it also became apparent that 'health care' reform was doomed to fail, could not work, cannot work, will never work, no matter whose plan is implemented or who implements it or how much money we do or do not spend doing it.

That's because we do not have a health care system. We never have had one. Since you cannot 'reform' something that doesn't exist, it follows that any such 'reform plan cannot work.

The statement above crystallized my thoughts on this matter in a blinding flash, but obviously my subconscious had been processing its way toward this conclusion for a long time. Otherwise I wouldn't have had such a sudden epiphany. For those whose subconscious is not as postally twisted as mine, let me explain.

The obvious point of the statement written on that wall was that we are spending more money on our 'health care' and not getting anything for it -- "we are no better at treating chronic disease than is France". But I chose to look not at the money but at the outcomes -- not "The US spends $3K to $4K more per capita than France does", but "We have the best rescue care system in the world..."

I'm sure that when most people hear the phrase 'rescue care system', the first thing that comes to mind is paramedics, fireman, ambulances, the Jaws of Life, and the like. But that's not what's being referenced here by 'rescue care'. What rescue care means here is 'emergency care' or 'acute care' -- what happens after you get to the hospital or emergency room.

Despite what you hear in the news (from the liberal press doing everything in their power to promote the programs of Dear Leader), if you have an illness in the United States, you have the best chances in the world of surviving. If you show up in the ER having a heart attack, in the throes of acute heart failure, or with a severe pneumonia, you have a better chance of surviving than anywhere else in the world. If your physician diagnoses you with cancer, your survival (in terms of percentages and duration) is better here than anywhere else. I could go on and on with examples. But none of this has anything to do with health care. It's medical care.

What's the difference? Medical care is what gets you over that acute MI, CHF, pneumonia, or cancer. It's the care provided by physicians and surgeons based on a tradition of treating acute medical problems that dates back more than two thousand years, to well before the time of Hippocrates. It's treatment based on anecdotal and then scientific observations of medical illnesses and treatments performed during those two thousand-plus years. It's the application of chemicals and fluids and electromagnetic radiation and invasive interventions to find the cause of a deranged physiological process and correct it.

Health care is none of these things. Health care does not involve fixing a deranged physiology. It involves maintaining a normal or optimal physiology for as long a time as possible. This rarely involves chemicals (other than vitamins), radiation, or invasive interventions. It does involve diet, exercise, avoidance of unsafe activities and toxic agents such as illicit drugs and excessive alcohol, the use of proper safety equipment, and the like. These are not the things that physicians and surgeons do. They are the things that each and every one of us should be individually doing but most of us do not, or do not do well.

Physicians and hospitals and home health nurses and physical therapists provide 'rescue' care -- medical care, not 'health' care. We have a medical care system, not a 'health care' system. This country doesn't have a health care system and has never had one! So there's no way we can reform it.

Trying to 'reform' the medical care system to try to be simultaneously a health care system will not improve health, as the medical care system and the people who work in it have no real training in it (such is not part of the system's two millenia-long tradition), and it will degrade the quality of the medical care system we have now, as these people cannot do that job and a second even more difficult one and not have the first job suffer.

It might be to the benefit of our nation to create a new system to encourage, support, cajole and reward health care. Exactly how to do this is beyond me; recall I am a physician and a member of the medical care system. Shoehorning it into the medical care system is a bad idea and is unlikely to work. And it's going to have to be a system that works at an individual level, as that problem starts at the level of the individual.

Let's reword the statement that was written on that wall in Nashville:

France spends $3K-$4K less per capita on health care than the U.S. does. France is no better at treating chronic disease than is the U.S., and its rescue care system is not as good.

When you look at it that way, France doesn't look that good any more, does it? You could replace France in that statement with any other country in the world and it would be just as true.

But look at both statements. France spends less and the U.S. spends more, and neither country is better at treating chronic disease (most of which is caused by poor health care choices) than the other. This tells you that spending more or less money is not the root of the problem. And it tells you one other thing.

France doesn't have a health care system either.