Government Health Care and Your Future...

...if you're a women, then not's so much.

Canada's Ontario province won't fund last-chance prostate cancer drug.

There are two tiers of men with advanced prostate cancer in Ontario: Those who get access to a remarkable drug through private insurance, and those who get a death sentence.

The grim news is often delivered at the London Regional Cancer Program to men whose shoulders sag and jaws drop when told Ontario's Health Ministry has for 15 months refused to pay for a medication covered by every other Canadian province.

"There's shock, fury and dismay," said oncologist Kylea Potvin. "Everyone thinks we have this wonderful universal health care system, but this is absolutely not the case. We've increasingly become a two-tier health care system where if you have money, you have access."

The drug Zytiga is a last resort for men whose prostate cancer has spread and who wouldn't benefit from aggressive chemotherapy or even chemical castration.

A pill with few side effects, Zytiga targets an enzyme needed to make a hormone that feeds the cancer and studies have shown it to slow its progression, leaving men living months or even years longer and without as much pain.

It was quickly approved in the United States and by Health Canada.

But Ontario rejected the application, a decision that's left heroic patients such as Percy Bedard of Zurich calling on Ontarians to ask their government why it has abandoned so many men to suffer and die before they should.

Glen Reynolds writes:

(1) They’re men, and nobody cares as much if men die. (2) On average, they’re past their earning years and if they die earlier it helps the pension problem. And men who live too long are just a burden on society anyway.

Expect this sort of thing here, soon, under ObamaCare. Probably with rules designed to discourage doctors from telling patients about treatments the government would rather not pay for.

Why do they/we hate us?

Glen Reynolds observes:

JUST IN TIME FOR THE ELECTION RUN-UP: Authorities rank “sovereign citizen” movement among greatest threats. And the Southern Poverty Law Center — ever eager to help the Democrats paint the right as violent — chimes in.

Notice that there’s never any “why do they hate us?” agonizing where these groups are concerned.

Also "Dissent is Patriotic" only when a Republican is in the White House.

Here is the article that Reynolds is referring to.

People who espouse the idea of being "sovereign citizens" are loons. But, then, so are the Occupy idiots, Black Supremacists and Islamic Extremists, and, yet, the media goes in searcho of "root causes" with them, but when it comes to disaffected white crazy folks, they have zero interest in "root causes."

The root causes for all of these kinds of groups, by the way, was classically dissected by Eric Hoffer in The True Believer, which should be "must reading" for anyone who wants to pretend to being "well-read."

Riots in American cities ...

...and it's not news?

Glen Reynolds writes:

#OCCUPYFAIL: Occupy support drops more than 20 points in … San Francisco? You can tell that the movement has lost popular support because the press suddenly stopped the breathless coverage. As I predicted, once it became clear the movement was hurting the Democrats, the coverage dried up.

Here is the linked Hot Air piece:

According to this poll, Occupy support in the Bay area would have been 58/34 at one point. Now it’s 35/57, which is a flip of 46 points in the gap. Combining support and opposition numbers, Democrat support for Occupy is now 40/56, and even among self-professed liberals, where 27% have switched to opposition, it’s only 52/35. Among San Francisco adults. Note too that the movement has not gained converts in anything like the numbers they are alienating, which means that the longer they go, the weaker they are getting politically.

In San Francisco. Nancy Pelosi’s home turf. The city that banned Happy Meals because parents were being held hostage by their children. The mind boggles.

The notion of “occupying” vacant buildings for their operations as some form of social justice also doesn’t go over as well as one might expect in the area. Only 21% support the idea, eleven points lower than the movement’s remaining support, while 71% oppose it. Even the youngest demographic, which still has a very narrow plurality supporting the movement (43/41) opposes this idea by a wide majority, 32/59.

But the best is yet to come. No one in this area is ever happy with the police. Eric Burdon once hailed the city in “San Francisco Nights,” praising the Hells Angels while warbling, “Cop’s face is filled with hate; heavens above, he’s on a street called Love.” (Needless to say, the entire song is dreck.) They’re not happy with the police in this instance, though, because the police haven’t been harsh enough with the occupiers. Twenty-eight percent say the police have been too harsh, while 35% say they’ve been “just about right” … and 33% say they need to get harsher.

When the Great Progressive Event has a third of adults in San Francisco looking for a police crackdown, I’d call that nuking the fridge.

If Occupy is alienating San Franciscans, imagine how normal America would feel...if the Occupy riots received actual press coverage?

Good point - "In Mocking Santorum, Eugene Robinson Reveals A Sickness in Our Society."

