Catholic Hospital Going to Hell

Well, to Hades, actually.

Caritas Christi Health Care, a non-profit Catholic hospital chain in Massachusetts dedicated to Catholic morality and social justice, is being acquired by a private equity firm. The name of the firm? Cerberus.

Disgusted

I knew it was coming, and still I'm surprised. As late as last Friday, I had allowed myself the hope that Obamacare would be defeated. I was inspired by the work of Paul Hsieh and others, and thought that maybe, just maybe, America would stave off the Leviathan.

I was wrong.

It's easy to blame the Democrats, but then again, we knew they have been salivating over enslaving the productive and have been gleefully doing it for well over a century. It's easy to blame the Republicans for barely mustering a counterargument that goes further than "we agree with you that it's our Christian duty to provide for the needy, but this just costs too much!" Democrats are the pushers, and Republicans are the friends who state their disapproval but cover for them anyway.

My outrage is broader, as I don't expect anything good from the leeches in Congress.

I am disgusted by every person in America who thinks this health care nationalization is well-intentioned and probably for the best.

I am disgusted by every person who evades the consequences of this bill and says "well, something had to be done!"

I am disgusted by my friends and family members who are smart enough to know better, but who abdicate the responsibility to think and thus welcome the further enslavement of me and my children to the state out of fear and willful ignorance.

I am disgusted by the businessman who sees the premiums he is paying for his employees go up, and sees the destruction of the health care industry and picking of my pockets as the pragmatic solution.

This is the choice you are making: you're calling for the gun to my head (and yours). You think that's melodramatic? How is the government going to enforce this? How else do they do anything? If I disagree and disobey, the guns come out. Is this the America you wanted?

Myrhaf was dead-on in saying "Darkness Descends."

We can’t even begin to know how this bill will worsen our lives. It turns doctors into creatures of the state. Rationing will have to happen, as it always does in socialism. Taxes will rise. 16,000 new IRS agents will be hired to audit Americans, taking us closer to a police state.

For a long time we have been more like Mussolini’s Italy than Jefferson’s America. Tonight we took another leap down the road to serfdom. The America we once knew — a safe and happy place full of “can do spirit” and productive individualists — is now dead. With fear and loathing we look toward the new America.

What I feel right now for all those in favor -- even grudgingly -- of what happened last night is a profound disgust. A deep moral revulsion. These aren't parlor games, and this isn't an abstract political discussion. Your ideas are antithetical to my life and the lives of my children, and now those ideas are being put into full practice. This is on your head.

Lucidicus - 21 musings before the vote

Jared Rhodes posted great op-ed this morning, saying:

On the proverbial eve of the critical vote on health reform, here are some assorted thoughts and ponderings to share, Thomas Sowell-style.

Here are some of the gems, but the whole thing is worth a read, a tweet, an email to friends, etc.

2. According to preliminary numbers from the Congressional Budget Office, health reform will cost an estimated $940 billion. I'm sure we will see people proffer calculations of what that comes to for every man, woman, and child in the nation. But remember to multiply that figure by about two in order to get your share, because over 40 percent of Americans pay no income tax.

11. I fear that under socialized medicine, it will be primarily the older doctors who will decide to quit. The younger ones coming out of the universities have been trained to be self-sacrificial, but that doesn't make a good doctor. In five years, your primary care physician could be essentially a social worker.

15. Empirical studies show that penalties (e.g., instituting a tax on soda) are more effective at changing consumer behavior than incentives (e.g., subsidizing the purchase of fruits and vegetables). So what. Rights are a moral concept. Your studies don't trump everyone else's rights.

16. Politicians on both sides repeatedly mistake seniors' protectiveness over Medicare for philosophical approval of the program. If I were 75 and had been forced to pay into the program for 45 years, I would oppose cuts, too. If the government breaks my leg and then hands me a pair of crutches, I'd be a martyr to refuse. But that doesn't mean we can't start phasing it out over the next few decades.

20. Requiring people to buy health insurance as part of an "individual mandate" does not make people more responsible. It makes them more helpless, by substituting government instructions for what should be a self-generated, self-motivated personal decision.

Read the whole thing, and pass it on.

Caution! Saw May Be Sharp!

Word to the wise: sharp things can hurt you. If you buy something that is sharp--say, a precision machine designed to cut wood by spinning a 10-inch blade at nearly 4,000 RPM--then it's reasonable to suggest that you know what you're getting into. Namely, that you know it could cut you if you happened to touch that spinning wheel of death.

If simple common sense isn't enough, the liability-shy manufacturers make sure to plaster DANGER: WILL ROBINSON!!! warnings all over their tools. So much so that the warnings take up more of the manual than the "how to operate this tool" section.

