Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Smiles For Socialism
For people who oppose socialized medicine, Britain’s NHS is the gift that keeps on giving. And for genuine Brits, it’s a nightmare:
Like so many young women, Amy King always took great pride in her appearance.
Standing in front of the mirror to check her make-up before a night out, the 21-year-old would always try a smile - friends told her they loved the way it lit up her face.
Eight weeks ago, all that changed. The student from Plymouth was admitted to hospital where, in a single operation, she had every tooth in her mouth removed.
Amy, whose dental problems were caused by untreated gum disease, does not go out any more. And when she looks in the mirror she hardly recognises the face staring back at her.
...
While Amy’s experience is an extreme one, it highlights growing concerns about the state of the nation’s dental health.
Last week, statistics obtained by the Liberal Democrats revealed that the number of people having teeth extracted in hospital has risen by one third in the past four years.
More than 175,000 Britons had their teeth removed under general anaesthetic in 2007/08, up 40,000 on the 2003/04 figure.
The number of children having teeth out has shot up, too. But more pertinent is the fact that the rate of these extractions gathered pace after a deeply controversial contract for NHS dentists was introduced in April 2006.
Read the whole thing. The system in Britain is basically denying people routine care but paying for massive expensive procedures. So Amy couldn’t get any help until they needed to yank out every last tooth.
Yes, the Law of Unintended Consequences rears its ugly head again.
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Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Ten Years Gone
This post was Originally posted at Right-Thinking by West Virginia Rebel. I don’t think I could have said it any better myself, so I’m republishing it in its entirety. Enjoy.
This week has marked the tenth anniversary of the Columbine shootings. As it turns out, much of what we thought happened didn’t.
They weren’t goths or loners.
The two teenagers who killed 13 people and themselves at suburban Denver’s Columbine High School...weren’t in the “Trenchcoat Mafia,” disaffected videogamers who wore cowboy dusters. The killings ignited a national debate over bullying, but the record now shows Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold hadn’t been bullied—in fact, they had bragged in diaries about picking on freshmen and “fags.”
Their rampage put schools on alert for “enemies lists” made by troubled students, but the enemies on their list had graduated from Columbine a year earlier. Contrary to early reports, Harris and Klebold weren’t on antidepressant medication and didn’t target jocks, blacks or Christians, police now say, citing the killers’ journals and witness accounts. That story about a student being shot in the head after she said she believed in God? Never happened, the FBI says now.
A decade after Harris and Klebold made Columbine a synonym for rage, new information—including several books that analyze the tragedy through diaries, e-mails, appointment books, videotape, police affidavits and interviews with witnesses, friends and survivors—indicate that much of what the public has been told about the shootings is wrong.
People on both the left and the right projected a lot of their own fears about teenage subcultures and gun violence onto these two. Columbine became one of the touchstones in the “Culture War”, mostly for all the wrong reasons. The plain fact of the matter was that these two were psychopaths who needed little outside influence to do what they did. The lesson of Columbine? It can happen anytime, anywhere, to anyone.
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Tuesday, April 07, 2009
Bad news about Lee
Please read this. We’ve lost Lee. Please be respectful in the comments.
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