How Doctors Die

Via Cousin Colby

 

Years ago, Charlie, a highly respected orthopedist and a mentor of mine, found a lump in his stomach. He had a surgeon explore the area, and the diagnosis was pancreatic cancer. This surgeon was one of the best in the country. He had even invented a new procedure for this exact cancer that could triple a patient’s five-year-survival odds—from 5 percent to 15 percent—albeit with a poor quality of life. Charlie was uninterested. He went home the next day, closed his practice, and never set foot in a hospital again. He focused on spending time with family and feeling as good as possible.

Several months later, he died at home. He got no chemotherapy, radiation, or surgical treatment.

Medicare didn’t spend much on him.

It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently.

More @ Saturday Evening Post

Marilyn Monroe working at her Radioplane factory job making WWII target drones

Via Horace

Veterans Today

Poll: Should states be allowed to ignore federal gun laws?

Via Billy
  

  

 As Congress debates new gun control legislation that may include broader background checks or bans on assault-style weapons and high-capacity ammunition clips, some state legislatures are considering laws that would attempt to nullify any new federal controls.

A new survey by Pew Research Center finds that 60 percent of the public says that states should not be allowed to ignore federal gun laws, while 36 percent say that states should be able to ignore federal gun laws, if they choose to do so.

What do you think? Cast a vote in our poll and drop a comment below. We've still got a lively discussion over the question I posed in yesterday's column, Why do we own guns?

Pew found that gun owners were divided over whether states should be allowed to ignore federal gun laws: 49 percent said they should, while 48 percent disagreed. Among those in gun-owning households who do not themselves own guns, 59 percent oppose states ignoring federal gun laws; among those in households without guns, 67 percent were opposed.

Republicans, by a 58 percent to 37 percent margin, said that states should be allowed to ignore federal gun laws if they so choose. About four-in-ten (38 percent) independents and just 18 percent of Democrats favor giving states the option to ignore federal gun laws.

More @ AL

Test Drive

Via Cousin Colby

Absolutely Worthless Boehner: House Will Fund Obamacare in CR; Won't Risk 'Shutting Down the Government'

Via avordvet

 

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said he would not include language to defund Obamacare in the continuing resolution bill when it returns to the House, stating, “our goal” is “not to shut down the government.”

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) offered an amendment to the Senate version of the CR that would have defunded Obamacare. However, the Senate is controlled by Democrats and, on Wednesday, Cruz's amendment failed.

Cruz pointed out, however, that if the Senate CR differs at all from the one passed previously by the House, the House would have another chance to vote on it, and could amend it then to defund Obamacare.

More @ CNS News

Dying Time

 

It is dying time.

For the better part of a month I have been deliberating on this fact; coming to grips with the implications of it. The powers who exercise control will ultimately come to kill us. The longer we object to their domination, the more surely they will devise a way to eliminate those who recognize them as the enemy.

The wave of gun legislation moving through the legislatures of the states is not without complicity with the federal government. What the federal government cannot expect the whole House or Senate to agree to, they have encouraged individually through the states with some success. The result is simply citizen disarmament through any means, which is an act of war against the rights of the people. Those who see their rights being violated and have the nerve to resist have become the enemy of the politician.

It is a long list now, that of rights being violated by the federal government. There is no right left in the Bill of Rights that have not come under attack by governments the nation wide. Governments at best are a tolerable evil, but when they focus their police powers against the people and their rights, they have crossed the line from tolerable evil to intolerable evil.

The soldier knows when it is time to die. It is determined by men who do not have to suffer the consequences. It is determined by circumstances created by those who gain from it. Politicians do not fear war as the people do. They are safe. They make the policies; they create the conditions. It is left to the people to decide when they have gone too far.

They have gone too far.

