Did you forget? I didn't.
I'm still an ardent believer in "better dead than Red" and "kill a commie for your mommy".
What's the practical difference between a Nazi/fascist and a communist? Communists had better PR. One was national socialism, the other was international socialism--no difference. As Darth Sidious said:
Combine government-run health care with "medical assistance in dying", as they do up north in Canada, and this is what you get:
Canada's Veterans Affairs office offered to assist a Paralympian and veteran to commit suicide when she sought to have a wheelchair lift installed in her home, the woman told lawmakers last week.
Christine Gauthier, a 52-year-old retired corporal who competed in the 2016 Paralympics at Rio De Janeiro, testified to lawmakers that a VA official had offered — in writing — to provide her with a medically-assisted suicide kit. The case officer remains unnamed but reportedly made similar offers to at least three other veterans, according to the Independent.
"I have a letter saying that if you’re so desperate, madam, we can offer you MAID, medical assistance in dying," Gauthier said in a hearing before the House of Commons veterans affairs committee.
The rot up there has grown so much, so fast. What happened to those people?
I've said it before and I'll say it again, there is something very sick and sinister beyond our northern border:
In a prestigious medical journal, doctors from Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children have laid out policies and procedures for administering medically assisted death to children, including scenarios where the parents would not be informed until after the child dies.
The article appears just three months before the Canadian Council of Academies is due to report to Parliament on the medical consensus about extending voluntary euthanasia in circumstances currently forbidden by law. The Canadian Council of Academies is specifically looking at extending so-called assisted dying to patients under 18, psychiatric patients and patients who have expressed a preference for euthanasia before they were rendered incapable by Alzheimer's or some other disease.
The Sept. 21 paper written by Sick Kids doctors, administrators and ethicists was published in the British Medical Journal's J Med Ethics and backed by the University of Toronto's Joint Centre for Bioethics.
In a flowchart that outlines how a medically induced death would occur at Sick Kids, authors Carey DeMichelis, Randi Zlotnik Shaul and Adam Rapoport do not mention conversation with family or parents about how the child dies until after the death occurs in the "reflection period."
Patient confidentiality governs the decision about whether or not to include parents in a decision about an assisted death, the authors said. If capable minors under the age of 18 stipulate they don't want their parents involved, doctors and nurses must respect the patients' wishes.
Have they crossed the boundary into Lebensunwertes Leben?
Over 15 years ago I wrote a post with the same title as this one, it only came to mind because that post received its first comment today! The thrust of that post was that people who lived through communism don't have any rose-colored glasses through which to view the experience.
So here we are again, over 15 years later, and I'll link to this video that makes the same argument:
Ilan Sinelnikov: What the Soviet Union Taught Me about Freedom
“I know that the truth is on my side.”
Ilan Sinelnikov was the first in his family to be born in a free country—the first to grow up with freedom of speech and freedom of religion. Those liberties didn’t exist in the Soviet Union, where his family was persecuted for being Jewish. Ilan attended college in the United States, where he aspired to hold a student leadership position. Because of his outspoken support of Israel, he was smeared, silenced, and blocked from that role. Ilan fought back and now encourages all Americans to speak up, tell the truth, and protect our country’s founding freedoms.
You can count on those who lived under communism/socialism to be against it, while those who lived with the comforts of capitalism pretend they’re doing everyone a favor by advocating communism/socialism:
OPINION: Living under a communist regime, the last thing you could imagine is that, by coming to the United States, you would be exposed to people who really believe that socialism works
Want to know how much European-style social programs cost? Here's how much:
Germany gdp per capita for 2020 was $45,724, a 1.6% decline from 2019. Germany gdp per capita for 2019 was $46,468, a 2.81% decline from 2018.
US States per capita GDP (in 2019 dollars)
Bottom line: If Germany, the “economic powerhouse of Europe”, were the 51st US state, its per capita GDP would place it 47th in the country, ahead of only Idaho, West Virginia, Arkansas, and Mississippi. The UK would beat only Mississippi. France wouldn't even beat Mississippi. Denmark would be near the middle of the pack, Sweden would be near the bottom, and Norway (with its North Sea oil revenue) would be near the top.
That's how much the social welfare state eats up.
Update, 10/26/21: People can't/won't be generous when government takes too much of their income:
Yet by nearly every measure Americans are more generous with their money and time than anyone — including Europeans.
Indeed, American charitable giving exceeds the entire GDP of most European countries.
According to the Almanac of American Philanthropy, Americans donate around seven times as much as continental Europeans to charitable causes per capita. Per person, even after adjusting for differences in household income, Americans donate twice as much of their income as the Dutch, three times as much as the French, five times as much as Germans, and ten times that of Italians...
The entire nation is altruistic, though the more religious the population, the more it gives. But even 40 percent of secular Americans give to charity, still better than most European nations...