I'll admit that my table saw is an imposing piece of machinery. It's intimidating, and I treat it with a healthy dose of respect. Much like I would get into full battle garb and carefully plan all my movements when dealing with HCl or infectious bodily agents in the lab, my table saw gets special consideration in my pantheon of tools. Now that I think about it, some of my hand-held tools are probably more dangerous with regular use, but there's something about the table saw when it's going full speed. It is serious.

So if I told you that a Boston-area man bought an entry-level table saw from Home Depot in the mid-2000's and when he mangled one of his hands in 2006, he sued and just won a $1.5M verdict, would you be surprised?

Sadly, you probably wouldn't, and neither would I. Still, the patent absurdity of a jury awarding some bozo a ton of cash because the extremely dangerous tool he bought turned out to be exactly as advertized. . . well, it's beyond the pale.

His side argued that some prohibitively expensive safety feature exists that can sense when the saw blade touches human skin and stop the blade, and the manufacturer was negligent because it hadn't included it. Sigh.

Just because a safety measure exists does not make a company liable for selling a product that is exactly what everyone knows it is. If the company said "no one can ever be injured with this table saw, ever, never, NEVER!" then sure, they'd be liable. But they went in the exact opposite direction, warning about SERIOUS INJURY AND DEATH on every open square inch of the product, its packaging, and its manuals. Thus, one might expect that extra care was warranted in using said product, and if one's hand gets mangled, it's probably because one was being a fucking idiot while using it.

I'm sure this is the same line of thinking that reasonable people were bandying about when that old crone spilled hot coffee on her lap, and--my oh my!--burned the crap out of her legs. Still, rampant stupidity and abdication of personal responsibility for one's own well-being and life must be called to the carpet when it rears its head. Even if it's lost on too many to be any good.

At least one commenter on the Boston Globe article got it right when he summed it up thusly:

The hammer manufacturers will be next, for not including thumb detecting radar.

It really is that sick and stupid.

Objectivist Roundup #139

Welcome to the March 11, 2010 edition of the Objectivist Roundup, your weekly dose of intellectual fuel and ammunition.

This roundup features posts by blog authors who are students and advocates of Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand. She called it a "philosophy for living on earth" and further described it:

My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.

"About the Author," Atlas Shrugged, Appendix.

Considering the events of the day you may notice that most of the posts below deal with politics. But note that they all share a common philosophical grounding in Objectivism, and consistently promote individual rights and the socio-economic system of laissez-faire capitalism to protect those rights. Such is the value of this roundup—weekly commentary on crucial issues from a rational, individual rights perspective.

And with that, I am pleased to present Objectivist Roundup #139!

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1. Rachel Miner presents Autism Experience posted at The Playful Spirit, saying, "I share the experience of discovering the thinking challenges my son faced and first learning about their label, autism. He has progressed so much in the last three years, that I can look with some fascination at how he dealt with epistemological issues like concrete thinking and scripted language. It was quite painful at the time though and I found this post difficult to write."


2. Joseph Kellard presents The Virtue of … Objectivist “Proselytizing” posted at The American Individualist, saying, "s true, the first time I did any face-to-face Objectivist "proselytizing," I didn't even have to leave my house."


3. Stephen Bourque presents Leftists and Evangelicals Make Excellent Bedfellows posted at One Reality, saying, "'Liberals' and conservatives agree on one thing: all men ought to live their lives in servitude to the needy."


4. Trey Givens presents John Kerry Laughs in the Face of Pink Blood Threat! posted at Trey Givens, saying, "Last week a number of gay blogs re-reported the news that John Kerry and others have called upon the FDA to re-evaluate the prohibition against homosexuals donating blood. As a homosexual who once enjoyed donating, I've argued against this prohibition myself. But with this announcement and at the risk of being seen as contrary, I re-evaluated that argument. It's not complete nonsense, but there's a far more insidious force at work here."


5. Diana Hsieh presents NoodleCast Video #1: Hope and Change posted at NoodleFood, saying, "My first experiment with video: a short speech given to Liberty Toastmasters."


6. Earl Parson presents Presidential Hypocracy posted at Creatures of Prometheus, saying, "I was outraged when I heard a soundbite on the radio of the President saying "...because nothing should get in the way of a family and its doctor.""


7. Tom Stelene presents An Armed Society Means Moral Progress posted at The Audacity of Independence.


8. Rob Abiera presents Capitalism and utilities posted at The Morality War, saying, "My letter to the editor advocating for a free market in utilities."


9. Paul Hsieh presents Hsieh OpEd at PJM: Can the Moral 'Narrative' of ObamaCare Be Defeated?" posted at We Stand FIRM, saying, "ObamaCare must be opposed at the moral level, not just the economic or procedural levels."