Patterico observes:

But the problem is not just that some leftists can’t understand the love that some people feel for their unborn children — or for their children who (like Sarah Palin’s son Trig) were born with disabilities. What really infuriates is the contempt they show for parents who make different choices than they would . . . and the smug arrogance with which they pronounce judgment on the most intimate aspects of others’ private lives.


What Robinson has done, and what Colmes did the other day, is indecent. These men would never say such a thing to Santorum’s face. (Or maybe they would — which is possibly even worse.) What sickness has invaded our body politic that people feel free, not only to act the cretin, but to do so on national television while sporting insufferable, supercilious, self-satisfied smirks like those we have seen on the mugs of Colmes and Robinson in recent days?

In short: how dare they? How dare they?!

There is something wrong with a system that expects people to undergo such indignities to attain high office. I’m not a fan of Rick Santorum as a candidate, but the treatment he has received in recent days regarding an intensely personal decision is a disgrace.

This follows on the last round of mocking Sarah Palin for having a Down-syndrome baby -

It could be because, increasingly, it seems that those in public life — especially Republicans — are seen as fair game for criticism of their most intimate decisions. Sarah Palin has a Down’s Syndrome child and is mocked. Rick Santorum brings home his child that died hours after his birth, and is mocked.

It could be that this is how the logic of abortion plays out - babies are just clumps of tissues until their born, and until they are born, or if they "shouldn't have been born," then getting weepy over them is just overly-sentimental.

Glen Reynolds points out:

WELL, AFTER THE TRIG PALIN ASSAULTS, GOING AFTER A STILLBORN BABY ISN’T MUCH OF A STRETCH: The Casual Cruelty of Eugene Robinson. Remember this the next time they launch one of their bogus “new civility” campaigns.


File this under the category of "holding paper."

Update:

This is from the Commentary piece I linked above:

The second point is the casual cruelty of Robinson and those like him. Robinson seems completely comfortable lampooning a man and his wife who had experienced the worst possible nightmare for parents: the death of their child. It is one thing to say you would act differently if you were in the situation faced by Rick and Karen Santorum​; it’s quite another to deride them as “crazy” and “very weird,” which is what commentators on the left are increasingly doing, and with particular delight and glee.


We are seeing how ideology and partisan politics can so disfigure people’s minds and hearts that they become vicious in their assaults on those with whom they have political disagreements. I would hope no one I know would, in a thousand years, ridicule parents who were grappling with unfathomable human pain. Even if those parents were liberal. Even if they were running for president and first lady.

The third point is it tells you something about the culture in which we live that in some quarters those who routinely champion abortion, even partial-birth abortion, are viewed as enlightened and morally sophisticated while those grieving the loss of their son, whom they took home for a night before burying, are mercilessly mocked.

Reynold's Law.

Subsidize middle-class status markers and you don't get more of the middle-class, you get fewer people with the virtues that make the middle class possible.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The Dwindling Power Of A College Degree.“Until the early 1970s, less than 11 percent of the adult population graduated from college, and most of them could get a decent job. Today nearly a third have college degrees, and a higher percentage of them graduated from nonelite schools. A bachelor’s degree on its own no longer conveys intelligence and capability. To get a good job, you have to have some special skill — charm, by the way, counts — that employers value. But there’s also a pretty good chance that by some point in the next few years, your boss will find that some new technology or some worker overseas can replace you.”
Of course, one reason why a bachelor’s degree on its own no longer conveys intelligence and capability is that a bachelor’s degree has gotten much easier to get, as part of a conscious strategy of giving everyone the markers of intelligence and capability. Remember Reynolds’ Law:

The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.

Get a job, you damn hippy...

...and no you can't maim the "1%" with your home-made fragmentation grenades.


Glenn Reynolds advises:

#OCCUPYFAIL: Occupy Portland domestic terrorists arrested with hand grenades. All the media myths about the Tea Party seem to have come true with regard to the Occupy movement, but the press doesn’t seem to care all that much.

Here is the story:

The deputy also found two gas masks, protective eye goggles and a safety helmet. All three men told the deputy that they had spent the night at the Occupy Portland demonstration, and they brought the mortars and safety equipment to the demonstration in preparation of the expected confrontation between police and protesters Sunday morning.


The three had been at the demonstration during the confrontation Sunday morning and had left about an hour before the vehicle was stopped. During that confrontation, a police officer was injured by a firework, but the three men denied being involved in the incident.

When asked about the explosives, the three men told authorities that they knew the canning jar would explode, causing glass shrapnel to fly and possibly cause injury.

So, the "grenades" are home-made, but let's give full credit to the Occupiers desire to maim.

