Racial bias keeps black patients alive longer

The dentist-waiting-room magazine Time could publish a treasury of unintentional liberal humor. Dig this latest howler: blacks are victims of bias by being kept alive through medical treatment.

Many patients with terminal cancer get life-prolonging end-of-life treatment they did not ask for, often due to lack of clear communication with doctors and, disproportionately, those patients are African American. …

Researchers from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute interviewed 71 black and 261 white patients in Texas and the Northeast United States. All patients had cancer that had spread and that was no longer responding to treatment. Most patients had discussed end-of-life care with their doctors.

"Doctor, I have come to a decision that when my time becomes of no further use to me, I request that no further efforts be made to keep me technically alive in a vegitative condition. This I submit to you while in command of my senses, and most solemnly ask that you duly note it."

"Hey, boy, what you babblin' about?"

"Doctor, I don't know how I can make myself any clearer. In the event that I have terminal cancer with no hope of remission, I adjure you to provide no further treatment."

"What y'all sayin', boy? You talkin' ebonics or somethin'?"

Wait a minute, though. Let's revisit the lead sentence: "Many patients with terminal cancer get life-prolonging end-of-life treatment they did not ask for … ."

Time's "Healthland" writer — "Healthland"! — "Bias World" —  goes on:

Black patients also tended to ask for burdensome life-prolonging care more often than whites, and were less likely to have do-not-resuscitate (DNR) orders following discussions with caregivers.

So, black patients get end-of-life treatment they did ask for. Our "Healthland" host, Meredith Melnick, can't keep her whites-off-Earth-now stories straight. In the course of a few paragraphs, the victims go from unwanted to requested life-prolonging care. You would think even a Time writer might notice the contradiction.

Oh, but assuming the second assertion and not the first is correct:

Researchers found that black and white patients tended to have end-of-life discussions with their doctors with equal frequency, yet black patients were less likely than whites to understand that their disease was terminal.

I can see no other way to interpret this than that, according to Ms. Melnick, blacks and whites had the same discussion with their doctors, but whites tended to be smart enough to "get it," but blacks tended not to. Could anything be more patronizing?

Time not only wants to keep every African American on the liberal plantation for his whole life, but even when about to take leave of it.

Pigs fly

Congress hopefuls vow to be pork-free

-- Headline, Washington Times, October 5

So they're running as Muslims?

U.S. government issues terrorism warning to the wrong people

 

Report this man to the authorities, especially if you are already dead from a terror strike.

Namely, warning its own citizens, not the terrorists and their enablers.

The Obama administration is expected to issue an alert to U.S. citizens in Europe, urging them to be vigilant after new intelligence pointed to new Al Qaeda threats, senior U.S. intelligence officials told Fox News. ...

The officials said the State Department was never considering issuing a travel warning, which advises Americans to stay away from the countries involved. Still, the move could have negative implications for European tourism if travelers fear there's a possibility of terror attacks.

 So, an American planning a sightseeing trip to the former cradle of Western civilization should be vigilant, but should not feel warned. Such hair-splitting absurdities are now standard operating procedure in the politics of security.

"Vigilant" is a weasel word, meaningless for those it is directed to, merely building a defense for the government. A jihadist disguised as an ordinary illegal immigrant blew himself to scraps, along with you as a side effect? Too bad, bub. We told you to be vigilant.

If this terror alert business were no more than a verbal game, we could ignore it as we ignore all sorts of politicobabble (if we want to stay sane). But it also sends a signal to Al Qaeda and its farm teams: we'll stop at nothing to protect our people, including telling them to be vigilant. The cities of Europe and the United States are yours to terrorize, but don't think for a Mecca minute that their inhabitants and visitors won't be nervously looking over their shoulders.

Language technicalities apart, the Failed Messiah administration is warning Americans about placing their bodies in Europe -- and, for that matter, the United States. Its citizens are treated like the hapless folks too poor to move out of a bad neighborhood, so they don't venture outside any more than they have to, and listen for any suspicious sound during the long night.

