28 February 2011
24 February 2011
22 February 2011
20 February 2011
Paging Dr. Shropshire: You're Guilty of Theft of State Taxpayers' Money
Can you say theft of state taxpayers’ money? These “doctors” are nothing more than charlatans.
What a stellar example of sniveling little socialists you are. Is this what you want your children to see and mimic later in their lives? Really? Really?
Instapundit shares some of the emails he received from doctors who found the actions of their peers reprehensible.
Professor Reynolds says it best, “You could hardly ask for behavior better tailored to lower respect for the medical profession.” Amen, Professor, amen.
I’d like to thank Ann Althouse for capturing for posterity these doctors in action in the video embedded below.Read more: http://nosheepleshere.blogspot.com/2011/02/paging-dr-shropshire-youre-guilty-of.html#ixzz1EVhzdxTE
19 February 2011
17 February 2011
Pajamas Media » A Letter from a Fearfully Concerned Muslim
Pajamas Media » A Letter from a Fearfully Concerned Muslim
A Letter from a Fearfully Concerned Muslim
To an American-Jewish friend.
February 11, 2011 - by Salim Mansur
Dear Roger,
Since 9/11 I have been mulling over the words of Georgi Arbatov pinned on the wall above my desk. I don’t believe in conspiracies, and I strive to keep my distance from the sophisticates of the Chomsky school of conspiracy-peddlers. But I do believe in what Barbara Tuchman described so well in The March of Folly. Folly, it seems to me, is the most severe and unforgiving sin of politicians, especially politicians responsible for the security of societies in advanced cultures of relative freedom, such as ours at this time in history. As Martin Walker, then the Moscow correspondent for the Guardian, reported in August 1992, Arbatov said to him: “We are going to do the worst thing we possibly can to America — we are going to take away their enemy.” Arbatov, you might recall, was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, responsible for keeping track of Soviet-American relations.
Arbatov — now looking back nearly twenty years later in deconstructing his words — seemed to possess a piercing understanding, as student of history, of the American scene, and how it could likely unfold over time in the post-Soviet and post-Communist era. His words to Walker were more insightful than any offered by just about all the left-leaning talking heads and commentators, in the U.S., Canada, and Europe put together. Arbatov understood, given his experience sitting in the privileged seat of the party in Moscow during the Brezhnev period, how the existence of Communist Russia checked the forces of the left in the West, keeping them from gaining influence and power. Now, as Arbatov reflected, since the Soviet Union as a military superpower had collapsed and the threat of Soviet Communism was discarded in the so-called dustbin of history, the spoiled children and beneficiaries of the West’s longest and strongest economic expansion and technological achievements, unparalleled in history, would set forth to do what the Soviet Union could not do — to advance the aim of Communism to wreck liberal capitalism from the inside.
Just ponder how a third-rate community organizer — from the most incestuously corrupt political region in the U.S.; with a record of participation in the most vulgar gathering of Jeremiah Wright posing as a reverend, spouting Fanonian rhetoric and bigotry; with mentors such as the unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers; channelling the teachings of Saul Alinsky and Rashid Khalidi of the Chomsky school of self-loathing and sophistry — could advance through the ranks of American politics at an astounding speed, with little or no record of experience in government, to become the 44th president. In one of my columns from 2008 for the Sun Media in Canada, I had written in disbelief, as I watched the primaries unfold, of how American voters could be so beguiled by a charlatan of the Harold Hill type from The Music Man and vote for Obama. I was wrong in my overestimation of reason and experience among American voters as a check on the naivete of the university crowd and the duplicity of Lenin’s “useful idiots” in free societies. One of the lessons from 2008, for me, is this: how can I now scold Egyptians for wanting freedom and democracy behind the banners of the Muslim Brotherhood when their experience with electoral politics is negligible, and their history of 7,000 years offer little guidance for what freedom requires — respect for the other and not mistaking freedom for licentiousness?
There is not a very long arc connecting the joyful news of Soviet disintegration with the painfully distressing slide of American politics framed for posterity in the election of Obama. Arbatov did not nor, even if he had indulged in irresponsible speculation, could have predicted such an eventuality in American politics. But he had it right, it seems to me, for what he meant was the presence of the Soviet Union placed upon liberal democracies, led by the U.S., a discipline and a check upon the excesses and follies of democracy. But once this discipline was removed it would lead to a bacchanalia in the West, the near instant raising of the slogan “end of history” even as the dust from the tearing down of the Berlin Wall had not settled, and this lack of discipline combined with the “flower children” of the sixties coming of age and grasping for power, would bring about a situation, Arbatov imagined, that would do more damage than the old men of the Communist plutocracy could ever deliver without committing suicide of their own.It is on account of the circumstances in which we find ourselves since 9/11 that I fear the West is precariously tilting at the edge of terminal decline. The situation today is dramatically different than the one in 1979. Then, Ronald Reagan, with Thatcher and Pope John Paul II on either side, reversed the slide of American politics and the West — from the debacle of defeat in Vietnam, brought by the fecklessness of the Democrats, to the hostage crisis in Tehran.
