Monday, August 23, 2010



Socialized medicine in wonderful Sweden (1)

Something for Americans to look forward to, thanks to the Democratic Party and President Emptyhead

A 32-year-old took the needle into his hands when he tired of the wait at Sundsvall hospital in northern Sweden and sewed up the cut in his leg himself. The man was later reported to the police for his impromptu handiwork. "It took such a long time," the man told the local Sundsvall Tidning daily.

The man incurred the deep cut when he sliced his leg on the sharp edge of a kitchen stove while he was renovating at home.

"I first went to the health clinic, but it was closed. So I rang the medical help line and they told me that it shouldn't be closed, so I went to emergency and sat there," the man named only as Jonas told the newspaper.

After an hour-long wait in a treatment room, he lost patience and proceeded to sew up his own wound. "They had set out a needle and thread and so I decided to take the matter into my hands," he said.

But hospital staff were not as impressed by his initiative and have reported the man on suspicion of criminal dispossession (egenmäktigt förfarande) for having used hospital equipment without authorization.

While Jonas admitted to the newspaper that he has no prior experience of sewing up himself he sought to play down the fuss that his handiwork has caused, arguing that "through the ages people have always sewn themselves up".

SOURCE

NOTE: Sundsvall is a major government hospital serving the entire region in which it is located

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Socialized medicine in wonderful Sweden (2)

More for Americans to look forward to, thanks to the Democratic Party and President Emptyhead

NURSES asked a mother to clean her own room two days after she gave birth by C-section because they were short staffed, Swedish media reported.

Over-worked nurses asked mother-of-two Elin Andersson to strip the sheets from her own hospital bed and tidy up before she was discharged from a hospital in Sundsvall, northern Sweden, local newspaper Sundsvalls Tidning said.

The request was among a list of problems Ms Andersson had at the hospital. She said had to call nurses every time she needed her medicine because nurses forgot to give it to her. And her partner was also asked to help care for her while she was in hospital because nurses had other patients to deal with.

Ms Andersson said the final insult came when she decided to go home: ”That was when the midwife said I had one final task to perform. Then she went and got a big white laundry bag and asked me to clean out the room and the bed where I had lain.”

Two midwives at the Sundsvall hospital ward admitted that Ms Andersson's claims were true. Midwife Gunnel Westerlund said: ”She describes precisely those bits that we don't have time for. Medical safety always comes first and you can't leave (another) mother while she's giving birth.”

SOURCE

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The Professional Left vs. the Amateur Right

Excerpt only

Of all the slips of the tongue and unintentional admissions by this administration, Robert Gibbs' "Professional Left" comment may well be the one they wish they could squeeze back into their collective windpipe the most:
I hear these people saying (Obama) is like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested. ... I mean, it's crazy. ... The Professional Left ... will be satisfied when we have Canadian health care and we've eliminated the Pentagon. That's not reality. ... They wouldn't be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president.

The term "Professional Left" denotes a growing industry that specializes in converting other people's money into an ideological product, while making a good living out of it in the process.

The term "Professional Left" hasn't been in open circulation before, but it deserves to stick. The casual way in which Gibbs dropped the phrase suggests that it is part of the inner circle's jargon, and that the White House residents are fully aware of its meaning, function, and implication: there is a class of people with radical leftist views who have made it their job - with the help of abundant grants, foundations, and trusts - to carry out propaganda campaigns, indoctrinate, subvert, and plant the seeds of the leftist worldview in people's minds through the arts, media, education, blogging, and street protests. For many it's the only income they've had in years. As with most professional enthusiasts, after a while the pre-paid idealism gives way to cynicism, and the quest for truth turns into a mechanical repetition of talking points.

Observe how many Professional Left organizations spawned in the years of Bush's presidency, when tax cuts ushered in economic prosperity. Immediately, they started working on bringing the economy down. The most prolific hatching, of course, occurred in the wake of the hate-Bush political flotilla.

