Why the Leftist obsession with the penis?

'It is a peculiar fact' stated Engels a few months after Marx died, 'that with every great revolutionary movement the question of 'free love' comes to the foreground'.' By the mid- to late-nineteenth century it was clear to advocates and opponents alike that many socialists shared a propensity to reject the institution of the family in favour of 'free love', if not in practice, at least as an ideal -- SOURCE 

The Leftist obsession with the penis generally flies just under the radar but it can be detected as far back as Karl Marx.  Most politically-informed people are aware that Karl was against the family, on the grounds that it was a conservatizing influence (which it is).

Marx could hardly have overlooked, however, a side-effect of a ban on the family.  It left the penis high and dry -- as it were.  There was nowhere for it to go outside the family.  Morals were very strict at the time about extra-marital sex.  There were of course abundant prostitutes in the 19th century but use of them was illegal, disgraceful and threatened syphilis.  All that was left for the penis was Mrs Hand and her five daughters.

Marx was himself married -- to Jenny von Westphalen, with whom he   had seven children.  Jenny was of an aristocratic family so Karl would have been well aware that it was common for wealthy men of the era to take a mistress -- so that would have been the liberation of the penis he envisaged for those who did not marry.  David Lloyd George, a Prime Minister of the UK during WWI, had a mistress (Frances Stevenson) for many years -- officially just his secretary of course

And in the 1920s and 30s "understood" homosexuality emerged.  Heavily Leftist British artists and intellectuals knew that they could not safely "come out" -- they could be prosecuted for it -- but nonetheless managed to create a general understanding that homosexuality was not only OK but rather "smart" -- J.M. Keynes, Lytton Strachey and the Bloomsberries generally.  The movie "Brideshead revisited" conveys that era very well.  You are never quite sure that the main character was queer.  So that was a rather clear example of a Leftist obsession with the penis.

And in the famous '60s, of course, there evolved a Leftist devotion to "free love", which had little to do with love.  It could more accurately be referred to as "penis liberation".  I was there.  I remember it well.  They say that if you remember the '60s, you weren't there.  But that refers to drug and alcohol abuse and I was teetotal throughout the 60s, incredible as that may seem.  Conservatives really are different. I was not totally abstemious about the other delights on offer, however.

That was also of course an era of huge student demonstrations against "the war" (in Vietnam) and a total rejection of all conventional morality.  Fortunately, Christians held the fort and civilization survived.

And then in the '70s and '80s Leftists waged an unsystematic but extensive campaign to legalize homosexuality, which eventually succeeded.  At last the penis could do its thing without the burden of reproduction or the threat of prosecution.  The ban on homosexual marriage lasted right into the 21st century, however, but that too was eventually ground down.  Use of the penis just for pleasure became at last respectable.

So what was left after that series of victories?  Where could Leftists go next in their devotion to the penis? One might have thought that the war was over but a new campaign began with great ferocity:  A campaign to "liberate" extreme sexual abnormality.  Now one person could enjoy not only the delights of the penis but also the delights of femininity.  "Transgenders" became the icons of modernity and liberation.  Some individuals went too far and cut their penis off but they generally regretted it. And in a pinnacle of penis devotion, some mentally ill women were encouraged to have surgery which would "give" them a penis.  Freud claimed that women suffered from "penis envy" but he never foresaw that in his writings.

And any criticism of the various abnormalities concerned was ruthlessly crushed, with criminal penalties threatened in some jurisdictions.  So that is where we are now.  Who knows what Leftist devotion to the penis will bring forth next?

So why?  It's all just a case of self-indulgence.  Leftists believe that "There's no such thing as right and wrong" so why not?  Leftists reject all moral and prudential restraints so their only task is to destroy such restraints on their own behaviour.  And that fits in with their overall program of destroying existing society as a whole.

Leftists, of course claim that they are acting out of compassion but there is not the slightest compassion evident when they attack in various ways people who believe in Biblical morality.  They don't even show tolerance then, let alone compassion. Listen to almost anything they say about Donald J. Trump and the resultant outpouring of hate will convince you that hate drives them, not compassion -- JR.

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Time to End Hospitals’ Right to Blank Check for Emergency Care

Emergency medical care is an exception to the general principle of market exchange, whereby services are voluntarily bought and sold, with sellers competing on price. Under federal law, hospitals are required to treat patients that arrive needing emergency medical treatment, regardless of their ability to pay—but allowed to subsequently charge whatever they wish.

In recent years, medical providers have increasingly exploited this arrangement by threatening exorbitant charges for out-of-network emergency care in order to force insurers to agree to generous reimbursement terms across the board. Patients have frequently been caught in the crossfire, and forced to pay large “surprise bills” for emergency care by hospitals or doctors who remain out of network.