More @ TL In Exile

Pushing Us Ever Closer to the Edge

Via WRSA

 

As the ever diligent and tireless Imperial Staff has been keeping you well up to date on, the natives are getting restless, the Browncoats are getting louder in their warnings to the federal tyrants and their minions, yet the ProgNazis and their RINO collaborators — a word to the latter: historically, no matter how brutal the revenge upon the instigators after a successful insurgency, the treatment that their collaborators got was invariably orders of magnitudes more merciless. Enemies are enemies, collaborators are treasonous backstabbers. You might want to at least think about that — keep pushing right on.

More and more firearms and ammunition manufacturers are joining the ranks of those who refuse to serve traitors to the Constitution (Beretta being one of them, for crying out loud!), we understand that their number is now up to close to 200 with no signs of slowing down, more and more local LE departments are declaring that they will not, under any circumstances, assist the federal tyrants in DC in violating their citizens’ unalienable rights, some have even gone so far as to declare that they will, further, arrest and prosecute any federal agents trying to do so in their jurisdictions, thousands, tens of thousands of patriots are speaking up openly, stating that they WILL NOT COMPLY ON PAIN OF DEATH with an enemy overthrow of our nation’s supreme law, yet the mindless, power mad tyrants in Moscow on the Potomac press on regardless as do, sadly, too many state governments across the nation, thinking that they’re doing What the People Want™, convinced by their own press and manufactured polls.

They’re in for one heck of a surprise.

Or maybe they want it that way, it really doesn’t matter to us one tiny little bit at this point.
We know that our ProgNazi enemies, emboldened by the lamentable lack of counteroffensives from patriots during the decades they spent undermining our nation’s foundations, can smell victory. They see the brass ring ahead of them. All that they and their communist forbears worked for seems to be within reach, now is their time, this is their moment, this is what they’ve been waiting for.

So they’re not going to let up this close to the finish line, especially not now that they have convinced themselves that they will cross it alive.

They, like innumerable wannabe fanatics before them in history, have convinced themselves that they cannot fail, that they’re on the cusp of total victory, and nothing but sudden death will convince them otherwise. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. Just one more push on the Eastern Front and the war will be won. Surround Bastogne and the enemy lines will crumble.

So we know that we’re shouting into the wind here, but honor requires that we warn our enemy before conflict is inevitable. Do not grant them the gift of being able to say as they’re rounded up and marched to the scaffolds that “they couldn’t possibly have known.” If they choose to ignore that warning, and they will, we know that by now, then so be it. But the gauntlet must be thrown.

Enemies of We the People and the Constitution of the United States of America to which we swore an unbreakable oath: You are entering territory that is not uncharted, you would know if you’d ever bothered to take a break from licking each others balls and read a few books, but it is fraught with danger, horror, tragedy and pain. You will not emerge from that territory unscathed and, if G-d be truly on our side, you will not emerge at all except to be hanged from the nearest utility posts.

And when we say “you”, we would like to remind you that we mean all of you. You, ProgNazi reading this while laughing to yourself at the bluster and bravado of this silly Internet blowhard, may think yourself safe, ensconced behind all of the paramilitary protection that the Enemy Occupation Force that you’ve built can provide. But can you say the same about everybody that you love and care about? Can you say the same about everything that you love and care about? And can you even say that said wall against the inevitable consequences of your own lust for power that obviously overrides the oath that you, with lies in your heart and treason on your mind, made when you made it to DC, that said wall can protect you 24/7? Every minute of every day for the rest of your lives.

Can you? Because if you think you can, then you’re deluding yourself.

You see, you don’t understand how this whole “asymmetric warfare” thingamajig that you love to talk about on TeeVee to sound smarterer than the proles really works. You think that it’s just a domestic version of the grand battles that you’ve read about in history books about traditional wars and that you’ll be safely hidden behind your lines with the enemies on the other side of those line. Those are international wars, and they bear no resemblance whatsoever to an intranational war, which is what you’ll be facing.

