God, grant me the senility to forget the people I never liked anyway,
The good fortune to run into the ones that I do,
And the eyesight to tell the difference.
I haven’t gossiped, I haven’t lost my temper, I haven’t been greedy, grumpy, nasty, selfish, or overindulgent. I’m very thankful for that. But in a few minutes, Lord, I’m going to get out of bed, and from then on I’m probably going to need a lot more help.
Amen
A New Year’s Wish
On New Year’s Eve, Marilyn stood up in the local pub and said that it was time to get ready. At the stroke of midnight, she wanted every husband to be standing next to the one person who made his life worth living.
Well, it was kind of embarrassing. As the clock struck – the bartender was almost crushed to death
Lecture Tour with A Difference
On New Year’s Eve, Daniel was in no shape to drive, so he sensibly left his van in the car park and walked home. As he was wobbling along, he was stopped by a policeman. ‘What are you doing out here at four o’clock in the morning?’ asked the police officer.
‘I’m on my way to a lecture,’ answered Roger.
‘And who on earth, in their right mind, is going to give a lecture at this time on New Year’s Eve?’ enquired the constable sarcastically.
I don’t know how many of you are aware that this year marks the 40th Anniversary of the 1972 Munich Olympics where the Munich Massacre took place. Palestinian terrorists took nine Israeli athletes, coaches and officials hostage, two were killed almost immediately and the others were killed later during a rescue attempt.
Here we are 40 years later and after doing some checking and a little investigating, I’m beginning to get a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach and things are starting to add up.
1. Olympic park is only about 2.6 miles from the London Borough of Tower Hamlets which according to the London census of 2001 had the largest Muslim population of all the London Buroughs at 71,389.
2. On July 7, 2005, the day after London won its bid for the 2012 Olympics, London suffered its first terrorist bombing and attempted bombings again in 2005 and 2007, this century. I don’t believe these were a coincidence but rather an early test of London’s security, granted these attacks took place years ago but what better way to lure their police and security forces into a false sense of security.
3. This year for the first time ever, Saudi Arabia is allowing its women to compete in the Olympics and seeing that more suicide attacks are being carried out by women recently, I believe this is just a little too convenient.
I sincerely hope I’m wrong and that this feeling I’m having is just the result of an over active imagination.
PUBLISHED:18:08 EST, 19 June 2012 | UPDATED:09:14 EST, 20 June 2012
Worrying claim: Professor Patrick Pullicino said doctors had turned the use of a controversial ‘death pathway’ into the equivalent of euthanasia of the elderly
NHS doctors are prematurely ending the lives of thousands of elderly hospital patients because they are difficult to manage or to free up beds, a senior consultant claimed yesterday.
Professor Patrick Pullicino said doctors had turned the use of a controversial ‘death pathway’ into the equivalent of euthanasia of the elderly.
He claimed there was often a lack of clear evidence for initiating the Liverpool Care Pathway, a method of looking after terminally ill patients that is used in hospitals across the country.
It is designed to come into force when doctors believe it is impossible for a patient to recover and death is imminent.
It can include withdrawal of treatment – including the provision of water and nourishment by tube – and on average brings a patient to death in 33 hours.
There are around 450,000 deaths in Britain each year of people who are in hospital or under NHS care. Around 29 per cent – 130,000 – are of patients who were on the LCP.
Professor Pullicino claimed that far too often elderly patients who could live longer are placed on the LCP and it had now become an ‘assisted death pathway rather than a care pathway’.
He cited ‘pressure on beds and difficulty with nursing confused or difficult-to-manage elderly patients’ as factors.
Professor Pullicino revealed he had personally intervened to take a patient off the LCP who went on to be successfully treated.
He said this showed that claims they had hours or days left are ‘palpably false’.
In the example he revealed a 71-year-old who was admitted to hospital suffering from pneumonia and epilepsy was put on the LCP by a covering doctor on a weekend shift.
Professor Pullicino said he had returned to work after a weekend to find the patient unresponsive and his family upset because they had not agreed to place him on the LCP.
‘I removed the patient from the LCP despite significant resistance,’ he said.
‘His seizures came under control and four weeks later he was discharged home to his family,’ he said.
Professor Pullicino, a consultant neurologist for East Kent Hospitals and Professor of Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Kent, was speaking to the Royal Society of Medicine in London.