Then if that isn't disturbing enough, there's this from James Taranto:

In covering the Tea Party, of course, the Times emphasized its supposed extremism and violence. Brisbane doesn't even mention these themes in his column on Obamaville, even though there has been a good bit of violence there, whereas Tea Party violence was a figment of left-wing imaginations. That tells you something about the agenda of the Times and other like-minded news outlets.


The media helped create and now helps sustain the Obamaville monster, but that doesn't mean they can control it. In recent days videos have surfaced from Oakland, Calif., and Portland, Ore., showing Obamavillians attacking local news crews attempting to report on the goings-on.

The Portland video is especially creepy. It shows an angry white man--his face obscured part of the time by a pink scarf--shouting obscenities at a newsman, and declaring: "We are the 99%, you're the 1%. . . . We don't want you in our society." The distinction between demonization and dehumanization is a very fine one, and media figures who have encouraged this foul and dangerous movement will have a lot to answer for if it continues to escalate.

America is moving toward energy independence...

...and it ain't green.

New Boom Reshapes Oil World, Rocks North Dakota

Two years ago, America was importing about two thirds of its oil. Today, according to the Energy Information Administration, it imports less than half. And by 2017, investment bank Goldman Sachs predicts the US could be poised to pass Saudi Arabia and overtake Russia as the world's largest oil producer.


Places like Williston are the reason why.

"For many years, they knew that there was oil in that area, but the technology wasn't available to get it out," the town's mayor, Ward Koeser, tells weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz.

But in the last few years, advances in such technologies as "fracking" and horizontal drilling have made, by some estimates, as much as 11 billion barrels of oil available in the Bakken formation under North Dakota and Montana.

"There's oil companies coming from all over the country now." Koeser says.

Williston has skipped the recession entirely. Unemployment there is less than 2 percent. The population, the mayor estimates, has grown from 12,000 to 20,000 in the last four years.

"We actually have probably between 2,000 and 3,000 job openings in Williston right now," Koeser says.

As Instapundit observes:

"The implications here are huge. If I were Russia and Saudi Arabia, I’d be subsidizing U.S. environmental groups in an effort to stop, or at least slow, the process."

Or re-elect an anti-business liberal.

Nerds like us.

Glenn Reynolds says:

WHEN I WAS A TEENAGER, JERRY POURNELLE’S ESSAYS IN GALAXY WERE A HUGE INFLUENCE. I’d say as big an influence on me as anything else I read. Now there’s a new edition of the collection, A Step Farther Out, available on Kindle. (Bumped).

Here's the link.

Galaxy magazine - check.

Pournelle's essays - check.

Teenager - check.

Downloaded to my Kindle - check.

"Preference Cascades."

A comment at Glenn Reynolds' Instapundit on the "Arab Spring" provides a useful way of thinking about surprising historical events, such as the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 or the collapse of the ancien regime in France in 1789.  Both events were surprising because these appeared to be solid, imposing, monolothic structures that were swept away in a matter of months. 

The comment observes:

JON HENKE EMAILS: “I was thinking about the ongoing revolutions in the Middle East and surrounding areas and I recalled something you wrote in 2002 that really captured what is happening in that region today. Concerning ‘preference cascades’, you wrote…”

This illustrates, in a mild way, the reason why totalitarian regimes collapse so suddenly. (Click here for a more complex analysis of this and related issues). Such regimes have little legitimacy, but they spend a lot of effort making sure that citizens don’t realize the extent to which their fellow-citizens dislike the regime. If the secret police and the censors are doing their job, 99% of the populace can hate the regime and be ready to revolt against it – but no revolt will occur because no one realizes that everyone else feels the same way.

This works until something breaks the spell, and the discontented realize that their feelings are widely shared, at which point the collapse of the regime may seem very sudden to outside observers – or even to the citizens themselves. Claims after the fact that many people who seemed like loyal apparatchiks really loathed the regime are often self-serving, of course. But they’re also often true: Even if one loathes the regime, few people have the force of will to stage one-man revolutions, and when preferences are sufficiently falsified, each dissident may feel that he or she is the only one, or at least part of a minority too small to make any difference.

So, to give credit where credit is due, Glenn Reynolds posits the idea of "preference cascades" working in a subterranean fashion in totalitarian regimes.

This is obviously an argument in favor of the First Amendment, which provides feedback to our government about the true sentiments of the governed, because truth is always good.  If a "preference cascade" effect is to occur in the United States, it will probably occur in an area of "political correctness," where the things that people know that they have to affirm to be accepted members of good society are at a variance from their lived experience.