There are numerous examples to choose from, but we’d suggest that you just pick up a book about the Balkans. That describes it quite well. Or you could pick the Revolutionary War, but it’s obvious to us by now that you really couldn’t care less about that particular war which birthed a Constitution that you swore, impatiently, an oath to during a lot of pomp and circumstance, wishing that they’d just get it over with already so you could get on to taking bribes and sodomizing underage interns.

Here are a few pointers, just to get you started:

More @ The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler

Christian Exodus

Brock:

I personally know these guys and are friends with them. Check it out! They are involved big time.

Most Respectfully,

Tim Norman

The high-toned statesman serving the public good can clearly be seen in the words and actions of Jefferson Davis, who acted politically from conviction alone.  Describing Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William Seward, President James Buchanan said: “He was much more of a politician than a statesman, without strong convictions; he understood the art of preparing in his closet and uttering before the public, antithetical sentences, well-calculated to both inflame the ardor of his anti-slavery friends and exasperate his pro-slavery opponents….he thus aroused passions, probably without so intending, which it was beyond his power to control.”

Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman

North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission

www.ncwbts150.com

"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"

Truth Held Subsidiary to an End:

“It was on [a late 1859 visit to an ailing Senator Jefferson Davis] that [William Seward] said a most remarkable thing to me. We were speaking of the difficulty men generally had in doing themselves justice [in public speaking], if not cheered on by the attention and sympathy of the audience. Mr. Davis remarked, “I lose much of the vigor of my thoughts when the audience is inattentive or seems “ill at ease.”  

Mr. Seward said, “I do not, it is rather a relief to me to speak to empty benches.” I exclaimed, “Then, whom do you impersonate?” “The papers,” said he, “I speak to the papers, they have a much larger audience than I, and can repeat a thousand times if need be what I want to impress upon the multitude outside; and then there is the power to pin my antagonists down to my exact words, which might be disputed if received orally.”

Another day he began to talk on the not infrequent topic among us, slavery….[and] I said, “Mr. Seward, how can you make, with a grave face, those piteous appeals for the Negro that you did in the Senate; you were too long a schoolteacher in Georgia to believe the things you say?” 

He looked at me quizzically, and smilingly answered: “I do not, but these appeals, as you call them, are potent to affect the rank and file of the North.” Mr. Davis said, very much shocked by Mr. Seward’s answer, “But Mr. Seward, do you never speak from conviction alone?”  “Nev-er,” answered he. Mr. Davis raised up his…head, and with much heat whispered, “As God is my judge, I never spoke from any other motive.”

After this inscrutable human moral, or immoral, paradox left us, we sat long discussing him with sincere regret, and the hope that he had been making a feigned confidence to amuse us. He [Seward] frankly avowed that truth should be held always subsidiary to an end, and if some other statement could subserve that end, he made it. He said, again and again, that political strife was a state of war, and in war all stratagems were fair.” 

(Jefferson Davis, A Memoir by His Wife, Varina Davis, Volume I, N&A Publishing, 1990 (originally published 1890), pp. 580-583)

The Substantial Pitfalls of Guest-worker Programs: Who Wins and Who Pays?

Mike Scruggs

 In 1997, after several years of thorough study, the Commission on Immigration Reform, headed by the late Congresswoman Barbara Jordan adamantly rejected guest-worker programs as a solution to illegal immigration. Past guest-worker programs exacerbated rather than relieved immigration problems. The Commission specifically stated that a guest-worker program would be “a grievous mistake” and gave powerful reasons for rejecting such programs.

• Guest-worker programs have depressed the wages of American workers.
• Those most adversely affected were the unskilled and thus poorest segment of the American labor force.
• Foreign guest workers are often more exploitable than U.S. workers.  They are less likely to complain of exploitive pay practices or unsafe working conditions.
• The presence of large numbers of guest workers in particular localities presents substantial costs in housing, healthcare, social services, education, and basic infrastructure that are borne by the broader community and even the federal government rather than by the employers who benefit from cheap labor.
• Guest-worker programs also fail to reduce illegal immigration.  In fact, they tend to encourage more illegal immigration. Guest workers often violate their work visa by going illegal and jumping to a better job. They then remain in the country permanently in violation of the conditions of their admission. They also have many birthright citizen babies at public expense.