Distressing: The professor has claimed an approved technique of looking after the terminally ill is not being used in all hospitals
He said: ‘The lack of evidence for initiating the Liverpool Care Pathway makes it an assisted death pathway rather than a care pathway.
‘Very likely many elderly patients who could live substantially longer are being killed by the LCP.
‘Patients are frequently put on the pathway without a proper analysis of their condition.
‘Predicting death in a time frame of three to four days, or even at any other specific time, is not possible scientifically.
This determination in the LCP leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy. The personal views of the physician or other medical team members of perceived quality of life or low likelihood of a good outcome are probably central in putting a patient on the LCP.’
He added: ‘If we accept the Liverpool Care Pathway we accept that euthanasia is part of the standard way of dying as it is now associated with 29 per cent of NHS deaths.’
The LCP was developed in the North West during the 1990s and recommended to hospitals by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence in 2004.
Medical criticisms of the Liverpool Care Pathway were voiced nearly three years ago.
Experts including Peter Millard, emeritus professor of geriatrics at the University of London, and Dr Peter Hargreaves, palliative care consultant at St Luke’s cancer centre in Guildford, Surrey, warned of ‘backdoor euthanasia’ and the risk that economic factors were being brought into the treatment of vulnerable patients.
In the example of the 71-year-old, Professor Pullicino revealed he had given the patient another 14 months of life by demanding the man be removed from the LCP.
Professor Pullicino said the patient was an Italian who spoke poor English, but was living with a ‘supportive wife and daughter’. He had a history of cerebral haemorrhage and subsequent seizures.
Professor Pullicino said: ‘I found him deeply unresponsive on a Monday morning and was told he had been put on the LCP. He was on morphine via a syringe driver.’ He added: ‘I removed the patient from the LCP despite significant resistance.’
The patient’s extra 14 months of life came at considerable cost to the NHS and the taxpayer, Professor Pullicino indicated.
He said he needed extensive support with wheelchair, ramps and nursing.
After 14 months the patient was admitted to a different hospital with pneumonia and put on the LCP. The man died five hours later.
A Department of Health spokesman said: ‘The Liverpool Care Pathway is not euthanasia and we do not recognise these figures. The pathway is recommended by NICE and has overwhelming support from clinicians – at home and abroad – including the Royal College of Physicians.
‘A patient’s condition is monitored at least every four hours and, if a patient improves, they are taken off the Liverpool Care Pathway and given whatever treatments best suit their new needs.’
So this is what we get to look forward to with Obamacare. So Grayson, who is it that wants us to die quickly, you obnoxious, overbearing buffoon.
Hi Steve,
What a difference a couple of days make. Grouchy is on the mend and I spoke with 2 of his doctors today. They took him off IV’s and put him on a regular diet and said if could tolerate that, they would release him tomorrow into my capable hands. LOL
I have to be honest with you Steve. We almost lost him because of his cardiologist. Needless to say that cardiologist is no longer going to get near him. (Hey Give me the word, I’ll have a chat with him. ) We have a new one who worked very hard over the weekend to keep him here with us a while longer and he told me that the one up in Denver almost killed him with the drugs he prescribed. So Grouchy fought hard to stay and I will be happy when I get him here.
Thank you for remembering him in your prayers.
Rose Ann
I recently asked my neighbors’ little girl what she wanted to be when she grows up. She said she wanted to be President some day. Both of her parents, liberal Democrats, were standing there, so I asked her, ‘If you were President, what would be the first thing you would do? ‘
She replied, ‘I’d give food and houses to all the homeless people.’ Her parents beamed with pride.
‘Wow… what a worthy goal.’ I told her, ‘But you don’t have to wait until you’re President to do that! You can come over to my house and
mow the lawn, pull weeds and sweep my yard, and I’ll pay you $50. Then I’ll take you over to the grocery store where the homeless guy
hangs out, and you can give him the $50 to use toward food and a new house.’
She thought that over for a few seconds, then she looked me straight in the eye and asked, ‘Why doesn’t the homeless guy come over and do the work and you can just pay him the $50?’
Exhausted, but with a heart full of joy he continues to climb the ladder and, yet again, he discovers an even larger room where he meets another man with a beard.