These creatures always give themselves benevolent, kind names. Common Dreams, for example, hatched in the good year of 1997, when the Republican majority in Congress was steering the country into prosperity. Among other things, the name "Common Dreams" adequately describes the Professional Left's collective ambition to attach themselves to a "progressive" think tank, with the feeding tube connected directly to the deep pocket of George Soros or his equivalent.

In contrast, there's no such class of people on the right. Those employed in the several right-leaning think tanks are too few to make up a class, or even a guild. The same applies to a handful of magazines and newspapers, one Fox News channel, and a few dozen local and national radio talk show hosts.

They are not living off public subsidies, leeching off charities, or smuggling in a fringe ideology wrapped in a mainstream format, which is what the Professional Left does. Unlike their ideological opponents, these people openly state their beliefs, make a living through legitimate advertising, and run honest, sustainable businesses. They may be a force, but there aren't enough of them to fill a large auditorium.

What we have is the Amateur Right: a loose amalgamation of free-roaming conservatives and libertarians who engage in political activism in their spare time - and on their own dime.

The Amateur Right's favorite pastime is listening to talk radio and fighting a battle of wits on political blogs and discussion forums. They are frequently accused of being corporate sellouts by their leftist opponents. A typical presumption is that no one would defend capitalist free markets unless they were paid to do so by a shady deep-pocketed entity. (That happened to me more than once and I've heard similar stories from others.) When the Amateur Right finally protested in the streets as tea partiers, the Professional Left and the Democrat leaders similarly accused them of being Astroturf laid down by insurance companies.

The accusations are telling. The astroturfing itself is a patented invention of the Professional Left - complete with union-sponsored buses full of uniformed "activists" with identical pre-printed signs. Many leftist bloggers are getting paid for building up the visibility of their causes on the Internet. Assigning these traits to the Amateur Right appears to be a projection, shaped by a narrative that measures success in dollars received from grants, charities, government funding, and salaries within the ranks of the Professional Left.

Even the wildly popular Tea Party Express must run its own independent fundraising to maintain the buses and the small staff of operatives. No money for them will be coming anytime soon from charitable foundations, whose fortunes were made through capitalist enterprise but whose programs invariably benefit opponents of capitalism.

Remember John Lennon's Imagine? As a mental exercise, try playing it in your head while imagining the Ford, Gates, Kellogg, or Rockefeller Foundations, the Pew Charitable Trust, and the rest of the usual NPR contributors giving money to cultivate the ideals of capitalism, individualism, and republicanism - or to promote the virtues of free enterprise and private property in poor urban areas. All you'll get is a headache and a bad case of cognitive dissonance. Tea parties need not apply. The charitable cup of tea tilts leftward by design. And so do the money bags.

Obama's entire career has been about organizing, sustaining, and advancing the Professional Left and their operations. One such undertaking involved the processing of $50 million given by the conservative Annenberg Foundation to reform Chicago public schools from 1995 to 2001.

In this Obama was assisted by Bill Ayers, the former Marxist terrorist turned professor, who develops and teaches the methodology of advancing leftist dogmas in the classroom. If you think Obama and Ayers designed a reform to improve test scores, think again: the academic performance remained as poor as it ever was. But guess what? The ideological indoctrination of students skyrocketed, along with the numbers of public school teachers turned into Professional Left operatives. Mission accomplished - conservative money was successfully converted into leftist ideology.

The abuse of the Annenberg Challenge wasn't the only example of conservative funding being hijacked by the Professional Left and used to destroy conservatism. It's how the Professional Left make a living. Converting other people's money into hot air is their raison d'ˆtre; everything else is a side effect.

It would be half as bad if they only processed the money given to them voluntarily. But the Professional Left has learned how to extract money designated for non-political purposes, and developed a variety of techniques that allow them to leech off society through government grants and endowments, union dues, and even church donations.

From 1994 to 2009, ACORN received at least $53 million in federal funding, of which they stole five million for themselves, and converted the rest into radical left-wing action to subvert America's political institutions.

