New Book Investigates Failures of Health Care Industry‏

HealthScare: Why Health Care Is NOT About Your Health is a controversial new book looking into the failures of the health care industry.

How well do you understand what defines your health? Can you wake up one morning and make the decision to go purchase good health? Where would you go? Can you tell Santa Claus that you want him to bring you the gift of good health for Christmas? The federal government and health insurance companies want us to believe that having “health care” can make you healthy. They have presented health care as a means to your health, but it has turned out to be a con job to take over each American’s access to medical care—decimating health professionals’ ability to treat their patients effectively and at a reasonable cost.

HealthScare: Why Health Care Is NOT About Your Health details the history and ultimate failure of government and insurance involvement in the health industry. Using over four decades of experience in the health industry as a pharmacist, Fritz Scheffel argues that we can make the health system efficient, cost effective, and beneficial to all by regaining power over our own health from power-hungry politicians.

With HealthScare, Fritz Scheffel offers a balanced and honest appraisal of the history and politics of the health industry; Fritz Scheffel provides us a path to saving our health and, ultimately, our nation.

Press release.  $14.95 on Amazon

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 An odd thing

I have watched on video many American patriotic occasions and noted the songs sung.  But I have never seen "I vow to thee my country" sung on such occasions. Have I missed performances of it?   It is both intensely patriotic and intensely Christian.  It basically says how unreservedly the singers love their country but also goes on to say that the Kingdom of God is better still.  I welcome email from readers to enlighten me about it.  It is of course massively popular in Britain, where it originated just after WWI.  Below is a video of a beautiful young British soprano singing it. And the wonderful music was written by Gustav Holst, an eminent British composer.



There is also a choral performance here where just about everybody who is anybody in British politics can be seen.

The words:

I vow to thee, my country, all earthly things above,
Entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love;
The love that asks no question, the love that stands the test,
That lays upon the altar the dearest and the best;
The love that never falters, the love that pays the price,
The love that makes undaunted the final sacrifice.

I heard my country calling, away across the sea,
Across the waste of waters, she calls and calls to me.
Her sword is girded at her side, her helmet on her head,
And around her feet are lying the dying and the dead;
I hear the noise of battle, the thunder of her guns;
I haste to thee, my mother, a son among thy sons.

And there's another country, I've heard of long ago,
Most dear to them that love her, most great to them that know;
We may not count her armies, we may not see her King;
Her fortress is a faithful heart, her pride is suffering;
And soul by soul and silently her shining bounds increase,
And her ways are ways of gentleness, and all her paths are peace.

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Liberalism Is Your Crotchety, Judgmental Aunt Wagging Her Finger At You

Ever been pinned down at Thanksgiving Dinner by a crabby relative who goes on a tirade about trivial complaints which are laced with biting criticism? "Why are skirts so short these days?" "You've gained a few pounds." "Ugh, next you'll be talking to those 'negroes!' You're barely able to tolerate it because she's old, out of it and you only have to be around her for a few hours before she goes home to her 12 cats and you don't have to see her for another year.

Well, liberals have become the equivalent of your b*tchy spinster aunt, but the worst offenders are young, their self-righteous whining is incessant and they never seem to go away.

Don't believe it? Well, you already do if you're not a liberal because you've long since gotten tired of their nagging.

"The Redskins’ name is unfair to Indians! It must be changed!" "How dare you refuse to bake a cake for a gay wedding! We're going to run you out of business!" "You disagree with a black man! That means you're rraacccisssst!"

Pretty much EVERYTHING is racist these days. In fact, half the time when you hear something called racist, you have to wait for the explanation to figure out why it's supposed to be bigoted. One of my recent favorites is a claim that hoop skirts are racist. Why? Who knows? Maybe it’s the same reason that The Lord of the Rings or Devil’s Food Cake is supposedly racist. Even if there isn't a professional race hustler around who's creative enough to come up with something you've done or said that's supposedly racist, they tag you as a bigot anyway because of some supposed "white privilege" you have.

