Despite Canada’s “free” health care-paid for by their very high taxes-many Canadians have become health care tourists to the private market USA because of Canada’s notoriously long waiting times for doctors and facilities plus a lack of advanced medical technologies.

This article by Ethel Fenig points up a benefit for Canadians of the rise in value of the Canadian against the US dollar, and also reminds us of the very relevant US election year demagogue issue: socialized health care.

Rudy Guliani’s comment during the last debate: “If we do Hillary care or socialized medicine, Canadians will have no place to go to get their health care.” is quite funny but also deadly serious. The hush-hushed failure of socialized medicine is a very deadly problem for thousands of Canadians right now.

On The Fence Films is an under appreciated resource for education about the realities of socialized medicine. It cuts deeply across the framed arguments and unquestioned assumptions of political and “journalistic” useful idiots who are blindly pushing socialized, government run health care in the face of overwhelming evidence of its failure just over our Northern border, and of government’s completely inability at any level to administer the simplest efforts without deadlocking political and personal wrangling.

I thought it was appropriate to visit this issue on the day our host is being tended to by one of our best private hospitals in the State.

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This last Saturday & Sunday, New England felt the tail-whip of tropical storm Noel. The news-guessers were dancing around making last-minute adjustments to what they started the week calling a sunny weekend, bumping up rainfall predictions and wind gusts in each successive broadcast. Power companies called in crews to stock up service vehicles and opened satellite business offices that were normally closed on the weekend to handle anticipated increased calls and need to dispatch crews.

It was a rainy, windy storm but not as harsh as the “surprise” storm in April. The “danger music” (haunting cello cords) played on the local panic station Saturday evening was gone Sunday morning as they reported minor local damage. One news report did stand out: it showed a resident wading up to his knees in his basement, gathering floating sneakers and hauling out appliances. When they interviewed him, he spoke about his sump pump not being able to keep up, wondered why no one had “done anything” about the stream overflowing, and commented that he saw flashing lights and was going out to see “what they were going to do for him”. My involuntary and perhaps unfairly harsh comment was “Go back to New Orleans”. What!?!?

New Orleans, for all the political wrangling, is a perfect example of what happens when people do not think clearly about the future and take personal responsibility for their own lives. I am not only talking about the fools on Bourbon Street dancing around for the camera and sloshing their drinks everywhere the night before Katrina; I am also talking about good, sane, responsible people. The guy on the news obviously had a house to live in and a life here in Maine, and he is probably a great guy. He was down there working hard in his flooded basement (a no-no by the way, as one could easily be electrocuted), not sitting on a cot at the local high school with a wool blanket over his shoulders. What’s my problem then? The time to act is before the storm, not during or after. I don’t expect the man to build a dike along the stream (something for which our local envirelgionist cult fanatics would hang him by the thumbs), but putting the nicely buoyant Nike’s up on a higher shelf might have been warranted; maybe even hauling out the washer and dryer.

The point is that we should think about storms and other contingencies well in advance. I understand it is unpalatable – the roof doesn’t leak when the sun shines – but it is far more palatable to climb on the roof and enjoy the sunny view while tacking on shingles than to tear out soggy, moldy rugs, wallboard, and insulation. How many of us know that New Orleans (not Louisiana) was given 7 million bucks 16 months before Katrina to build an Emergency Operations Center? Auditors have not been able to determine where the money was spent.

I’m just sayin’....

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If you are a born pessimist (like me), this is not necessarily for you.

If you are a doomsayer, this is not necessarily for you.

But if you are a pessimistic doomsayer with a streak of masochism, this was created with you in mind.

Enjoy!

SImplyJews

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Music Review: Guns and Roses, Rick Wakeman, The 69 Eyes and Scum

Twenty-Four Hours with an Apple Touch

Lighter and thinner than the iPhone, Apple’s Touch is the newest member of the Apple family of neat products.

And finally an excellent gothic novel called The Wolf’s Lament.

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It’s even worse than censorship according to this sad soul. It’s ‘silencing’

“If you follow foreign news, you’ll remember that former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto returned to her native Pakistan two weeks ago and only narrowly avoided being blown to bits.

I was thinking of this when I saw the reviews of Susan Faludi’s new book, “The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America,” in which the dyspeptic feminist decries the “silencing” of women after the attacks. Evidently someone in Pakistan wants to “silence” Bhutto permanently, but that’s not what Faludi has in mind.

Faludi’s idea of “silencing” – and forgive me, but here it’s such a preposterous, super-fatted term that I can’t help giving it quotation marks – is not a bullet in the head or the detonation of explosives to shut up forever some meddlesome woman. Faludi is distressed that male writers outnumber females on the op-ed pages of American newspapers.

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Leftists repeatedly do everything they can to avoid looking at the facts of any issue they discuss. Instead they use moral outrage, ad hominem arguments, appeals to dubious authority, whatever.

Egregious Leftist columnist Dana Milbank is a good example. He appears to have been present at a launch at AEI of a new book “Abraham’s Children: Race, Identity and the DNA of the Chosen People” written by Jon Entine. You may remember that Entine got into a lot of trouble a few years ago for arguing that blacks have a genetic advantage in certain sporting events—an advantage any Olympic games spectator could see with their own eyes. Entine appears not to have been deterred by his critics however. The new book argues that the average Jewish IQ is unusually high and that the advantage is genetically inherited. The IQ research certainly supports that (See here and here) but it is again pretty obvious if you look at who is teaching in the universities etc.

Milbank reports that the arguments of the new book were generally accepted by the audience and then goes on to say:

Left unchallenged was the question of whether Jews are indeed smarter than others—even though it would have only required a walk down the hall to the office of new AEI visiting fellow Paul Wolfowitz, whose leadership on the Iraq war and conflicts of interest as head of the World Bank demonstrate that Jews are capable of questionable judgment.

Where do I begin to comment on that pathetic apology for an argument? He thinks that the “questionable” judgment of one Jewish man is a serious challenge to generalizations about Jews as a whole. It would be equally logical to deny that dogs bark because some dogs do not.

But that’s the sort of thing that Leftists do when all the evidence is against them. Anything rather than abandon the simplistic illusions that they so obviously desperately need.

There is nothing wrong with using examples and anecdotes to make vivid a statistical generalization but to use one example to challenge a statistical generalization is brain-dead. To challenge a statistical generalization you have to look at the evidence for and against it, and where IQ is concerned, Leftists avoid doing that like the plague. No mystery why.

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We haven’t had time to even write the music for this. However this is the first draft of the song I wrote upon hearing I had colon cancer. My lovely wife Kim co-wrote edited and improved the lines.

Stalking Me
[Dodge/Dodge]

1)

Big C is after me
Not what you think
Nothing I did wrong
In me, it dont belong.

2)

Not Charlie or crack
No artificial means
For this attack
Here to end my dreams.

3)

Talking about the cancer
Thats the fact of the matter
It doesnt know class
Nor evil nor good

4)

Its a battle against the clock
For my ability to rock
A battle against the clock
So that I can rock.

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