Europeans will, no doubt, argue that they already give charity in high taxes that fund big social safety nets. The data shows, however, that in overall spending, there isn’t much difference between the United States and other developed nations — each redistributing 20 percent of GDP. Once added in with the massive amount of charity, there is no comparing American generosity — the only difference is that most of ours is not a state obligation.
Was confining much of the working-age population the right decision?According to Public Health Agency of Canada data, there had been 7,773 Covid-19 deaths in Canada as of June 7. Federal Chief Medical Officer Theresa Tam has confirmed that 81 percent of them were linked to long-term care facilities. Of the remaining 1,482 deaths, most were people over the age of 70. Only 229 of the total deaths were aged under 60 and almost all of those had pre-existing health conditions. Clearly, for a healthy working-age person, the risk of dying from Covid-19 is significantly lower than dying by accident or from other diseases.
If Canada’s working-age people hadn’t been removed from the workforce plus been subjected to such severe general restrictions – everything from being barred from medical and personal care appointments, to cancelling travel and being unable to go about their daily lives, nearly all of which involves economic activity of one sort or another – Canada’s economy would have continued to function without the job losses, bankruptcies and tragic social impacts including mental health deterioration, suicides and family violence. And without the need for the crippling increases in our national debt. In hindsight, keeping healthy working-age people away from their jobs – the first such quarantine ever undertaken – may be the most damaging decision in Canadian history.
Did the shutdown of surgical wards to prepare for Covid-19 victims cost more lives than were saved?These shutdowns came as Canadians in need of health care were already suffering on long waiting lists. A December 2019 Fraser Institute report found that waiting lists averaged 20 weeks and totalled more than 1 million people. Cancer, cardiac and other patients who had finally been given a surgical date were sent notices of indefinite postponement. The mental anguish of knowing that a tumour continues to grow or a blocked artery might cause a heart attack adds even further medical risk. Now, three months later, no one knows how much longer their wait will be. B.C., for example, has announced that it will take as long as two years to work through its 30,000 cancelled surgeries. Ironically, B.C. Health Minister Adrian Dix has now turned for help to the same private clinics he’s been trying to shut down.
Preparing for the possibility that hospitals could become overwhelmed by Covid-19 victims was a prudent decision. The problem is that our medical system went into the crisis with essentially zero unused capacity and the longest waiting lists in the OECD.
Open the secondary schools. There have been zero deaths of children under age 16 in Canada. And there’s a growing consensus that their light viral load makes children unlikely spreaders of the virus. Rather than being the most vulnerable, as they were to the Spanish Flu a century ago, they appear to be the least vulnerable to Covid-19. Reopening schools therefore poses low risks. When summer ends, many parents need to get back to work, rather being kept home supervising their children.
Don’t leave pandemic response measures solely in the hands of Chief Medical Officers. They did their job of “flattening the curve” well. But the measures taken should have also considered the impact of hospital bed closures on treatment of other diseases, small business owners who face losing everything, stress-induced mental health deterioration, suicides, family violence, long-term unemployment and massive public debt.The strategy to cope with any new outbreak should include our best financial, business, education and mental health experts working as a team. These teams should be assembled immediately as we navigate the unknown course of the corona virus. There’s little point to sweeping measures that over-protect the entire population against a single virus if the resulting damage is so severe that the nation in its weakened state can’t cope with future crises, whether those are health-related or otherwise. For such crises will surely occur.
Hear hear.
A socialism-themed restaurant chain in Washington, D.C., run by a multimillionaire former mayoral candidate laid off hundreds of staffers this week due to the city's coronavirus restrictions, according to reports.Socialism for thee, but not for me.
Andy Shallal, a restaurateur who unsuccessfully ran for D.C. mayor in 2014, said he was forced to let go hundreds of waiters and other employees at Busboys and Poets, his chain of six restaurants and bookstores across the city, according to DCist. Shallal, a longtime advocate for mandatory paid sick leave and minimum wage hikes, has hosted events at his restaurants for former convicted Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers, former U.S. Communist Party leader Angela Davis, and a Venezuelan government reception honoring the legacy of Hugo Chavez.
When Jorge Galicia and Andrés Guilarte tell college students socialism is no utopia, they speak from experience.Of course they'll be ignored. 20-year-olds raised in middle-class America know better than these foreigners.
The two young intellectuals were born and raised in Venezuela and over the last decade saw their country transformed into a place they barely recognize.
As exiles seeking asylum in America today, they’re telling any young person who will listen: the virus is socialism.
“No one else can know what happened in Venezuela but a Venezuelan, and we are experts on that,” said Guilarte, 25.
Galicia, 24, adds “I definitely see America committing a lot of the same mistakes Venezuela committed.”