Without any doubt, more is going on: intelligence and counter-terrorism agencies of both the U.S. and European states are working their tails off to spike new plots. Judging from the many reports about arrests of terrorists and interdiction of their bases in Pakistan -- to which you can add successes the agencies don't publicize for tactical reasons --  they are doing spectacularly well, considering what they're up against.

But nine years after we were given every reason to know better, we are still treating terrorism as a criminal offense. Take a bite out of man-caused disasters!

We are still officially committed to prevention. But you know the saying about what the best defense is, and that is where we're failing, for fear of offending the adherents of the politico-religious system that nurtures the terrorism.

We cannot take the offensive because we are roped to a piece of false logic. Most Muslims are not terrorists. (Only one-fourth of British Muslims believed the 7/7 terror attacks in London were justified.) Therefore, anything beyond defense will drive "moderate" Muslims -- those content to wait for demographics to bring sharia law to the West -- into the arms (or into using the arms) of the fanatics.

But there is no evidence that we are given any credit in the mosques and banlieues for our restraint. We simply look weak and decadent, trying to win by not losing too much. But you can't use damage control to overcome an enemy determined on winning.

We shouldn't be content with warning our own. We should be warning those who would harm them.

U.S. turns to Web censorship to fight man-caused disasters

The government will stop at nothing to prevent terrorism — pardon, Ms. Napolitano, "man-caused disasters" — nothing, I tell you, except keeping potential terrorists out of the country. That would be discrimination. Shutting down Web sites — now, that's a different story.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

Militant websites are becoming more accessible and appealing to Americans, experts told members of Congress on Wednesday, adding that the sites must be monitored and some should be shut down. …

Militant websites are said to have influenced several recent terrorist acts in the U.S., said Mansour Hadj, director of the Middle East program at the Middle East Media Research Institute.

Hadj said YouTube is a "primary clearing house" for Anwar Awlaki, an American who is among the most wanted terrorists. Awlaki was apparently in touch with U.S. Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, accused of killing 13 people at Ft. Hood, Texas, in November. After Awlaki's website was shut down, videos from it were moved to YouTube, which removed them just hours after the November shootings, Hadj said.

Of course, we could stop importing Muslims, some of whom will be terrorist plotters, in our masters' grand scheme of population replacement. 

The "progressives" bristle at the idea of any kind of immigration restriction, but go into cardiac arrest at the suggestion of refusing immigrants whose political-religious system is incompatible with American values. And our state security agencies go right along. Better to have NSA computers listening in on every phone conversation and reading every e-mail. Better to run every airline passenger (except Muslims) through a degrading security clearance for every flight. Random searches of commuters, that's the ticket. And shut down Web sites and YouTube videos.

It's true that the enemy uses electronic media for recruitment and training. What good would it do them if we didn't invite them to send sleeper cells into the U.S.? Why not simply stop allowing the "militants" to establish colonies here? But our politically correct rulers, with the potential power to shut down any Web site, would rather put all Americans through the wringer than offend Muslim opinion. They see themselves as defenders of Islam, not America.

I predict that, unless there is a change of course, restrictions on free speech will get tighter and tighter (just like in the U.K., where objecting to Muslim immigration is a "hate crime") the more home-grown man-caused disasters there are.

What do you do if a pipe bursts in your house and it's flooding the place? If you're stupid, you bail out the water. If you're smart, you shut off the flow.

Which thimble is the gold under?

Suspicion is growing that the United States's supposed gold reserves are largely vapor, and that the government and the Fed are playing a game of sleight-of-hand. Dennis Mangan has a posting about the lack of transparency in their gold holdings. You'd think the American people would have a right to an independent accounting, wouldn't you? It's their money, isn't it? 

No, and no. It appears that the government would sooner reveal all it knows about captured UFOs, if any, than the actual status of the gold it claims to have socked away.

It's not an academic issue. With faith in all major currencies sinking rapidly, gold is luring investors who don't want to see their dollars or pounds sterling or yen dissolving in an acid bath of hyperinflation. A planned second round of "quantitative easing" (dubbed QE 2) risks further diluting the value of currency.

