Fox News has recently reported what happens when a country has social medicine. Bear in mind our politicians are trying to impose social medicine in the US.
A 69-year-old Japanese man injured in a traffic accident died after paramedics spent more than an hour negotiating with 14 hospitals before finding one to admit him, a fire department official said Wednesday.
The man, whose bicycle collided with a motorcycle in the western city of Itami, waited at the scene in an ambulance because the hospitals said they could not accept him, citing a lack of specialists, equipment, beds and staff, according to Mitsuhisa Ikemoto.
It was the latest in a string of recent cases in Japan in which patients were denied treatment, underscoring the country's health care woes that include a shortage of doctors.
The man, who suffered head and back injuries, initially showed stable vital signs, but his condition gradually deteriorated. He died from hemorrhagic shock about an hour and half after arriving at the hospital, Ikemoto said.
Ikemoto said the victim might have survived if a hospital would have accepted him more quickly. "I wish hospitals are more willing to take patients, but they have their own reasons, too," he said.
The death prompted the city to issue a directive ordering paramedics to better coordinate with an emergency call center so patients can find a hospital within 15 minutes.
The motorcyclist involved in the Jan. 20 accident was hurt too and was also denied medical care by two hospitals before one accepted him, Ikemoto said. He was recovering from his injuries.
More than 14,000 emergency patients were rejected at least three times by Japanese hospitals before getting treatment in 2007, according to the latest government survey. In the worst case, a woman in her 70s with a breathing problem was rejected 49 times in Tokyo
Posted by Walt as Medical, Socialism at 11:09 AM EST
No Comments »
By Thomas E. Brewton
The light of God's truth has been snuffed out in Europe, now the least Christian and the most secularized and socialized part of the world.
This week, Black Rock Congregational Church is focusing on worldwide missionary programs and the 20-plus missionaries that the church supports. In that connection, rather than a traditional sermon, we at Black Rock-Long Ridge Congregational Church (North Stamford, Connecticut) heard a report by Dr. Ted Noble, one of those missionaries. His subject was the appalling decline of Christianity throughout Europe.
Fewer than one percent of Europeans are Christian believers. Elsewhere, especially in Africa and Asia, the percentage is much higher and growing. Europe has become a spiritual wasteland in which people look to the political state for their salvation.
In the 19th century, Africa, the Dark Continent, was looked upon as the great field of activity for Christian missionaries. Conditions are the reverse today. American Episcopalians, for example, who seek a return to the Bible and a turning away from the secularized social gospel that has overtaken their church, now look to African bishoprics for support.
Dr. Nobel talked mostly about the opportunities and the needs for missionary work in Europe. But it's important also to ask why Europe is in spiritual decline.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Walt as Christianity, Europe Political Issues, Socialism at 4:32 PM EST
No Comments »
By Thomas E. Brewton
Believing apparently that specifics are not necessary, Senator Obama promises us that his election will bring us all together in one happy family via a miraculous transformation of society and its citizens.
Earthly perfection of human nature and human society, here and now, is what Senator Obama is promising us. This is his implicit message when tells us that he can, as President, bring us all together and move us beyond strife, aggression, and wars.
One thing we can state categorically in that regard is that what Senator Obama promises is emphatically, irreconcilably opposed to the Judeo-Christian foundations of Western Civilization. Parenthetically, the Senator's secular and socialistic mind-set may explain in part why he saw no problem with the unchristian hatred preached by his minister, the Rev. Wright.
Senator Obama is not necessarily painting himself as the Second Messiah who will personally effect the transformation. Rather, as a good socialist-progressive-liberal, he expects that structural changes in the political state will do the necessary work.
Such structural changes will include higher taxes, especially on capital gains which fuel business innovation and more efficient production, massive increases in Federal welfare-state spending programs, and crushing inflation, along with extensive increases in regulation of personal and business conduct (including stronger affirmative-action measures).
As the German Empire's Iron Chancellor Otto von Bismarck told the Reichstag in the 1880s, he was instituting the world's first welfare state in order to gain total control over the German people. Those who are dependent upon the political state for their benefits, he observed, can be herded like cattle.
In contrast, in the Old Testament, King Solomon tells us:
The words of the Teacher, son of David, king in Jerusalem:
"Meaningless! Meaningless!" says the Teacher. "Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless." What does man gain from all his labor at which he toils under the sun? (Ecclesiastes 1:1-3)
I, the Teacher, was king over Israel in Jerusalem. I devoted myself to study and to explore by wisdom all that is done under heaven. What a heavy burden God has laid on men! I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind. (Ecclesiastes 1:12-14)
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Walt as Presidential Race, Socialism at 12:35 PM EST
No Comments »
by Nancy Salvato
If there is one thing for certain in this world, it is when Jack Nicholson plays the male protagonist in a film, his performance will be outstanding. As McMurphy, in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, his impression on me is as compelling today –as it was over 30 years ago when I first watched him bring to consciousness the minds of assorted inmates staying on Nurse Ratched’s ward of the mental institution. The message I took away while watching McMurphy undermine Nurse Ratched’s authority over her unit -until she has him lobotomized, stands the test of time. Power hungry people will resort to any means necessary to maintain control. Although Nurse Ratched’s actions were extreme, her display taught me just how vulnerable people are if they are labeled mentally unstable or forfeit the responsibility of making decisions on their own behalf. Those placed in their charge are not necessarily looking out for them.