The Soviet Union did discipline the West and, ironically, the existing reality of the Soviet Empire gave Reagan the measure needed to re-group and deliver the coup de grace. But after 1992 we have been in the state of enjoying our unrestrained appetite for endless orgy, the zeal that comes to declining bodies from the artificiality of induced eroticism by pills which give to narcissists of the “sixties” generation the pathetic sense of immortality. These are the folks the people have elected to run their lives, protect their cultural legacy, hold back the enemies of freedom, maintain balance of power in strategic and vulnerable regions of the world and, as Burke reminded his own generation, maintain the promise of the present and inheritance of the past as trustees for the unborn generations of the future.
Ten years after 9/11, we, the broad public of liberal democracies, still have not fully grasped the meaning of that horror-filled morning, or understood without any apologetics or polemics the evil nature and ideology of the men who planned and executed the deed. We remain more or less preoccupied with re-litigating the debate over the decision by the Bush administration to take the war declared upon the West into the heartland of the enemy and expunge them; and instead of faulting Bush for not going far enough at home and abroad in defeating the Islamist jihadi assault on the West, for reasons that have everything to do with the nature of our corrupted polity, we have contorted ourselves to find the right mix of appeasement. From the ashes piled high at the end of the Second World War to the re-grouping that was essential to contain the Soviet Union, the passage of time was barely twenty-four months. Ten years after 9/11, the West has as leaders Obama and Cameron, Sarkozy, Berlusconi, and Merkel still clinging to the fantasy that Islamists are merely a Middle Eastern version of Milton and Locke, Tocqueville and Mill, leading the reform of the Islamic civilization that once gave us Alhambra and the Taj Mahal, Omar Khayyam and the tales from the Arabian Nights.
The fault, as Cassius reminds Brutus, is in ourselves, a decaying civilization that will be saved (if it will be) not by the snobs in Washington and New York, London and Paris, Rome and Berlin, but by our version of the unsophisticated children of truckers who are now waking up from the drug-induced stupor of their parents’ and grandparents’ generation. I have hope, the eternal hope of a fearful heart, that the West will survive and yet again gather speed, but how sad are the losses and tears that have piled up — with more to come. They could have been avoided if we, as a people, were not so irresponsible or unfaithful to our history as to place at the head of our societies leaders so unworthy and clueless as the one who so unfittingly occupies the seat of Washington and Lincoln, at the head of this great republic.
Cordially,
Salim
Salim Mansur is a professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario.
A Letter from a Fearfully Concerned Muslim
To an American-Jewish friend.
February 11, 2011 - by Salim Mansur
Dear Roger,
Since 9/11 I have been mulling over the words of Georgi Arbatov pinned on the wall above my desk. I don’t believe in conspiracies, and I strive to keep my distance from the sophisticates of the Chomsky school of conspiracy-peddlers. But I do believe in what Barbara Tuchman described so well in The March of Folly. Folly, it seems to me, is the most severe and unforgiving sin of politicians, especially politicians responsible for the security of societies in advanced cultures of relative freedom, such as ours at this time in history. As Martin Walker, then the Moscow correspondent for the Guardian, reported in August 1992, Arbatov said to him: “We are going to do the worst thing we possibly can to America — we are going to take away their enemy.” Arbatov, you might recall, was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, responsible for keeping track of Soviet-American relations.
Arbatov — now looking back nearly twenty years later in deconstructing his words — seemed to possess a piercing understanding, as student of history, of the American scene, and how it could likely unfold over time in the post-Soviet and post-Communist era. His words to Walker were more insightful than any offered by just about all the left-leaning talking heads and commentators, in the U.S., Canada, and Europe put together. Arbatov understood, given his experience sitting in the privileged seat of the party in Moscow during the Brezhnev period, how the existence of Communist Russia checked the forces of the left in the West, keeping them from gaining influence and power. Now, as Arbatov reflected, since the Soviet Union as a military superpower had collapsed and the threat of Soviet Communism was discarded in the so-called dustbin of history, the spoiled children and beneficiaries of the West’s longest and strongest economic expansion and technological achievements, unparalleled in history, would set forth to do what the Soviet Union could not do — to advance the aim of Communism to wreck liberal capitalism from the inside.
