…be sure to vote for Hillary in the next elections.

Make no mistakes about it: the Walter Reed fiasco is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to problems with government sponsored health care. It is not the care that wounded soldiers get, it is the care that every single person in the military health care system gets. It is wounded soldiers, healthy soldiers, spouses, children and retirees. What is happening at Walter Reed is happening everywhere that the military, the former military and their dependents receive care.

And it could be your health care system, too. Just vote for her. Watch it happen. No, you won’t pay a dime for that office visit. Will that be any consolation when the care you receive is inadequate? How about when it takes a month to get an appointment? And guess what? If your child has an earache, you will be directed to the nearest emergency room, because their offices will be too booked to accommodate you. But you won’t mind spending 3 hours waiting for a doctor to see you and another hour waiting for your antibiotic at the pharmacy, because that ER visit and the prescription will be totally free.

Go here to read about Lorri’s nightmare, and then think long and hard about the real cost of a universal health care system. Is that really better than what we have now?

Do you want more examples? The ER doc who wasn’t sure if Petey’s arm was broken. My neighbor who had constant menstrual bleeding for six months and was repeatedly told that it was an “hormonal hiccup.” The doctor who told another neighbor that she could not possibly have strep throat despite the fact that all three of her kids had it – she had to demand a throat culture.

Tricare: when it is good, it is very very good; and when it is bad, it is horrid.

I know, two daily rants in one day. I’ll calm down soon.

This article doesn’t say where the seven year old child lives: with his biological mother or with a family who actually loves him.

Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you! Isaiah 49:15

I’d give my life for my kids…but my eyesight? I dunno, let me think about it.

I don’t mean to pooh-pooh this article. As a mother of future college students (I hope), a culture that promotes dangerous behavior is worrisome. But perhaps quite a bit of my concern stems from personal experience where I can soberly and seriously consider my own college behavior and say, “My goodness, that was stupid!”

Certainly, through the grace of God and not my own savvy or inner strength, I survived. But survive I did.

I can’t help but wonder who the alarmists are who are responsible for this article and the research that went into it. Are they people who themselves rarely drank, never skipped class in order to recover from the previous night, never did homework half-lit? Or are they ones who were funneling yards of beer while the entire frat house chanted, “CHUG! CHUG! CHUG!”? Does puritanical disdain or the sagacity of experience motivate their panic?

The report by The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, argues substance abuse isn’t an inevitable rite of passage for young adults. Rather, it argues a particular culture of excessive consumption has flourished on college campuses, and calls on educators to take bolder stands against students and alumni to combat it.

{snip}

Young adults in general have higher abuse rates, so a higher rate for college students is to be expected. But other research indicates that college students drink more than high school peers who don’t go to college.

Is this truly shocking? A 20 year old in college drinks more than a 20 year old not in college? Could it be that the non-college student has to get up and go to work or risk being fired, while the college student can blow off Professor Peabody’s chemistry lecture without anyone even noticing?

At the University of Kentucky, longtime administrator Victor Hazard says he too has noticed a change, with more students drinking simply to get drunk.

“To the extent there is such a thing as a social drinker, it was more of a meet-and-greet type of environment in the earlier years when I was here,” said Hazard, Kentucky’s associate vice president for student affairs and dean of students.

Now, he said, students are “drinking to become intoxicated as fast as they possibly can.”

Ah, yes, when I was a student, we only drank socially. These hoodlums of today just want to get drunk. Sorry, buddy, take off the rose-colored glasses. Even if you yourself did not participate in binge drinking or illegal drug use, surely you were aware of others who did? Or did you wear those rosy lenses back then, too?

“It’s getting more intense,” she said. “Drinking games that were happening in private parties or houses or bonfires 10 years ago are now happening in public venues. That to me reflects a sort of larger acceptance of extreme drinking.”

Either I went to the best kept secret of party schools (it didn’t make the Top Party School list when I was there), or the woman who said this lived at home and didn’t experience campus life in its fullest…or spent her free time in the library or dorm studying. Or she’s 80.

And the concluding quote:

“People need to step up and realize this is not a rite of passage, this is not something we should tolerate. If it keeps going, we’re going to destroy our best and brightest.”

How bright are you if you kill yourself with booze or get yourself addicted to prescription drugs? Here is the bottom line: it is not the campus culture that is victimizing helpless students. These are adults making personal choices. If your “friends” are pressuring you to drink an entire bottle of vodka, find different friends. If there are no sober people to be found on campus, find another campus.