If the incessant cries of racism don’t get to you, then the increasingly hyper-sensitive feminists will. That pack of harpies ruining men’s lives for putting up a swimsuit calendar at work was annoying enough in the sixties, but if anything, they have even more trivial, pampered, first world complaints to nag everyone about today.

Of course, they can’t say that; so everything is “rape culture.” Men and women are having sex drunk? That’s rape. You’re anti-abortion? Probably because you want women to bear the children of men that raped them. You think rapes on college campuses should be investigated by the police instead of women’s studies professors? You must be pro-rape!

Liberals complain incessantly about racism because almost everyone in America is against it and they constantly accuse people for fomenting “rape culture” for the same reason. As long as people they don’t like are spending all their time defending themselves against charges that they’re racist and love rape, they’re hoping everyone else won’t notice that liberals have gone CRAZY.

Crazy enough that the word “mansplaining” is actually a thing. That’s when a man explains something to a woman that she already knows. There are even whole TUMBLR pages dedicated to criticizing “manspreading,” which is men who spread their legs on the subway, presumably because they don’t want to squash their junk. By doing that, they’re apparently asserting their male privilege…or something. Then there’s “Gamergate,” which long story short, is a gaggle of liberal hens incessantly clucking at men who want to play video games in peace because guys who spend all their free time playing Madden and Street Fighter apparently aren’t sufficiently deferential to the nagging of a bunch of harpies who want to lecture them about feminist trivia.

Of course, the list of issues that set off liberals goes far beyond race and feminism. Lefties demanded that Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich lose his job for being opposed to gay marriage. The liberals at Planet Fitness banned a woman at the gym because the women’s bathroom should be for women as opposed to men who identify as women. A liberal Muslim at the University of Missouri demanded that the incredibly popular war movie American Sniper be banned because it made her feel “unsafe.” Support for the 2nd Amendment was declared “homophobic” at Kalamazoo College.

Libs block conservative speakers at college campuses when possible and often throw things. They chant and try to disrupt their speeches if that doesn’t work because their tender liberal ears can’t handle a contrary opinion. Asking someone from another country where he’s from is considered a “micoaggression” by liberals, which basically is just another term for, “We don’t have enough things to cry about already.” Mount Holyoke College is even pulling The Vagina Monologues because it’s not sensitive enough to men with vaginas. I know, I know, if you have a vagina, you’re not a man, but you have to humor these loons a bit; they’re coo coo for Cocoa Puffs.

As you’re discussing all these issues, you have to be careful because you might accidentally use a “trigger” word that upsets some terribly sensitive liberal soul. Oberlin College can tell you all about it.

Oberlin College has published an official document on triggers, advising faculty members to "be aware of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression," to remove triggering material when it doesn't "directly" contribute to learning goals….

That’s no small matter because once liberals, the world’s most easily offended people, have been “triggered” by something you’ve done, then they view themselves as victims who have a right to go to insane lengths to fight back against your grievous attack.

Last March at University of California–Santa Barbara, in, ironically, a “free-speech zone,” a 16-year-old anti-abortion protester named Thrin Short and her 21-year-old sister Joan displayed a sign arrayed with graphic images of aborted fetuses. They caught the attention of Mireille Miller-Young, a professor of feminist studies. Miller-Young, angered by the sign, demanded that they take it down. When they refused, Miller-Young snatched the sign, took it back to her office to destroy it, and shoved one of the Short sisters on the way.

Speaking to police after the altercation, Miller-Young told them that the images of the fetuses had “triggered” her and violated her “personal right to go to work and not be in harm.” A Facebook group called “UCSB Microaggressions” declared themselves “in solidarity” with Miller-Young and urged the campus “to provide as much support as possible.”

Incidentally, those last two paragraphs are from liberal writer Jonathan Chait who wrote a column complaining about how intolerant liberalism has become now that his fellow travelers have moved on from going after Duck Dynasty and Rush Limbaugh to *** gasp *** targeting liberals like him, too.