It's been decades since dollars have been legally convertible into gold or silver, but the U.S. dollar has generally kept its place as the international primary medium of exchange because of the country's financial strength — scratch that one — and the assumption that ultimately the gold hoard was there as a backup.

If the second condition is shown to be false, the economic fallout not only for the United States but for the world monetary system could be catastrophic.

Meanwhile, the debate over gold's role as an investment vehicle rages. Its price continues to rise, although relatively gradually, which is probably a good sign that it will continue its upward trajectory. Some commentators believe gold is just another bubble, like tech stocks or real estate, and point to the metal's long slump after scraping the sky in the early '80s.

Tyler Durden, at Zero Hedge, disagrees:

The only reason the market has found some validation to the September risk asset surge, is the "certainty" of QE2. Were this to be taken away, stocks would plunge, as would all other assets. And since the Fed is uncontrollable, and unaccountable to anyone, it is now impossible to prevent this line of action, whose outcome is what some may be tempted to call, appropriately so, hyperinflation. 

The direct outcome will be an explosion in all asset prices, although we continue to believe that of all assets, gold will continue to outperform both stocks and bonds, as recently demonstrated. Those who are wishing to front-run the Fed in its latest and probably last action, may be wise to establish a portfolio which has a 2:1:1 (or 3:1:1) distribution between gold, stocks and bonds, as all are now very likely to surge. 

We would emphasize an overweight position in gold, because if hyperinflation does take hold, and the existing currency system is, to put it mildly, put into question, gold will promptly revert to currency status, and assets denominated in fiat, such as stocks and bonds, will become meaningless.

This might be a good time to ponder La Rochefoucauld's aphorism: "Nothing is as bad — or as good — as it seems."

Assuming you want to get on the gold train before it leaves the station, you are confronted with the hotly argued question of what form to buy and hold it in — principally, in an ETF like GLD or as coins and bullion. GLD was previously discussed here and here.

It seems to me that no format for owning gold is risk-free. If you own physical gold and hoard it through a hyperinflationary crisis, you might come out way ahead … once the crisis is past, but you are unlikely to be able to benefit from it during the crisis, when it will probably be subject to government confiscation or criminal larceny (assuming there is any difference). If you hold your precious metal through an intermediary such as an ETF, you are probably safe from losing it in a home burglary, but confiscation will be even easier. And as noted in the earlier postings, there are doubters about the actual holdings of the intermediaries as well.

In my own case I unloaded my GLD shares. Even though I thought the risk of flim-flam on the sponsor's part was small, it was more risk than I wanted to take on.

But I've again become convinced that it's a good idea to put some of my family's assets in gold. This is not advice. Do your own research and make your own decisions. I have discovered a gold open-ended fund that I am a little more comfortable with, ETF Securities Physical Swiss Gold Shares, SGOL. The company says:

ETF Securities commissions a biannual independent audit of the bullion held in the Trust vaults. The audit is carried out by Inspectorate International. Inspectorate International is a global company providing inspection, testing, and analysis of commodities worldwide. There is one audit that takes place at year end, 31st December and one random audit that is carried out at the discretion of ETF Securities management. All audit reports are published on our website www.etfsecurities.com. The audit focuses on the amount of bars and that they are LBMA or LPPM good delivery standard.

In addition to the stringent audit procedures set in place by ETF Securities, the custodian also conducts their own audits as part of their custodial duties. 

The auditor, Inspectorate, seems about as solid as you can ask. A sample audit report is available here — click "Download audited gold bullion bar count."

Aside from all that, SGOL is relatively little known at the moment, so it presumably has nowhere near the volume of gold that GLD says it holds, making auditing easier and the possibility of fiddling less. Even so, it is not absolutely safe. My professional work involves risk management. In my line we understand that risk can only be mitigated, not eliminated.