In the joint hearings before the U.S. Senate and House committees on immigration, a distinguished member of the Commission, Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, President Emeritus of the University of Notre Dame, carefully explained that:

“The idea of a large, temporary work program is tremendously attractive.  Perhaps a better word though, would be ‘seductive.’ There is a superficial plausibility to this argument, and the Commission gave it serious consideration for more than a year and a half…. In the end, we were persuaded after much study, that it would be a mistake to launch such a program.”

He went on to point out some serious questions about effective control of temporary worker programs and enumerated some important failings of past temporary worker programs.

• Temporary worker programs need some limits, which would require serious attention to effective enforcement.
• It is difficult to turn off such programs once started.
• A large program would build a dependency on foreign labor in certain sectors of the economy.
• Without strict enforcement of employer sanctions against hiring other illegal immigrants, a temporary worker program would stimulate new migration pressures in the long run, exacerbating rather than curtailing illegal immigration
• “Certain jobs would be identified with foreigners,” which would effectively stigmatize such jobs.

 Sociological Tipping of a Workforce

(Related to Rev. Hesburgh’s last point on stigmatizing jobs, my own observations indicate, for example, that construction, landscaping, and hospital cleaning maintenance crews tend to “tip,” going quickly from just a few immigrant workers to nearly all immigrant workers in a local economy once local employers begin the trend of hiring cheap foreign labor. American workers are displaced in these jobs both by lower immigrant wages and this sociological “tipping” phenomenon. This also makes price competition difficult for employers that obey U.S. immigration laws.)

Rev. Hesburgh summarized his remarks to the joint committees with this conclusion:

“We do not think it wise to propose a program with potentially harmful consequences to the United States as a whole.”

It is fairly obvious that the pressure for guest-worker programs is coming from those employers, who are now breaking U.S. immigration laws and from other businesses that benefit from this situation.  Hence we have the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business associations advocating a policy advantageous in the short term to their constituent members, but damaging to the common good and prosperity of the American people. Ironically, the Chamber is advocating a policy that would damage the U.S. economy and its own constituent members in the longer term by importing a new electorate proven to be more interested in big government social-welfare programs than free enterprise. 

Studies over the last ten years by Edwin S. Rubenstein Economic Consultants indicate that both excess legal and illegal foreign labor not only drive down American wages but also displace American workers. The politics of guest-worker programs strongly suggest that transforming illegal immigrant workers into guest-workers would continue to displace American workers. This alone ought to be enough to forcefully reject such programs.

In addition, business addiction to cheap foreign labor discourages the innovation necessary for longer-term success in global competition. As it drives wages down for working Americans, it will also adversely impact consumer demand. As noted above in relation to the U.S Chamber’s shortsighted economic folly, importation of cheap foreign labor is also changing the electorate enough to alter the political environment of the U.S., resulting in a government much less favorable to free enterprise and market economics. This would severely damage the economic future of the nation. In that event, we can kiss both economic freedom and prosperity goodbye. . 

Guest-worker programs generally help businesses that have the political clout to demand them. These demands frequently occur even when declining wages indicate there is no labor shortage. Guest-worker programs have so far not been good for American workers, taxpayers, and the country in general.  President Reagan once suggested that any guest-worker program should be first tested by a small pilot program. But so far, special interest politics have trumped such good sense. Cheap labor users usually press for immediate relief, hoping to dump their labor problem on governments and taxpayers on an urgent timeframe rather than taking some responsibility to find and invest in a solution themselves. Guest-worker programs are essentially public subsidies for the politically powerful, and their side effects can endanger a nation’s foundations.