Galicia and Guilarte are currently visiting college campuses nationwide warning young people against socialism, and told The College Fix in a joint telephone interview on Wednesday their message could not be coming at a more critical time.
Far-left climate extremist Greta Thunberg unloaded on the world in an op-ed published on Friday, claiming that fossil fuels “are literally” killing mankind, and that they are a threat to “our very existence” as she said that her “climate crisis” agenda is not just about the environment, but about fighting the “colonial, racist, and patriarchal systems of oppression.”As noted on Instapundit:
In an op-ed published in Project Syndicate, Thunberg and two other far-left climate activists attacked world leaders over their pro-capitalist policies, writing that “the politicians let the profiteers continue to exploit our planet’s resources and destroy its ecosystems in a quest for quick cash that threatens our very existence.”
“And just like that, it never actually was about climate. It’s always about changing society into a Marxist utopia and every one of these movements prove it,” the Daily Wire’s Jeremy Frankel tweets.
You know the old saw, give a man a fish and he’ll have a meal, teach a man to fish and he’ll have food for the rest of his life.Charity is one thing, dependence is another. Understanding that difference is what differentiates conservatism from socialism.
It ignores the fact that if you give a man a fish everyday, not only will he never learn to fish, he’ll come to resent you for giving him a fish. He might even come to believe he’s incapable of learning to fish, and that you can only fish because of some invisible “privilege” that allows you to learn that stuff. At the same time you will believe that he’s inferior to you, unable to make his own decisions, and that you must decide and set everything for him or he’ll die. You might not admit it, ever, but you’ll come to believe that he’s a burden. Subconsciously you’ll hate being beholden to him. You’ll come up with all sorts of schemes, from aborting his children to enabling his drug addiction to facilitating his euthanasia just to be rid of the intolerable burden. And it’s no surprise because your “charity” is increasingly met with resentment, envy and outright anger.
Why? Well, because that’s the way humans work. The human being was born to strive. Being handed things just makes them both dependent and resentful of that dependence. This paradise that the very well fed and clothed imagine, where the government just magically dispenses everything everyone might want is no such thing. If it were possible to implement it without stealing this stuff from others (it’s not. The government produces nothing.) it would make humanity extinct in two generations. It would also create the crime wave to end all crime waves.
We clever monkeys don’t like stuff handed to us. We like to improve it, to work at it, to make it better. When it becomes impossible, we’re reduced to the level of pets, and humans don’t do well with being pets. No, it’s not even like the perfect childhood, in which you’re handed all you need. First of all no one had that perfect a childhood, and even the best parents don’t always know what you need (let alone want.) Second, childhood is a time of growing and learning, sometimes quite painful learning, as growing up is a painful process of leaving behind habits and cherished modes of life. Third, even children in happy families chomp at the bit to leave and be adults. It’s just the way we’re built.
Removing someone’s reason to strive is not a charity.
A majority of respondents say that socialism is incompatible with American values, a Monmouth University poll released Monday says. link
Democratic Rep. Stephanie Murphy (Fla.) took members of her own party to task Tuesday, telling an audience she's "offended by this whole conversation about socialism" in American politics.People who escaped from communism are usually the strongest proponents of the free enterprise system.
The Washington Examiner reported that Murphy — whose family fled Vietnam for the U.S. when she was a baby — decried the notion of socialism.
"I am offended by this whole conversation about socialism," she said. "The idea that in the greatest democracy, the greatest capitalist system in the world, we're having casual conversation about socialism, offends me."
Speaking to a crowd of 150 people at the BakerHostetler legislative seminar, Murphy called herself a "proud capitalist."
"It is the system that built us the greatest nation and the greatest economy in the world," she reminded attendees. "Sure, we have to fix the inequities that exist in our system. We have to make sure everybody, no matter what zip code they're born in, has a fair shot.
"But it is not the moment to undo the whole system and embrace something that Americans have spent blood and treasure fighting to save other countries from," she added, according to the Examiner.
California state regulators have been working on a plan to charge mobile phone users a text messaging fee intended to fund programs that make phone service accessible to the low-income residents, reports said Tuesday...Socialism is expensive.
Charges may also be applied retroactively to messages sent in the past five years, which has raised questions concerning the proposal’s legality, Rufus Jeffress, vice president of the Bay Area Council, told the San Francisco Bay Area's KNTV-TV. The “alarming precedent” could chalk up to a bill of more than $220 million for consumers, the Mercury News reported.
The wireless industry argues that the fees would put carriers at a disadvantage since competing messaging services like Facebook’s Messenger and WhatsApp would not be charged the new fees, FOX11 reported.
Those against the proposal said that wireless customers already pay into the state’s Public Purpose Programs, which they call “healthy and well-funded” with nearly $1 billion in its budget, the Mercury News reported. But state regulators disagree, saying the budget has increased more than $300 million over six years, KNTV reported.