Broken souls fixed while-U-wait

Much pondering has gone down in the blogosphere and elsewhere about Obama's single-minded determination to radically transform America — along with his seeming indifference to the outrage he has generated. It is as though he cannot be troubled about counter-revolution because he knows that history has already happened, and it's on his side. There's also a quasi-religious component to his sacrifice-the-troops, human-wave assault on our constitutional foundation, which he neither understands nor cares about. He is the Soul Fixer.

An article titled "The Stakes of Obamacare" on the web site of the Claremont Institute quotes Michelle "Madame Defarge" Obama thus: 

Her husband "knows that at some level there's a hole in our souls," she often said, and he "is the only person in this race who understands that before we can work on the problems, we have to fix our souls. Our souls are broken in this nation."

Part of the soul-fix was to reawaken Americans' belief in "the audacity of hope," the notion that big changes were still possible in politics if only the people would put aside their cynicism and fear, enlist behind a leader capable of seizing the moment, and together chant, "Yes, we can." The Obama campaign seized that moment and did not let go, but the point was not merely to win the election but also to change the country. He knew it was impossible to fix the American soul without working on "the problems," too, without showing that change could be embodied in new programs and institutions that would in turn shape a better American soul.

It's a long article, but worth the read for its analysis of the value system and strategy of the Soul Fixer and his followers. The piece, by Charles R. Kesler,  focuses on the Obamacare law, but only as an example of the operating principle behind it. Essentially, the Fixer and his apostles believe that they were put on earth to conquer human nature once and for all; to create an earthly paradise where poverty, illness, inequality, and a poor self-image are against the law.

Obviously, mere individuals are incapable of bringing this to pass by themselves; the same applies to privately held institutions (businesses, if one has to be vulgar) and governments that are relatively close to the people, such as state and local. Only a central government of the wise and far-seeing will do.

Among its other effects, this act marks a new stage in the decline of constitutional government in America. One sign of this was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's remark, "we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy." After shepherding the equally massive financial regulation bill into law, Senator Christopher Dodd was moved to say something very similar: "No one will know until this is actually in place how it works." In late August, Senator Max Baucus, Finance Committee chairman, chimed in: "I don't think you want me to waste my time to read every page of the health care bill....We hire experts."

 

These statements make both an epistemological and a political point. The first is that these bills are so long, complicated, and unreadable that no one who isn't an expert can possibly decipher them. That implies, in turn, that no amount or quality of democratic deliberation can clarify them to citizens, and in most cases to legislators, in advance. Indeed, Pelosi suggests that political debate itself, "controversy," mostly dims public understanding by generating "fog."

The second point is that neither she nor Dodd nor Baucus is especially troubled by this breakdown in democratic accountability. With this kind of legislation, they imply, there's no choice but to trust the experts—not merely those who patch the law together, but perhaps more importantly those who implement it. For the truth is that this kind of bill, almost 3,000 pages long, will mean what the bureaucrats say it means.

But even that is only an epiphenomenon of the state of mind of which Obamacare is both product and promoter. To wit: Everything that is good and desirable (and arguably much that isn't) is a human right. But humans — ordinary humans, that is — can't guarantee those so-called human rights. Everything's stacked against you: business, the economy, the cost of valuable things like medical care, and the refusal of reality to yield to dreams.

You have only one player on your side (so this line of thinking goes): a big central government that can order all these others to yield. Big dogs, look out: bigger dog moving in.

The trouble is, even if the Government Colossus could make all your wishes (excuse me, rights) come true — which it can't — the price is a hole in your soul that makes the one Obama sees look like a subatomic particle. It's the price, simply, of self-respect, of knowing that you (not some far-off bureaucracy) are responsible for yourself and those you love. And learning how to live up to that responsibility, to be an adult, not a perpetual child.

"The Welfare State," Malcolm Muggeridge wrote, "is a kind of zoo which provides its inmates with ease and comfort and unfits them for life in their natural habitat." I think he was too optimistic, but he was writing in the 1950s, when even a conservative like Muggeridge could take the state's IOUs seriously. Soul Fixer Obama and his kind will bring us neither ease, nor comfort, nor the ability to live in the world that is our habitat.