Inherent in writing and exposing one’s own ideas about terrorism (or the war against radical Islamism), the border threat, or political correctness, is the likelihood of being branded a right wing nut. Being labeled as such isn’t personally offensive (I’ve begun to grow my Alligator Skin) but there is the danger that being branded as such could chip away at my credibility, which is the whole idea behind such mudslinging. This is why it’s so important to be able to back up an argument with facts. This is extremely difficult in the face of a movement doing everything it can to shut down ideas which run counter to their own.
For example, let’s look at the Fairness Doctrine. In an editorial titled the Unfairness Doctrine, the editors of the National Review Online point out that even though Fairness Doctrine was not passed into law this time around, other forms of legislation could equally serve to stifle free speech. The liberal think tank "Center for American Progress," founded and run by former Clinton White House chief of staff John Podesta, has proposed there be new national and local limits on the number of radio stations one company can own, a de facto quota system to ensure that more women and minorities own radio stations, and that the government should require commercial owners who fail to abide by enforceable public interest obligations to pay a fee to support public broadcasting.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Walt as Biased Media, Socialism at 11:13 PM EDT
No Comments »
by Thomas E. Brewton
An enduring society is not a random assemblage of people drawn together, like pigs around the feed trough, waiting for welfare-state handouts.
The liberal paradigm recognizes no spiritual dimension to human nature or to human society. In the liberals' atheistic and materialistic world, humans are merely animals a notch along the evolutionary scale from the apes and, like them, motivated only by material factors: water, food, sex, and shelter.
Societies, in that paradigm, are held together by whatever may be the currently reigning regulations governing those material wants. A political society theoretically is a lump of clay that intellectuals are capable of shaping anyway they wish.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Walt as Cultural Issues, Socialism at 12:13 AM EST
No Comments »
by Thomas E. Brewton
Liberals' head-in-the-sand urge to pull troops out of Iraq is nothing new. Western democracies, entranced with liberal Progressivism, have failed repeatedly to preserve social and political stability.
In words that apply to public opinion today, Walter Lippmann, in The Public Philosophy (1954), described his dismay in the summer of 1938, when war in Europe seemed inevitable.
….there was no sure prospect that France and Great Britain would be able to withstand the [German] onslaught that was coming. They were unprepared, their people were divided and demoralized. The Americans were far away, were determined to be neutral, and were unarmed….. I began writing, impelled by the need to make more intelligible to myself the alarming failure of the Western liberal democracies to cope with the realities of [the 20th] century.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Walt as Atheism, Communism, Cultural Issues, Socialism at 11:54 PM EST
No Comments »
by Thomas E. Brewton
American labor unions are pushing candidates for the Democratic Party's 2008 presidential nomination toward expansion of the welfare-state and massive inflation of the sort that the Great Society spawned.
After both World War I and World War II, the British Labour Party led England into its destructive liaison with socialism that destroyed British industry and reduced England to the "sick man of Europe."
Harold Meyerson's January 31, 2007, column in the Washington Post describes the behind-the-scenes power exerted by labor unions, especially the government employees unions. Their immediate goal is imposition of universal, socialized medicine, of the sort championed in 1993 by Hillary Clinton.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Walt as Labor, Socialism at 11:04 PM EST
No Comments »
by Thomas E. Brewton
Liberal social justice is based on statistical averages relating to an abstraction called "humanity." Individual morality is not an element in that liberal cosmology.
One of the first legislative acts of the newly ensconced Congressional liberals was increasing the minimum wage. Countless studies have demonstrated that the legal minimum wage is counter-productive. But it sounds good and it can be applied at one shot without the tedious process of arriving at fair wages in individual cases.
The minimum wage is an example of the sound-good, feel-good statistical virtues of liberal-socialist-progressivism. Another is Al Gore's championing the Kyoto Protocols that would eliminate millions of workers' jobs in the Western world to reduce greenhouse gases, a statistical virtue that state-planners hypothesize will prevent the current high-point cycle of sun spot activity from warming the earth.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Walt as Socialism, U.S. Political Issues at 1:28 AM EST
No Comments »
by Thomas E. Brewton
As noted frequently in past postings, the unavoidable tendency of socialism is concentration of political power in the hands of a ruling elite who decide for the masses what their living and working conditions are to be. This is called state-planning.
In ways that would have been inconceivable as recently as the 1920s, our everyday lives are circumscribed by unelected bureaucrats in Washington who make regulations, enforce them, and adjudicate them, too often without our access to the normal safeguards of the common law. Those bureaucrats think of the IRS, for example, issue rulings that most Federal courts will not contest, on the grounds that they lack the supposed expertise of the tens of thousands of Federal regulatory bureaus.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Walt as Socialism, U.S. Constitutional Issues at 10:10 PM EST
No Comments »
By Thomas E. Brewton
The socialistic welfare state is extolled by liberal-socialistic- progressives as more Christian then Christianity, because the welfare state purports to help the needy. So did Hitler's National Socialism.
Traditional Christmas spirit, depicted in Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, was the warmth of family gatherings, friendship, and loving kindness to everyone.
Today, however, many people insist that socialism IS Christianity.
It's certainly true that the early churches established by the Apostle Paul grew rapidly, because people found there the Christian love and fellowship, as well as support for the poor, sick, elderly, and disabled, that was available nowhere else.
The socialist political state, however, is expressly atheistic and materialistic. There can therefore be no identity between Christianity and socialism, simply on the superficial basis that they nominally espouse some of the same objectives.
The collectivized compulsion of the socialistic state is exemplified by bureaucratic rules mandating certain conduct, described in tens of millions of regulations.
The spirit of Christmas is written in every individual human heart.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Walt as Cultural Issues, Socialism, U.S. Political Issues at 6:42 PM EST
No Comments »
