various rhetorical musings of an over-active mind... typically wandering point-to-point without structure or concern, thereof... did you want cohesive, linear thoughts?... then go somewhere not called "Ramblings"...
April 2010, Obama was lying through his teeth talking to NASA employees, hoping to bamboozle them into voting Democrat, no doubt, in the midterm elections. From the BBC:
Barack Obama says it should be possible to send astronauts to orbit the planet Mars by the mid-2030s and return them safely to Earth. The US president made the claim in a major speech to staff and guests at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. He was laying out the details of his new policy for the US space agency.
Forget the moon, says Obama! We're aiming for a Mars mission! So, imagine my surprise to read this today:
In its budget submitted to Congress on February 13, the Obama administration zeroed out funding for NASA’s future Mars-exploration missions. The Mars Science Lab Curiosity, currently en route to the Red Planet and the nearly completed small MAVEN orbiter, scheduled for launch in 2013, will be sent, but that’s it. No funding has been provided for the Mars probes planned as joint missions in 2016 and 2018 with the European Space Agency, and nothing after that is funded either. This poses a grave crisis for the American space program.
suppose a hypothetical, if you will... let us suppose a situation where you, personally, were required to kill a stranger, but you were morally opposed to murder... consider each point of the following, and decide if you agree to commit the murder or do you oppose the murder.
The government mandates that you murder a stranger.
You may hire someone to do this for you, and the government will reimburse their cost.
You must purchase the weapon, and the government will reimburse its cost.
You must document the stranger's family names, ages, and addresses, providing them to the government.
You must provide for any healthcare associated with the murder (i.e. incidental harm to a family member).
You must provide this murder "service" on demand.
You can only murder children.
Only the mother of the targeted child may request the murder.
The child must be in the mother's womb; unborn.
unless you are a sociopath, you look at #1 with disgust... you (hopefully) would refuse to murder a stranger.
maybe #2 will give you some moral reprieve, but it is still the same murder as in #1... only you are allowed to have a gun-for-hire do the wet-work.
at least with #3, the cost of murder is subsidized.. but it is still murder.
for me, #4 is macabre... it was much better when you didn't have to know anything about them... now, you know the family which is left behind.
just in case a family member is injured during the murder, #5 leaves you being responsible for their care... so, you have some responsibility in all this bloodshed... does your finances now affect you being able to murder someone?... or is it still just a murder?
with #6, now you have to murder someone whenever you are told to... at what point has this crossed from being "just a murder" and turned into a slaughter?
wouldn't you just flatly refuse #7?... there are those who can rationalize the murder of some, but could you murder children?
suddenly #8 turns homicide to infanticide... are you really willing to assist a mother in the murder of her own child?
and #9... suddenly, this is okay... this isn't murder; it's abortion... a moment ago, we were abhorrent in the thought of being forced to assist a mother in killing her child... but now, we're okay with it... now, we don't understand what the fuss of the first eight propositions was all about.
of course it's okay to murder a stranger; if it's abortion.
of course it's okay to hire a murderer; if it's an abortion doctor.
of course it's okay to buy tools of killing; if it's to abort a child.
it's only polite to know the family; after all, you're aborting their child.
of course you take care of the mother; it was in her womb that you murdered her child.
of course you provide this on demand; it's the mother's choice, not the aborted child's.
of course you can murder children; if they haven't been born.
the same people who were against murder in the first place are the ones who cheer for it now... they can't understand that when someone is against murder from the start, they are against murder to the end.
Three points. As Paul Ryan said to you, this is an account gimmick that they've done that in no way hems the complicity of Catholic institutions and individuals in delivering services they consider morally abhorrent.
Second. You asked the question, 'How did this come about?' George, this is what liberalism looks like. This is what the progressive state does. It tries to break all the institutions of civil society, all the institutions that mediate between the individual and the state. They have to break them to the saddle of the state.
Third. The Catholic Bishops, it serves them right. They're the ones who were really hot for Obamacare, with a few exceptions. But they were all in favor of this. And this is what it looks like when the government decides it's going to make your healthcare choices for you.
- George Will, ABC's This Week, 2/12/2012
"Just this week, we learned that one of the largest groups paying for these ads regularly takes in money from foreign corporations. So groups that receive foreign money are spending huge sums to influence American elections, and they won't tell you where the money for their ads come from. So this isn't just a threat to Democrats. All Republicans should be concerned. Independents should be concerned. This is a threat to our democracy. The American people deserve to know who's trying to sway their elections." - President Obama, Oct. 7, 2010, Bowie State University
HOWEVER... in other news:
Barack Obama's reelection campaign will begin using administration and campaign aides to fundraise for Priorities USA Action, a super PAC backing the president.
Two Obama campaign aides confirmed that senior campaign and administration officials who participate at fundraising events for the president's campaign will also appear at events for Priorities USA Action, the PAC supporting Obama.
yeah... and raising the debt ceiling was "Unpatriotic" until Obama wanted to do it.
Remember these words: "evidence-based care." They are likely to be very much a part of your future. IF you are elderly or disabled, odds are that Medicare will eventually refuse to pay for any procedures that aren’t evidence-based. If you get health insurance at work, your employer will probably do the same. If you buy your own insurance, you won’t have much choice about the matter. The only health insurers that will be allowed in the new (ObamaCare) health insurance exchanges — certainly the only ones that survive — will be those that limit coverage to evidence-based care.
So what’s wrong with evidence-based medicine? Wouldn’t you want your doctor to make decisions based on scientifically verified evidence?
Most of what doctors do is what they and their colleagues have found to work. A study by the Institute of Medicine, for example, concludes that "the evidence base on the effectiveness of most health services is sparse."
In another Institute of Medicine study, researchers found that fewer than 20% of the American Heart Association/American College of Cardiology heart disease management recommendations "are based on a high level of evidence." If doctors were forced to do only those things that are evidenced-based, patients would be deprived of most of what doctors do.
Second, even where there are well established guidelines, they are inevitably written for the average patient. But suppose you are not average. Is your doctor free to step outside the protocols and give you care based on her training, knowledge and experience? Or will she be pressured to stick to the cookbook, regardless of how the patient fares?
"third" was not copied... it stated a statistic without evidence or verifyable link...
Fourth, evidence-based guidelines are based on studies; and these studies often exclude entire segments of the population. For example, a large number of studies of patients with heart failure excluded elderly patients, even though most of the people who have this problem are elderly!
Finally, the whole idea behind guidelines and protocols is that it is appropriate to treat patients with similar conditions the same way. But individuals are individuals. They don’t always respond to treatments the same way. For substance abuse, for example, there apparently is no such thing as a protocol that works for diverse groups of patients.