Emergency care is necessarily an unfree market, but it is a small and discrete part of healthcare, accounting for less than 7 percent of hospital spending. Ending the right of providers to fill in a blank check for emergency medical procedures would directly help some of the most vulnerable patients, who are being subject to exorbitant bills. But it would also prevent providers from leveraging this exceptional situation to undermine price competition for the bulk of hospital services.

The seemingly narrow issue of payment for out-of-network emergency care therefore has broader significance. The rising cost of healthcare is often discussed as a general phenomenon afflicting medical services, but the problem is primarily a matter of medical costs and expenditures most closely tied to hospital care.

According to a recent study in Health Affairs, whereas between 2007 and 2014 inpatient hospital prices increased by 42 percent and outpatient hospital prices rose by 25 percent, inpatient physician prices increased by 18 percent, and outpatient physician fees increased by only 6 percent. Over the same period, while many expensive new drugs have become available, the price index for existing drugs increased by only 2 percent.

Much attention has been paid to the responsibility of hospital mergers for this trend, but prices at hospitals with local monopolies average only 12 percent more than those at facilities with four or more local competitors. By contrast, prices for equivalent services can be three times higher at different facilities within the same hospital market.

What gives hospitals such pricing power, if it isn’t just market share? A major factor is the current billing rules for emergency care.

Congress enacted the 1986 Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) to require hospitals to treat and stabilize the condition of patients arriving at emergency departments, regardless of their insurance coverage or ability to pay. Yet, this legislation imposed no limit on the amount that hospitals and clinicians could then bill patients for the care they received—even if treatment began while they were unconscious.

The main constraint on hospital prices is normally the ability of insurers to steer patients to in-network facilities with which they have negotiated better rates. Yet this constraint is all but absent for emergency-care situations in which patients must often seek treatment at the nearest possible facility. Knowing that patients will expect their insurers to cover emergency-care costs, hospitals have increasingly used the threat of exorbitant out-of-network bills for emergency care to negotiate more generous reimbursement arrangements (high fees without constraints on volumes) for in-network elective care.

A similar dynamic has become clear among clinicians who frequently treat emergency patients. According to a recent Brookings Institution study, whereas physicians in general contract with insurers at an average of 128 percent of Medicare rates, those in specialties able to impose out-of-network emergency bills are able to drive a harder bargain: with emergency physicians billing an average of 306 percent and anesthesiologists billing 344 percent of Medicare rates. This has yielded a phenomenon known as “surprise billing,” where out-of-network providers of emergency care bill enormous amounts in excess of charges covered by insurers—leaving individuals to pay the balance. Most shockingly, this may even happen for out-of-network clinicians practicing at in-network hospitals.

As a solution to this specific problem, scholars from the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute recently recommended prohibiting clinicians from independently billing for emergency, ancillary, and hospitalist services—a reform which would make hospitals responsible for paying them and collecting reimbursement by affiliating with insurance networks. As the patient has little say over which emergency-care physicians, anesthesiologists, or pathologists will bill for services incident to their care, and hospitals have control over who operates within their walls, such a proposed reform makes a lot of sense.

Yet a broader reform is required to remedy the incentive for hospitals to themselves threaten emergency-care patients with exorbitant charges. Various legislative proposals regulating out-of-network bills for emergency care were introduced in the last Congress, and congressional staff have been working to develop reforms which could pass this year.

One prominent idea is an approach that has already been employed by some states—to subject out-of-network rates for emergency care to independent arbitration. This seems appealing because it does not appear overly prescriptive or rigid; but it is really just a form of buck-passing rather than an actual solution. Instead of having legislators weigh trade-offs in consultation with insurers, hospitals, patient groups, and research organizations, it would simply require judges with no healthcare staff, expertise, or relationships with effected stakeholders to improvise consequential decisions with complex unintended consequences. The administrative costs of appealing fees could be substantial, and under the pressure of interest-group lobbying, such an arrangement may inadvertently lead to payments drifting upwards.

A similar danger is involved in proposals to establish default out-of-network rates based on averages or percentiles of in-network rates: Hospitals may be able to inflate their permitted out-of-network reimbursements by manipulating in-network payment arrangements.

The best approach is rather to cap the rates that hospitals are allowed to charge for various out-of-network emergency-care services at a specified proportion of Medicare rates. Scholars at the Brookings Institution have recommended a tight cap of 125 percent of Medicare rates, under the belief that this could immediately improve insurers’ negotiating power with respect to reimbursements over elective care, and hence substantially drive down hospital costs.

Yet, such a cap would likely decimate hospital revenues overnight, and is therefore likely to be impractical. Nonetheless, a looser cap of 150 percent of Medicare rates (or higher for some specialties) would serve to protect patients from surprise bills greatly in excess of charges covered by their insurer, while preventing hospitals making use of the threat of out-of-network price gouging to cripple the ability of insurers to negotiate reasonable in-network payment arrangements.