Full of hope, he asks again, “Are you Mohammed?”
“No, I am Jesus… You will find Mohammed higher up.”
Mohammed higher than Jesus!
The poor man can hardly contain his delight and climbs and climbs, ever higher.
Once again he reaches a larger room where he meets a man with a beard and repeats his question:
“Are you Mohammed?” he gasps as he is, by now, totally out of breath from all his climbing.
“No my son…..I am God.. But you look exhausted. Would you like a coffee?”
OK, big macho guy that I am.. Yea right, I crack myself up sometimes.
Any way I not big on Ballet, but watch these 2 vids. Pretty amazing Stuff. First one Joseph sent and while I was there I saw this second one. Some people will not let anything get in the way of their passion.
I never knew there’s an event called the World Naked Bike Ride. Did you?
Not only did I not know there’s a World Naked Bike Ride, I hadn’t known that the event is held in DOZENS of cities across the world and that Mexico City just had its SIXTH World Naked Bike Ride on June 12, 2011. How ignorant is that?
Hundreds of bicyclists in their underwear, covered in body paint or wearing nothing at all have taken to the streets of Mexico City to demand respect from motorists…. Organizer Fabian Conejo said Saturday that riding nude demonstrates how vulnerable cyclists are to the millions of cars that clog Mexico City streets.
And now, what you’ve been waiting for….
Um, doesn't the bicycle seat get, um, kinda sticky? (London, June 11, 2011)
Calling Al Gore (London)
Ugly male exhibitionists, London
I hate to think what he's doing. (London)
Mexico, June 12, 2011
Ewwwwwww.... (Mexico)
Mexico
Doesn’t it warm the cockles of your heart to see just what lengths exhibitionists go to go naked? They are Congressman Anthony Weiner’s best buds!
But how did San Francisco skip out on this important event? I’m OUTRAGED, just OUTRAGED!!!
There are a couple of things you can say about Ron Paul. First, there is little middle ground with him. People either love him or hate him. Second, he is not shy about talking about what is on his mind.
Ron Paul earlier this week was talking about the Bin Laden operation and said, “I would suggest the way they got Khalid [Sheikh] Mohammed. We went and cooperated with Pakistan. They arrested him, actually, and turned him over to us, and he’s been in prison. Why can’t we work with the government?” He is of course, referring to the government of Pakistan.
Then, when asked by WHO radio if it was necessary Paul said, “I don’t think it was necessary, no. It absolutely was not necessary. I think respect for the rule of law and world law and international law. What if he’d been in a hotel in London? We wanted to keep it secret, so would we have sent the airplane, you know the helicopters in to London, because they were afraid the information would get out?”
If there is any doubt that Ron Paul should not even get near the OvalOffice, even on a tour of the White House, he has just revealed it. Such insane comments now raise the issue if he should even be in the Congress.
Ron Paul supporters will always rush to his defense. They will point out some good things he has said and done, such as the demand to audit the Fed.
That is all well and good but his isolationism and naïveté are simply too much.
Perhaps Ron Paul should be reminded of a few things. Bin Laden was the mastermind behind 9/11. He is not a combatant in the sense of the law, where the law of warfare applies. He is a terrorist. The best legal analogy to a terrorist is the pirates of old. Under International Law, a country that catches a pirate is pretty much free to do anything to the pirate they want.
The same should be true for terrorists.
For Ron Paul, he should know much better. As a Congressman, he should have access to some classified information that we do not have. Every American who watches the news and can fog a mirror knows that the Pakistani Intelligence Service has been a silent partner with Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. If we had tipped Pakistan off that we were going to go in and try to “arrest” Bin Laden, when we got there, all we would have found would have been an empty house and maybe some booby traps.
For a Congressman to say the raid to kill the man who is one of the greatest mass murderers of Americans in history was, “not necessary,” is simply nuts.
Ron Paul thinks that if we simply pull all of our military out of every other country and hunker down behind our borders everything will be okay. No, it won’t be. We are dealing with madmen in this world. Some of them are bent on world domination by their particular religion and others are simply nuts. Ballistic Missile technology and nuclear weapons are spreading faster than anyone can control. Kim Jong “mentally” Il can push a button and thirty minutes later one of his missiles hits America.