Just ponder how a third-rate community organizer — from the most incestuously corrupt political region in the U.S.; with a record of participation in the most vulgar gathering of Jeremiah Wright posing as a reverend, spouting Fanonian rhetoric and bigotry; with mentors such as the unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers; channelling the teachings of Saul Alinsky and Rashid Khalidi of the Chomsky school of self-loathing and sophistry — could advance through the ranks of American politics at an astounding speed, with little or no record of experience in government, to become the 44th president. In one of my columns from 2008 for the Sun Media in Canada, I had written in disbelief, as I watched the primaries unfold, of how American voters could be so beguiled by a charlatan of the Harold Hill type from The Music Man and vote for Obama. I was wrong in my overestimation of reason and experience among American voters as a check on the naivete of the university crowd and the duplicity of Lenin’s “useful idiots” in free societies. One of the lessons from 2008, for me, is this: how can I now scold Egyptians for wanting freedom and democracy behind the banners of the Muslim Brotherhood when their experience with electoral politics is negligible, and their history of 7,000 years offer little guidance for what freedom requires — respect for the other and not mistaking freedom for licentiousness?
There is not a very long arc connecting the joyful news of Soviet disintegration with the painfully distressing slide of American politics framed for posterity in the election of Obama. Arbatov did not nor, even if he had indulged in irresponsible speculation, could have predicted such an eventuality in American politics. But he had it right, it seems to me, for what he meant was the presence of the Soviet Union placed upon liberal democracies, led by the U.S., a discipline and a check upon the excesses and follies of democracy. But once this discipline was removed it would lead to a bacchanalia in the West, the near instant raising of the slogan “end of history” even as the dust from the tearing down of the Berlin Wall had not settled, and this lack of discipline combined with the “flower children” of the sixties coming of age and grasping for power, would bring about a situation, Arbatov imagined, that would do more damage than the old men of the Communist plutocracy could ever deliver without committing suicide of their own.It is on account of the circumstances in which we find ourselves since 9/11 that I fear the West is precariously tilting at the edge of terminal decline. The situation today is dramatically different than the one in 1979. Then, Ronald Reagan, with Thatcher and Pope John Paul II on either side, reversed the slide of American politics and the West — from the debacle of defeat in Vietnam, brought by the fecklessness of the Democrats, to the hostage crisis in Tehran.
The Soviet Union did discipline the West and, ironically, the existing reality of the Soviet Empire gave Reagan the measure needed to re-group and deliver the coup de grace. But after 1992 we have been in the state of enjoying our unrestrained appetite for endless orgy, the zeal that comes to declining bodies from the artificiality of induced eroticism by pills which give to narcissists of the “sixties” generation the pathetic sense of immortality. These are the folks the people have elected to run their lives, protect their cultural legacy, hold back the enemies of freedom, maintain balance of power in strategic and vulnerable regions of the world and, as Burke reminded his own generation, maintain the promise of the present and inheritance of the past as trustees for the unborn generations of the future.
Ten years after 9/11, we, the broad public of liberal democracies, still have not fully grasped the meaning of that horror-filled morning, or understood without any apologetics or polemics the evil nature and ideology of the men who planned and executed the deed. We remain more or less preoccupied with re-litigating the debate over the decision by the Bush administration to take the war declared upon the West into the heartland of the enemy and expunge them; and instead of faulting Bush for not going far enough at home and abroad in defeating the Islamist jihadi assault on the West, for reasons that have everything to do with the nature of our corrupted polity, we have contorted ourselves to find the right mix of appeasement. From the ashes piled high at the end of the Second World War to the re-grouping that was essential to contain the Soviet Union, the passage of time was barely twenty-four months. Ten years after 9/11, the West has as leaders Obama and Cameron, Sarkozy, Berlusconi, and Merkel still clinging to the fantasy that Islamists are merely a Middle Eastern version of Milton and Locke, Tocqueville and Mill, leading the reform of the Islamic civilization that once gave us Alhambra and the Taj Mahal, Omar Khayyam and the tales from the Arabian Nights.
The fault, as Cassius reminds Brutus, is in ourselves, a decaying civilization that will be saved (if it will be) not by the snobs in Washington and New York, London and Paris, Rome and Berlin, but by our version of the unsophisticated children of truckers who are now waking up from the drug-induced stupor of their parents’ and grandparents’ generation. I have hope, the eternal hope of a fearful heart, that the West will survive and yet again gather speed, but how sad are the losses and tears that have piled up — with more to come. They could have been avoided if we, as a people, were not so irresponsible or unfaithful to our history as to place at the head of our societies leaders so unworthy and clueless as the one who so unfittingly occupies the seat of Washington and Lincoln, at the head of this great republic.