A cap limited to out-of-network fees for emergency care could hardly be more different in spirit from proposed single-payer or all-payer reforms, which propose to effectively set a comprehensive floor on payment rates for all medical services—elective as well as emergency; in-network as well of out-of-network.

By eliminating hospitals’ default right to fill in a blank check for emergency care (whose provision is already mandated by federal law) a cap on out-of-network emergency charges would in no way restrict market forces from shaping the delivery of elective care (which accounts for over 93 percent of hospital spending). Providers could still insist on their preferred reimbursement arrangements before agreeing to deliver elective care, and insurers could still negotiate discounts from preferred networks of providers. Nor would such a cap restrict the freedom of hospitals and insurers to agree to better terms of contract to pay for emergency care in-network.

In fact, restoring balance to the default arrangement for out-of-network emergency care could encourage more reasonable payment agreements more broadly—by preventing hospitals from threatening exorbitant out-of-network bills to drive up reimbursement rates and veto cost-controls in payment arrangements across the board.

SOURCE 

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Free of the Mueller probe, President Trump can finally engage in vital nuclear arms talks with Russia, China and others

It is no coincidence that not until after Special Counsel Robert Mueller turned in his final report to Attorney General William Barr finding no conspiracy or coordination by the Trump campaign with Russia to interfere in the 2016 election that President Donald Trump is now free to act as a president would in engaging in nuclear arms talks with Russia, China and other great powers.

On May 3, speaking with reporters prior to a meeting with Slovak Republic Prime Minister Peter Pellegrini, Trump said he had a discussion with Russian President Vladimir Putin about nuclear arms in response to a question about the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) that expires in 2021.

“We’re talking about a nuclear agreement where we make less and they make less, and maybe even where we get rid of some of the tremendous firepower that we have right now,” Trump said.

While the Russian collusion probe by the Justice Department and intelligence agencies, beginning in 2016 and not wrapping until March 2019 — which ultimately found that Trump was no Russian agent after all and had nothing to do with the hack of the DNC and John Podesta emails or putting them on Wikileaks —continued on, nuclear arms agreements around the world have been fraying.

The Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with Russia was terminated. Denuclearization talks with North Korea have stalled.

And there’s no question that one of the biggest reasons has been because President Trump’s ability to negotiate was hampered by the ongoing investigation by Mueller. Foreign leaders could hedge that perhaps Trump was a lame duck who might be removed from office soon.

The effort to sabotage the President and his ability to engage in foreign policy by his own security services has unquestionably made the world a more dangerous place.

Now, clear of any charges, Trump is free to negotiate.

Which is good, especially on nuclear arms control. With thousands of nuclear missiles pointed at one another, we need to have a president who can communicate with his counterparts.

Trump also mentioned including China in a new agreement. Which, if you want to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorists like Islamic State or al Qaeda, or simply to have agreements that are accountable to everyone, you need cooperation among the world’s nuclear powers — all of them. In that context, including China and other nuclear powers should be welcomed. The biggest problem with the INF Treaty was that it did nothing to bind other countries. So, this could be a worthwhile endeavor.

Trump said, “We’re spending billions of dollars on nuclear weapons, numbers like we’ve never spent before. We need that, but they are also — and China is, frankly, also — we discussed the possibility of a three-way deal instead of a two-way deal.  And China — I’ve already spoken to them; they very much would like to be a part of that deal. In fact, during the trade talks, we started talking about that. They were excited about that. Maybe even more excited than about trade. But they felt very strongly about it.”

Trump continued, “So I think we’re going to probably start up something very shortly between Russia and ourselves, maybe to start off.  And I think China will be added down the road.  We’ll be talking about nonproliferation.  We’ll be talking about a nuclear deal of some kind.  And I think it will be a very comprehensive one.”

In talking, the worst thing that can happen is that we’re not able to come to a full agreement, but dialogue is still better than continuing on the current escalation cycle without communicating. Only the most virulent warmonger ready to start World War III over the DNC emails would find fault here.

And here’s the thing, with New START expiring in Feb. 2021 with the option to extend to 2026, Trump, and only Trump can really do anything about it. There will be a matter of weeks after the next inauguration for a new president to perhaps come to a deal, but careful negotiations can take months and years. Extending is okay but improving and strengthening the agreement and extending the scope to non-signatories should be a focus.

Either way, the groundwork needs to be laid right now. There is too much at stake.

Stopping nuclear arms proliferation is not a partisan issue. It is an area of policy that affects every living being on this planet, and is where President Trump could really use the voices of both parties to help deescalate the new Cold War we are in. It’s time to let the President be the President and work with his counterparts on nuclear security issues — for all of our sakes.

SOURCE 

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