Liberals are like Iran’s morality police, but instead of screaming at women for showing their ankles or going out in public without a male relative, libs yell at you for wanting to play video games without feminist jargon in them or wanting to only have women in the women’s bathroom. They’re nasty, quarrelsome and many of them are young, which means they may have those sticks wedged in their behinds for life. Maybe Obamacare should be authorized to yank them out – at least until we get rid of it and give the whiners something to REALLY complain about.

SOURCE

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It's Election 'Day' for a reason

by Jeff Jacoby

EXCEPT FOR diplomats posted abroad, early voting isn't an option in Israeli elections. So when Israel's election day dawned on Tuesday, with impressions of the campaign's home stretch fresh in voters' minds, no one in the country had yet cast a ballot. The giant pre-election rallies in Tel Aviv, the final flurry of ads, the polls showing the main opposition party in the lead, the prime minister's unexpected repudiation of a Palestinian state: Together Israelis had taken it all in, and together Israelis would put it all to a vote.

Over the past two decades, early voting has become routine in American elections, with citizens in 36 states and the District of Columbia permitted to cast their ballots well in advance of Election Day, either by mail or at early-voting polling stations. In 2012, according to the United States Election Project at the University of Florida, at least 32 million votes were banked early, a whopping one-fourth of all ballots cast nationwide that year. Other calculations range even higher: A presidential commission on election administration reported last year that the number of votes cast before Election Day in 2012 was 47 million, nearly one-third the US total.

Is this wise? Does the metamorphosis of Election Day into Election Month strengthen the machinery of democratic self-government? Plainly, many Americans think so. "Whenever we have a law that expands access to the ballot and makes it easier for people to register and to vote," former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick said last year after signing a law to authorize early voting in the state beginning in 2016, "it makes our democracy better."

Except that it doesn't. At best, it only makes it more convenient — and that convenience comes with downside tradeoffs.

First, far from motivating more citizens to participate in elections, early-voting laws actually decrease turnout. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin, in a study published in the American Journal of Political Science, have shown that early voting "lower[s] the likelihood of turnout by three to four percentage points." Why? Because by dragging out for weeks what had been the concentrated, communal experience of a single decision day, early-voting laws wind up "dissipating the energy of Election Day" and "reducing the civic significance of elections for individuals." The Tuesday after the first Monday in November used to be a climactic moment when the nation turned out to choose its leaders. Now it's merely when the voting stops.

A second tradeoff, even more unfortunate, is the loss of informational equality. In some states, the early-voting window opens more than six weeks before Election Day — a month and a half! Think of what can happen in the last 45 days of a campaign: a high-stakes debate, an outrageous gaffe, an international crisis, a late-in-the-game promise, a surge of momentum, a demoralizing admission, a spectacular endorsement.

"Early voters are in essence asked a different set of questions from later ones," argued Eugene Kontorovic and John McGinnis, law professors at Northwestern University, in an essay in Politico last year. "They are voting with a different set of facts." That isn't the way to make democracy better.

Like a jury retiring to consider its verdict, Israel turned out en masse to elect a new parliament — and only after all the testimony was in. No voters had cause to regret a vote cast weeks earlier, or to wish they had known then what they knew now. Israelis don't vote when they decide they've heard enough. They vote, as Americans used to vote, on Election Day.

You don't have to look to Israel to know that a campaign's last innings are often the most enlightening or game-changing. Just think of the revelation, days before the 2000 election, of George W. Bush's drunk-driving arrest. Or John Silber's prickly interview with Natalie Jacobson as the 1990 Massachusetts governor's race neared its climax. Or Lyndon Johnson's bombing halt in North Vietnam on the eve of the razor-sharp election in 1968. Or Ross Perot's wild claim, late in the 1992 campaign, of his daughter's wedding being sabotaged by Republicans.

Elections are more meaningful when voters act collectively, coming together at one time to make their political choices. We may disagree sharply over whom ultimately to choose, but the choosing should be done when the campaign ends — on a clearly defined Election Day, not a long-drawn-out election season.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for 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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