And if you are a parent, I suggest you encourage your children to seek a Bachelor of Science degree. In my experience, the workload required to cut it in those programs naturally reduces the opportunity for binge drinking. It’s all those Bachelor of Arts students with excessive free time who are out drinking 3 or 4 times a week!

…except I really don’t find stupidity amusing.

You know, if you’ve ever received poor services from a professional, some wisecrack may remind you that for every doctor or lawyer or CPA or whatever to finish in the top half of his (or her) class, there is a doctor or a lawyer or a CPA or whatever who finished in the bottom half. The same goes for architects and engineers and designers.

Half of my problem is that I went to a really good school, the kind of school that makes you think. It was not enough to design an adequate road system or an adequate bridge or an adequate sewer treatment facility. No, you also had to look at cost, convenience and common sense. Major engineering failures are well-known, generally for the catastrophic loss of life, but it is the minor engineering failures that cause us the biggest trouble in our daily life. Most of us can get in our cars and quickly find a badly designed parking lot or intersection. Perhaps you don’t really know why it doesn’t work, you just know to avoid that area because it’s a nightmare. Well, a degree is a degree and at some point potential employers stop asking you for a college transcript and an account of your GPA. My guess is that most parking lot designers for shopping centers were not in the top fifth of their class…but that’s just a guess.

And so I live in housing on a military post. The housing is new – my house is less than one year old. But the neighborhood style is not new – this is the third neighborhood like it built on this post by the same private firm. You would think that by the third neighborhood they might have made some design changes. Surely, surely, families who live in the other neighborhoods have had similar complaints.

I won’t even bore you with construction complaints like the creaking hallway floor, the bathroom door that sticks (and sticks again a month after my husband shaves down the edge), the drafty windows and doors, and the carpet padding with obvious holes in it. OK, I just did. My bigger complaint, though, lies with the poor design of the house itself.

Overall, the layout and the size of the rooms are good. I think the closet size in two of the bedrooms is ridiculously small, but they meet my young children’s needs (I wouldn’t want to live here with teen girls, though). We have an attached garage and a five foot tall privacy fence that locks in the back yard between my neighbor’s garage and mine. There is no gate to the fence.

Problem number one: the phone/cable/internet hookup is on our outside garage wall – which is in my other neighbor’s backyard. When the poor phone guy came to install our connection he had to climb the next door fence three times (6 times if you include the return trip) to access the box, since we had no neighbors at the time. And if we had had neighbors, they would have had to allow this person access to their yard for my sake.

Problem number two: I have a laundry room between the garage and the kitchen. This laundry room has a single electrical outlet for the dryer. There is no place to plug in an iron. No place to plug in chargers for cell phones and other electronic leashes (even though it makes the most sense to have them there, since it’s right by the garage where they want you to park your car). No place to plug in any of the rechargeable household things that some people (not me) may have.

Problem number three: the hot water and furnace and blower for the A/C unit are “conveniently” located right there in a closet between the kitchen and the family room. I’m not sure who finds this convenient. If I needed work done on my furnace, I’m not sure the middle of my living space is the best place for someone to park themselves, especially since that kind of work is usually dirty and done by filthy men (no offense, just an observation of the nature of the business) and that section of flooring is carpeted. But the worst part of this location is the noise, which seriously, seriously reduces quality of life every time the heat or A/C kicks on.

Problem number four: speaking of carpet, the eating portions of my kitchen and my dining room are carpeted. I really prefer hardwood floors throughout, but if you’re going to be cheap, I’d really rather have linoleum in the eating areas. Not carpet. Do you know what tacos can do to a beige rug?

Problem number five: I guess the specs called for two outside water spigots on the house. So they gave us one in the front and one on the side. But the one on the side was on the same side as the attached garage. The only way to access the backyard was to get a really long hose and wrap it from the spigot by the front door, across the threshold and around the other side. Unsightly and inconvenient to say the least. They finally, begrudgingly, corrected this after six months.

And today pops up problem number six. Last week, I received a letter informing me that a contractor required access to my home this morning for an unspecified purpose, and that they would come in regardless of how I felt about it. I just wonder, if I am not at home and my protective German Shepherd gets a little too defensive of home and hearth, would I be liable? They followed up with a phone call, and I said that I would indeed be home (I have no life). I should have asked the nature of the business, I suppose. When the doorbell rang this morning, the dog, of course, had to let the people at the door know that she was here and she did not like visitors. Not knowing where they needed to go, I put her in the backyard.