Obama once worked with ACORN as a community organizer, processing other people's money into ideology, and later as a lawyer, defending their right to such activities. In the first year of Obama's presidency, ACORN was poised to receive up to $8.5 billion more tax dollars through the stimulus bill, despite being under investigation for voter registration fraud in a dozen states. That same year, their "common dreams" were shattered when Congress finally withheld their funding. However, what tipped the scale was not the fact that ACORN was a home of professional subversives, but an unrelated scandal that was hardly ideological in nature and involved underage prostitution.

The Professional Left's appetites go far beyond government coffers. Even after you've paid your taxes and saved some cash for personal spending, part of it will still be sucked into the Professional Left's omnipresent and hyperactive proboscis through movie tickets, cable and newspaper subscriptions, college, and other tuition fees. You can roughly measure how much by the amount of ideological hot air coming from the screens, news columns, and your school curricula.

Every time you buy a corporate product or service - a computer from Hewlett Packard, a cell phone from Verizon, cereal from Kellogg, jeans from Levi Strauss, cosmetics from Liz Claiborne, or medicines from Merck - you also feed the Professional Left. All of these, and most other big companies have donated to leftist groups and causes, as well as conducted "progressive" seminars with employees - paying Professional Left instructors. This money is included in the price of their products and services.

The same goes for your investments and saving deposits. JP Morgan, Chase, Wachovia, Bank of America, US Bank, Citibank, PNC Bank, Provident Bank, and others have been giving money - voluntarily or otherwise - to ACORN and other branches of the Professional Left's ideological-industrial complex.

Guess who is best positioned today to appropriate billions of tax dollars in stimulus slush funds, and to process them into organic, locally made hot air? Even without ACORN there remains a well-trained, hungry army of looters and moochers collectively known as the Professional Left. No doubt each and every one of them has already been counted and added to the list of "three million jobs saved or created" by this administration. Their job description? To spend as much of your money as possible to strike at America's foundations, demonize your values, indoctrinate your children, and destroy your way of life.

President Obama is proactively doing just that on a national scale, converting the American economy into a gigantic ball of ideologically sound hot air, while making a nice living for himself and for all those who assist him in that activity. If that does not describe him as the ultimate mover and shaker of the Professional Left, I don't know what else does.

Slowly but surely, the Professional Left's complex has diversified and expanded its frontiers to include professional educators, filmmakers, entertainers, lawyers, writers, clergy, journalists, politicians, government workers, and now also members of the president's cabinet and even the president himself. And given the proverbial revolving door in their membership, they can all move freely from one field to another without ever stepping outside the common hot air bubble, staying in touch with the others trough a common, members-only mailing list. One of such mailing lists, recently discovered and analyzed by the Daily Caller, was used by specialists in various sectors of the Professional Left to share thoughts on the many ways they can spend your money, shove their ideology down your throat, and bamboozle you into voting Obama into the White House.

More HERE

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ELSEWHERE

Analyst: US turning into USSR: "There’s a lot of talk these days about America being an empire in decline. Gerald Celente, director of the Trends Research Institute, goes a step further, arguing America is following a similar path as the former Soviet Union. ‘While the many glaring differences between the two political systems have been exhaustively publicized — especially in the U.S. — the glaring similarities [go] unnoticed,’ Celente writes in The Trends Journal, which he publishes.”

Britain trying to tax its most successful industry out of existence: "France and Germany are trying to break the dominance of the City of London by offering tax breaks lasting for up to 20 years to the world's biggest investment banks, The (London) Sunday Times reported. The latest threat to the City [financial sector] comes amid mounting fears that Britain's coalition Government will impose another tax on banker bonuses this year. Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, has also raised the prospect of further taxes being imposed on the wealthiest in society - a move that would be viewed as a direct attack on the City. Almost 4000 senior financiers left the City in the first six months of 2010, according to data published over the weekend by IMAS, the corporate finance advisory firm."

There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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