10. Grant Jones presents Congress: Deconstructing America Piece by Piece posted at The Dougout, saying, "Taking time from the busy schedule of destroying America, Congress submits to a harbinger of the Dark Ages."


11. Roderick Fitts presents Prerequisites for Understanding Bacon's Induction Part 2: Scholastic Natural Philosophy posted at Inductive Quest, saying, "A discussion of Bacon's view of the Scholastics and the philosophy they endorsed, that of Aristotle. Essential reading for understanding Bacon's "Novum Organum.""


12. Kelly Elmore presents First Gardening Day of the Spring posted at Reepicheep's Coracle, saying, "This post details our first spring gardening tasks, including a new method for making vegetable beds with minimal work that I am trying this year."


13. Stella presents Oh yeah, that's insane, all right. posted at ReasonPharm, saying, "ReasonPharm is back from a bit of a hiatus, with this post pointing out the real problem with a proposed salt ban (!) in NY state restaurants."


14. Rational Jenn presents Opposing Georgia State Senate Bill 132 posted at Rational Jenn, saying, "This post contains the letter I wrote to my state Senator concerning a proposal to raise the minimum compulsory school attendance age in Georgia from 16 to 17. The state (any state!) has no business interfering with, controlling, or dictating the terms for one more year in the lives of each Georgia child. It's a disastrous idea from start to finish."


15. Ari Armstrong presents Stop the 'Amazon Tax!' posted at Free Colorado, saying, "Extensive analysis of Colorado's "Amazon Tax" and why it is unjust."


16. Sandi Trixx presents On Unemployment Benefits posted at Sandi Trixx, saying, "Two recent posts on unemployment benefits inspired by Krugman's theory that said benefits decrease unemployment."


17. Jeff Montgomery presents Chicago Lakes Winter Hike posted at Fun With Gravity, saying, "This one's about a recent winter hike near Mount Evans in Colorado. Calling all armchair hikers!"


18. Jim Woods presents A Republican Gallatin? posted at Words by Woods, saying, "Jefferson's Sec. of Treasury Albert Gallatin provides a role model for transforming American politics through advocating and then implementing limited government."

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That concludes Objectivist Roundup #139. To participate in next week's roundup, submit your blog article using our carnival submission form.

Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

Orren Boyle, Meet Bill Gates

"Google's algorithms learn less common search terms better than others because many more people are conducting searches on these terms on Google. These and other network effects make it hard for competing search engines to catch up. Microsoft's well-received Bing search engine is addressing this challenge by offering innovations in areas that are less dependent on volume. But Bing needs to gain volume too, in order to increase the relevance of search results for less common search terms."

-Lead whiner for Microsoft, counsel Dave Heiner, pleading for help from the DOJ and EC

This is just disgusting. Back when the looters and rotters were attacking Microsoft for being too good, I was angry and defended the company against the injustice. Now they are doing the same damn thing, pleading to the State to knock their competition down a few pegs. "But it's too hard beat them! It's not fair! Bing needs to gain volume too! Who the hell are they to think they're so great?!"

Screw you, Microsoft. You deserve every bad thing that comes to you from now on.

Today, Yaron Brook and Don Watkins have a column in the Christian Science Monitor provocatively titled, "Apple vs. GM: Ayn Rand knew the difference. Do you?," with a subhead of "Apple acts like a producer. GM acts like a looter. It’s a key distinction that Ayn Rand laid out in ‘Atlas Shrugged.’"

Microsoft, though it admittedly has a very mixed history, has generally acted like a producer in the past. Now, it's playing the political pull game, and shows its new pragmatic, unprincipled colors: cowardly, yellow, Orren Boyle type colors. Sickening.

Brook and Watkins could just as easily be talking about Microsoft as they are GM:

The producers, such as Hank Rearden, inventor of a new metal stronger and cheaper than steel, work tirelessly to create products that improve human life. The looters are basically pseudobusinessmen, like the incompetent steel executive Orren Boyle, who get unearned riches by getting special favors from politicians. Their business isn’t business, but political pull.

It is the producers who make life possible: who keep grocery shelves stocked; who discover new lifesaving drugs; who make computers faster, buildings taller, and airplanes safer.

The looters, on the other hand, leech off the wealth created by producers.

The novel rejects the widespread notion that both the producer Reardens and the looter Boyles are fundamentally united by a desire for profit. Only the Reardens, she argues, deserve to be called profit-seekers, because they earn rewards through productive effort; the Boyles are antieffort parasites seeking unearned loot.

But it’s not only unearned wealth the looters want. In “Atlas Shrugged,” Boyle uses his influence to throttle Rearden with progressively harsher government controls and regulations, because he can’t survive except by hindering the competition.

Witness the birth of Microsoft's new tagline: "antieffort parasites seeking unearned loot."