Guess where they needed to go? The backyard, of course. They needed to get to the electricity meter in the backyard right next to the phone/cable/internet box. But that’s not my electricity meter, it’s my neighbor’s. Mine is in my other neighbor’s backyard.

Soon, the powers-that-be will begin charging me for my electricity and water consumption (that’s right, I don’t pay a single red penny right now, which is good since the drafty doors and windows have me cranking the heat up quite a bit). The water meter is on the side of the house near the front. It is easily accessed without bothering anyone. But to reach my electricity meter, you have to enter a home. In my case, it is my neighbor’s home, although some of the houses do happen to have them in their own backyards. They really should have just installed them right next to the furnace in the middle of the house. Or next to that water spigot at the front door – why not? It’s not like these designers have to live here, right?

And that, ultimately, is my biggest complaint. Nobody who designed these houses had to actually live in the models they built. They couldn’t have, since quickly certain flaws would have been corrected. In addition, I don’t believe these houses were actually designed to be lived in at all. Not really. How many neighborhoods today are populated by people who spend sun-up to sun-down at work, or school or daycare? And the weekends are so packed with errands, or sports or mini-vacations that they’re never home to notice that the furnace drowns out the TV or to realize how difficult it is to fill a kiddie pool without a water tap in your backyard.

It is terrible, I know, especially during this season of Lent, to be complaining about my adequate house when there are people starving in the world and living in shacks. I should be grateful for the roof over my head and my “cushy” lifestyle that permits me the luxury of sitting at a computer with a fancy high-speed internet connection typing away with the heat cranked and no job to go to because I have a husband with a good enough salary to keep me home by my choice. And that, really is part of the problem. Having finished near the top of my class, I should be out there affecting change for the good instead of backseat-driving all the hardworking schleps out there. That guy who has to go through my house to read my neighbor’s meter? It’s all my fault. At the minimum, if I were working, I wouldn’t be around to notice all these pesky problems.

Amazing story about a premature baby with a good prognosis.

Horrific story about healthy, full-term babies who suddenly die and disappear. But don’t worry, it’s in the Ukraine (capitalist slime that they are). It would never happen here. We would never go that far down the slippery slope, right? We’re so much more in control of ourselves.

H/T: The Daily Eudemon.

This is why I oppose any and all homeschooling laws in this country. If you give an inch, bureaucrats will take a mile.

German authorities have basically kidnapped a 15 year old girl, because her parents violated the law by homeschooling her. The worst part is the charge made by her father that the local papers aren’t covering the story because “It is about a personal affair that is not of public interest.” Gosh, that infuriates me.

I suppose that Jewish family that was “detained” in 1932 didn’t interest the public either. Nor that other Jewish family, or that Christian family that hid them…

It also wasn’t a public issue when authorities came knocking on someone’s door and took away their mentally handicapped relative. Just a personal, private affair. Not my business, not yours. Keep it out of the papers, mind your own business.

You would think that the Germans would have learned that lesson long ago. Oh, no. The law is the law – right or wrong. And violators of the law, even an unjust law, deserve punishment. That is the German mentality, witnessed first-hand by me. Thank goodness I live in a country where enough people think the laws (at least traffic laws!) are somewhat optional. And thank goodness there is usually some media outlet for every outrageous governmental decision.

Debate Rages in Florida Over Law Against Feeding Homeless

“It’s a sorry state of affairs when you can feed the squirrels, the doves and pigeons at Lake Eola, but not a hungry guy down on his luck.”

Yes, it is.

Yesterday, a friend sent a global email about the new vaccine against HPV, an STD that causes cervical cancer. I didn’t even read it, mainly because I’m fairly familiar with the vaccine and it’s controversy. I also avoid reading global emails that promote gloom, doom and despair.

One mother who had recently had her daughters given the vaccine was upset. She was completely unaware of issues surrounding it. I wonder how it is that I don’t watch the nightly news, read the daily newspaper, or listen to NPR or any talk radio, and I still know about stuff like this. And I wonder how other people can be completely oblivious to it.

I was irritated by the first global email, and this “reply all” was equally annoying. I offered up the 5 seconds it took me to delete it and went about my day. Then several other woman did their “reply all” rants about how vaccinating against cancer is good. Who can really argue against that? Cancer = Bad…No Cancer = Good. Pretty simple, right?