Cordially,
Salim
Salim Mansur is a professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario.
10 February 2011
Refusing to Suffer Is Refusing to Live
Refusing to Suffer Is Refusing to Live
Catholic Portal
Refusing to Suffer Is Refusing to Live
When human fear masquerades as compassion, lives cannot be lived to their fullest because the fear is in control.
By Chelsea Zimmerman, February 09, 2011
2
Share
After several years of rigorously defending and promoting the dignity and sanctity of all human life, it has been my observation that one of the supporting pillars of the culture of death (those kneejerk proponents of abortion, euthanasia, assisted suicide, cloning/ESCR) is a desire to avoid or alleviate human suffering at all cost. A woman with an unwanted pregnancy doesn't want the "burden" of a child; sick people want cures for what ails them or they want to be put out of their misery altogether; what good is imperfection, anyway? We see suffering, more than evil, as the worst thing there is, so much so that we will commit evil acts in an attempt to avoid it, often under the pretext of mercy and compassion.
But a culture that expects life to be lived to its fullness must be able to embrace and make peace with—even find joy in—the normalcy of human suffering.
A few years ago, this expressed sentiment prompted a fellow blogger to ask: why?
I have to admit, she had me stumped. Though I had come up with the connection between the culture of death and society's disdain for suffering, I couldn't exactly explain why the two were so connected. Then, nearly two years later, I came across a section in Fr. Jacques Philippe's book Interior Freedom entitled "Refusing to Suffer Means Refusing to Live":
Suffering should be remedied whenever possible, but it is a part of life, and attempting to get rid of it completely means suppressing life, refusing to live, and ultimately rejecting the beauty and goodness that life can bring us.
Why does hatred of suffering lead to decreased respect for human life? Because refusing to suffer is refusing the totality of living. It is a rejection of life itself.
If anything is certain in this life it is that we all will, at some point, experience suffering. Accidents will happen; people will let us down; our bodies will deteriorate; our loved ones will fade. Suffering is part of human existence and we should reduce or ease it where we can, but eliminating it completely is not within our power. In fact, very often the more we reject and try to avoid suffering, the more we encounter it; as our ability to forebear any difficulty becomes decreased, the smaller and more insignificant trials begin to seem huge and intolerable.
When I was 17 and the doctors told me that I would never walk again, I knew I had two choices. I could wallow in self-pity and sit around moping about my fate and refusing to face life in a wheelchair. Or I could accept the diagnosis, get out of bed, and confront the challenges that come with a disability head on.
I'm not going to lie. The past eleven years have not been easy.
But that doesn't mean they have been "too hard" to take, or that joy has eluded me. I'm still a human being, I'm still alive, and my life still has meaning and infinite value despite my challenges and limitations. What's more, experiencing adversity has provided me with an elite (and extensive) education in the practical living-out of those valuable virtues: humility, patience, courage, and perseverance.
A life without suffering or conflict is one of heaven, not earth. On earth, even Jesus, the God-man, suffered. So did his beloved mother.
In another book, In the School of the Holy Spirit, Fr. Philippe posits that what often prevents us from becoming saints is the difficulty we have in fully accepting everything that happens to us. Though he does not will suffering, which is a consequence of Original Sin, God does, much to our bewilderment, allow it and he invites us to consent to it, not in a sense of passive resignation, but in the trusting, total abandonment that "for those who love God, everything works together for good" (Rom. 8:28).
God's ways are not our ways; he created us and alone knows what is best for us. He is infinitely good and eternally seeks our well-being, so we can be sure that whatever he allows to befall us is never purposeless, but ultimately for our benefit and the good of others.
The Culture of Death is rooted in an inability to meaningfully connect with suffering. Trained by the popular culture to believe that pleasure alone translates into "living life to the fullest," we try to avoid pain rather than move through it, which means we can never triumph over it or transcend it.
We think that by pushing all that is imperfect and difficult out of our sights, we are showing the tenderness of our hearts, when all we are really betraying in our fear, and how it owns us.
But we needn't be owned. Let us trust in Christ who tells us, "do not be afraid, little flock (Lk. 12:32). Take up your cross and follow me. For my yoke is easy and my burden light (Mt. 11:30)." Remember, ours is not a God who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has similarly been tested in every way (Heb. 4:15), who gave himself up unto death for us so that we would not have to suffer alone.