We cannot have a leader who does not believe in protecting America. Socialists hate America and do not want to see America defend itself. What is Ron Paul’s excuse?
The turnout was much bigger than expected, and the message was clear: people in Britain are totally opposed to the government’s choice to prioritise the needs of bankers and big business over those of ordinary citizens.
So claims one Alex Pinkerman – nom de plume for an anonymous union organizer – writing in the UK Telegraph this weekend.
Yes, the riots in London, which destroyed small shops and assaulted on-duty police, were presumably prompted by anger that the British government was not sufficiently taxing the rich to pay for generous public compensation.
You read that correctly: these people actually believe that Britain is pandering to wealthy bankers.
Let’s take a moment to look at how much money the British government already takes from the rich through an ultra-progressive tax rate. According to HM Revenue & Customs (England’s version of the IRS), citizens who earn more than £150,000, or about $240,000, forfeit a full 50 percent of their income. Middle class workers pay less than half of that.
In the business world, corporations pay 26 percent of their profit. The death tax on wealthy estates is 40 percent. Capital gains are taxed up to 28 percent.
And yet, shockingly, this hasn’t been enough to please the likes of Alex Pinkerman. The British government is teetering on insolvency and forced to stop spending. What went wrong?
European socialism has proven one fundamental fact about life; taking from the wealthy is never enough. It becomes addictive as more and more ways are found to spend the money. It’s an easy source of revenue, just take it at gunpoint, and then use it to buy whatever you want – you can always go back for more.
Until there isn’t any more left. That is where Britain finds itself right now. Taking half of the money earned by rich people has not been enough, and only now are they starting to learn that their entire paycheck will never be enough.
What will come of Britain as the country finds itself at this turning point? A Reagan revolution would reverse the trend and lower taxes for everyone. Yet signs from the British government signal that their conservative party doesn’t have the guts to do this. The likely path is that big government proponents will double down and begin to seize more. Because that is what progressives do.
Readers might ask at this point, what happens when there are no rich people left? Ahh, but you don’t understand the progressive mind. That’s the beauty of blaming the rich – it’s quite an easy bar to raise or lower.
For unemployed teenagers rioting in the streets, anyone who makes a middle class salary is richer than they are. For uneducated immigrants not allowed to vote, the privileged “native” class, no matter how poor they may be, still have an unfair advantage.
And so the beat goes on. As society slides further into poverty, whoever happens to remain at the top becomes, by default, the rich. It is a foolproof political ploy, and it literally becomes an addiction for collective societies.
To understand how far this seduction can go, it’s important to research the inner workings of the Soviet Union prior to WW2. Far too few Westerners know anything about life behind the Iron Curtain. And yet this is essential to study, because the Soviet Union fully exposed the progressive playbook a century ago.
In 1928, Stalin found his factory worker bees unhappy, because, well, communism was not exactly providing them enough food. So his administration stooped to blaming massive starvation on… farmers. Not giant corporations that owned farmland. Not farms owned by banks. Just individual, family-run farms that happened to own their own land.
These greedy villains, with their plows and their barns and their cows they would not give away, were blamed for Stalin’s inability to feed loyal factory workers. Stalin sought to punish them by seizing wealth they were unfairly keeping for themselves. He ordered farmers to surrender all of their property – land, buildings, plows, seed, livestock – to the collective.
These hardworking farmers, puzzled to find themselves attacked as the proverbial Goldman Sachs of their day, finally recognized the uselessness of blaming the rich. Rather than giving their livestock to Stalin’s government, they slaughtered the animals themselves and absorbed much of the meat into an underground market.
Stalin then used the media to call them viciously selfish wealthy elites. Many more starved across Russia.
To read more about the kulak rebellion, visit here.
That is the end game of taxing the rich. That’s the dead end waiting at the finish line for Progress. When the corporations and the banks and the oil executives are gone, the rich become whoever is left.
If the communists and community organizers in Britain get their way, England will begin its slow march in this direction. Because in the end, that is what folks like Alex Pinkerman will settle for.
Worrying claim: Professor Patrick Pullicino said doctors had turned the use of a controversial ‘death pathway’ into the equivalent of euthanasia of the elderly
Distressing: The professor has claimed an approved technique of looking after the terminally ill is not being used in all hospitals