Nevertheless, I felt compelled to do my own “reply all” (surely upsetting everyone, like me, who can’t stand having strangers argue in my own personal inbox). I explained that the issue that seemed to be raised in the first email was not the vaccine itself but the government mandate. I explained that HPV is not a public health risk in the way that polio or small pox had been. I am opposed to government involvement in the minutiae of personal lives. Doctors can be forceful enough in demanding encouraging parents to do certain procedures; we don’t need the government to make it the law as well.

Of course, Merck knows well that doctors will only reach those potential customers whose parents actually bring them to the doctor every so often. There are legions of kids who might miss out on this chance to line Merck’s pockets, so Merck feels the need to lobby state congresses. By making it a state law, thousands of kids who might otherwise never have the opportunity to get stuck in the arm will now be ordered to do so.

Unfortunately, you don’t even need to lobby the state congress if your buddies are high enough up on the food chain:

By using an executive order that bypassed the Legislature, Republican Gov. Rick Perry — himself a conservative — on Friday avoided such opposition, making Texas the first state to mandate that schoolgirls get vaccinated against the virus.

That’s right, one man gets to unilaterally decide what’s best for all schoolgirls in Texas. Nice of him, huh? How about nice for him:

Perry has ties to Merck and Women in Government. One of the drug company’s three lobbyists in Texas is Mike Toomey, Perry’s former chief of staff. His current chief of staff’s mother-in-law, Texas Republican state Rep. Dianne White Delisi, is a state director for Women in Government.

The governor also received $6,000 from Merck’s political action committee during his re-election campaign.

A top official from Merck’s vaccine division sits on Women in Government’s business council, and many of the bills around the country have been introduced by members of Women in Government.

Merck is doing an excellent job of mucking the waters of what should be a crystal-clear issue: do we, the people, want laws and executive orders based on what is best for us, or what is best for large corporations? It is one thing to mandate that insurances cover the vaccine. It is one thing to mandate that the state pay for those who have no insurance. It is quite another to mandate that children receive it, especially when the public health is not at risk.

** UPDATE (3/1/07): For all you you have come here via a Google search, I’ve reiterated my main points in a newer post.

Since I already exposed my right-leaning stance on the minimum wage, I might as well tell you that I support the Second Amendment in it’s unadulterated form (no, they didn’t mean state militias, they meant common citizens). A few years ago, Bill joined the NRA against my wishes as is his prerogative. My argument against being a member: concern that a leftist takeover of the government would turn that membership list into a hit list for search and seizures of any and all citizen-owned firearms.

Surely even liberals would be smart enough to check under the floorboards.

Actually, it was only a few months ago that we became gun owners. It’s not that I was really opposed to having a gun in the house, it was that there was no legitimate excuse to spend hundreds of dollars on a firearm of any kind. We don’t live in a rural area with varmints that need eliminating (although the squirrels in our last neighborhood did qualify, I think there are post regulations against discharging a firearm in housing areas). Bill does not hunt (although he says this is a Catch-22, since he can’t hunt without a gun). And our neighborhood is a safe one. But last year someone gave Bill a shotgun he didn’t want (at least that’s the story), and there you have it. I suppose at some point I ought to learn how to load and shoot the thing, since there’s little point to having something like that around if you don’t know how to use it.

Anyway, via email from my brother-in-law came this funny one last night:

Some Facts, To Ponder.

(A) The number of physicians in the U.S. is 700,000.

(B) Accidental deaths caused by Physicians per year are 120,000.

(C) Accidental deaths per physician is 0.171

*(Statistics courtesy of U.S. Dept. of Health Human Services.)*

Now think about this:

Guns:

(A) The number of gun owners in the U.S. is 80,000,000. (Yes, that’s 80 million.)

(B) The number of accidental gun deaths per year, all age groups, is 1,500.

(C) The number of accidental deaths per gun owner is .000188

*(Statistics courtesy of FBI)*

So, statistically, doctors are approximately 9,000 times more dangerous than gun owners.

Remember, “Guns don’t kill people, doctors do.”

FACT: NOT EVERYONE HAS A GUN, BUT ALMOST EVERYONE HAS AT LEAST ONE DOCTOR. Please alert your friends to this alarming threat.

We must ban doctors before this gets completely out of hand.

Out of concern for the public at large, I have withheld the statistics on lawyers, for fear the shock would cause people to panic and seek medical attention.