"It is not fleeing from suffering that heals us, but our willingness to accept it, grow and mature through it, and find meaning through union with Christ, who suffered with infinite love" (Pope Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi, 37).
Catholic Portal
Refusing to Suffer Is Refusing to Live
When human fear masquerades as compassion, lives cannot be lived to their fullest because the fear is in control.
By Chelsea Zimmerman, February 09, 2011
2
Share
After several years of rigorously defending and promoting the dignity and sanctity of all human life, it has been my observation that one of the supporting pillars of the culture of death (those kneejerk proponents of abortion, euthanasia, assisted suicide, cloning/ESCR) is a desire to avoid or alleviate human suffering at all cost. A woman with an unwanted pregnancy doesn't want the "burden" of a child; sick people want cures for what ails them or they want to be put out of their misery altogether; what good is imperfection, anyway? We see suffering, more than evil, as the worst thing there is, so much so that we will commit evil acts in an attempt to avoid it, often under the pretext of mercy and compassion.
But a culture that expects life to be lived to its fullness must be able to embrace and make peace with—even find joy in—the normalcy of human suffering.
A few years ago, this expressed sentiment prompted a fellow blogger to ask: why?
I have to admit, she had me stumped. Though I had come up with the connection between the culture of death and society's disdain for suffering, I couldn't exactly explain why the two were so connected. Then, nearly two years later, I came across a section in Fr. Jacques Philippe's book Interior Freedom entitled "Refusing to Suffer Means Refusing to Live":
Suffering should be remedied whenever possible, but it is a part of life, and attempting to get rid of it completely means suppressing life, refusing to live, and ultimately rejecting the beauty and goodness that life can bring us.
Why does hatred of suffering lead to decreased respect for human life? Because refusing to suffer is refusing the totality of living. It is a rejection of life itself.
If anything is certain in this life it is that we all will, at some point, experience suffering. Accidents will happen; people will let us down; our bodies will deteriorate; our loved ones will fade. Suffering is part of human existence and we should reduce or ease it where we can, but eliminating it completely is not within our power. In fact, very often the more we reject and try to avoid suffering, the more we encounter it; as our ability to forebear any difficulty becomes decreased, the smaller and more insignificant trials begin to seem huge and intolerable.
When I was 17 and the doctors told me that I would never walk again, I knew I had two choices. I could wallow in self-pity and sit around moping about my fate and refusing to face life in a wheelchair. Or I could accept the diagnosis, get out of bed, and confront the challenges that come with a disability head on.
I'm not going to lie. The past eleven years have not been easy.
But that doesn't mean they have been "too hard" to take, or that joy has eluded me. I'm still a human being, I'm still alive, and my life still has meaning and infinite value despite my challenges and limitations. What's more, experiencing adversity has provided me with an elite (and extensive) education in the practical living-out of those valuable virtues: humility, patience, courage, and perseverance.
A life without suffering or conflict is one of heaven, not earth. On earth, even Jesus, the God-man, suffered. So did his beloved mother.
In another book, In the School of the Holy Spirit, Fr. Philippe posits that what often prevents us from becoming saints is the difficulty we have in fully accepting everything that happens to us. Though he does not will suffering, which is a consequence of Original Sin, God does, much to our bewilderment, allow it and he invites us to consent to it, not in a sense of passive resignation, but in the trusting, total abandonment that "for those who love God, everything works together for good" (Rom. 8:28).
God's ways are not our ways; he created us and alone knows what is best for us. He is infinitely good and eternally seeks our well-being, so we can be sure that whatever he allows to befall us is never purposeless, but ultimately for our benefit and the good of others.
The Culture of Death is rooted in an inability to meaningfully connect with suffering. Trained by the popular culture to believe that pleasure alone translates into "living life to the fullest," we try to avoid pain rather than move through it, which means we can never triumph over it or transcend it.
We think that by pushing all that is imperfect and difficult out of our sights, we are showing the tenderness of our hearts, when all we are really betraying in our fear, and how it owns us.
But we needn't be owned. Let us trust in Christ who tells us, "do not be afraid, little flock (Lk. 12:32). Take up your cross and follow me. For my yoke is easy and my burden light (Mt. 11:30)." Remember, ours is not a God who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has similarly been tested in every way (Heb. 4:15), who gave himself up unto death for us so that we would not have to suffer alone.
"It is not fleeing from suffering that heals us, but our willingness to accept it, grow and mature through it, and find meaning through union with Christ, who suffered with infinite love" (Pope Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi, 37).
07 February 2011
05 February 2011
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