Time Immortal

Leave it to a British journalist to catch the deeper significance of the electoral victory of Barack Hussein Obama. The sane Hitchens brother notes:

I was in Washington DC the night of the election. America’s beautiful capital has a sad secret. It is perhaps the most racially divided city in the world, with 15th Street — which runs due north from the White House — the unofficial frontier between black and white. But, like so much of America, it also now has a new division, and one which is in many ways much more important. I had attended an election-night party in a smart and liberal white area, but was staying the night less than a mile away on the edge of a suburb where Spanish is spoken as much as English, plus a smattering of tongues from such places as Ethiopia, Somalia and Afghanistan.

As I walked, I crossed another of Washington’s secret frontiers. There had been a few white people blowing car horns and shouting, as the result became clear. But among the Mexicans, Salvadorans and the other Third World nationalities, there was something like ecstasy.

They grasped the real significance of this moment. They knew it meant that America had finally switched sides in a global cultural war. Forget the Cold War, or even the Iraq War. The United States, having for the most part a deeply conservative people, had until now just about stood out against many of the mistakes which have ruined so much of the rest of the world.

Suspicious of welfare addiction, feeble justice and high taxes, totally committed to preserving its own national sovereignty, unabashedly Christian in a world part secular and part Muslim, suspicious of the Great Global Warming panic, it was unique.

These strengths had been fading for some time, mainly due to poorly controlled mass immigration and to the march of political correctness. They had also been weakened by the failure of America’s conservative party – the Republicans – to fight on the cultural and moral fronts.

They preferred to posture on the world stage. Scared of confronting Left-wing teachers and sexual revolutionaries at home, they could order soldiers to be brave on their behalf in far-off deserts. And now the US, like Britain before it, has begun the long slow descent into the Third World. How sad. Where now is our last best hope on Earth?

The main problem with a progressive demagogue taking office is that the changes he brings about tend to be of the sort not easily dislodged from the public scene. Think of Pierre Elliot Trudeau and how he gave Canada its Charter, which purports to defend the rights and freedoms of Canadians but which, in effect, does almost the opposite. Think of nationalized , or nationalized Education, or the welfare culture extant today in most Western democracies. Think of the irregularities and insecurities that plague Immigration laws in many nations, Canada and the U.S. included.

Now imagine how it might come to pass that those things could be undone again? It’s impossible to envision, isn’t it? Or, at least, nearly so?

Even in what could be called the best-case scenarios (either a disastrous Obama presidency that swings the American populace strongly back toward an invigorated, staunchly conservative Republican party, or an Obama presidency in which Obama himself is forced by circumstances to channel the spirit of Ronald Reagan), the social changes that the Obama administration is (if only at first) going to be anxious to implement will be of the same lasting character.

And who knows who will then pay the price for such progressive excess? The unborn almost certainly will, but I doubt it will be just they who suffer.

This is one of those “made of WIN” kind of exchanges:

PAUL KRUGMAN
And private insurance? That’s the thing, I— Actually, can I just —I wanted to ask a question. And—

JOHN DONVAN [MODERATOR]
Please—please do—

PAUL KRUGMAN
—and I wanted to ask, actually two questions, to the audience. First, how many Canadians, would Canadians in the room please raise your hands. [ONE PERSON APPLAUDS, LAUGHTER]

JOHN DONVAN
We have about seven hands going up—

PAUL KRUGMAN
Okay, not as many as I thought. Okay, of those of you who are not on the panel who are Canadians,, how many of you think you have a terrible health care system. [PAUSE] One, two—

JOHN DONVAN
We see—almost all of the same hands going up. [LAUGHTER]

PAUL KRUGMAN
Bad move on my part. [APPLAUSE]

The system in Canada would work…if society was not peopled by gluttonous, selfish, and/or self-destructive men and women. Since society in Canada is so peopled, however, our health care system is groaning under the strain.

I just don’t see a way that the doctors can come out of this story and not look like complete douchebags, even if they do make a valid point about the relative availability of treatment for scoliosis on different sides of the Rocky Mountains.

A 12-year-old child with epilepsy, cerebral palsy and a spinal deformity has been advised by orthopedic surgeons at B.C. Children’s Hospital to look for a doctor in Alberta or elsewhere in Canada after her parents spent months drawing public attention to long waits for non-emergency surgery.

Dr. Doug Cochrane, the hospital’s vice-president of medicine, acknowledged the doctors took a highly unusual action, but said it was justified on the grounds they felt they could not establish a proper working relationship with the parents.

The girl, Carly Lamont, is one of 150 B.C. children on a waiting list for spinal surgery to correct the curvature caused by a condition called scoliosis. Only two doctors in B.C. do such surgery on children, while there are four in Alberta.

Given that scoliosis runs in my family, this story is kind of relevant to my interests. And for whatever reason, it just makes my blood boil. Okay, I get that the parents haven’t exactly been fully co-operative, but they were drawing attention to a real problem that exists in the Canadian system: wait times are pathetic.

And I realize that the doctors have every right to recommend treatment be sought in another province, especially if the wait times are liable to be lower elsewhere, but there’s still no getting around the fact that they come out of this looking vindictive.

Sigmund, Carl, and Alfred have a short post up with the actual comparison, and while I’m sure there’s probably room for variance, I have to say that overall the results don’t surprise: wait times in Ottawa average about 20 hours, whereas wait times in Boston average about 1 hour.

I never understood what Michael Moore was getting at in Sicko. Not that I expect the man to turn in anything other than a distorted, misleading account of the subject he is covering, of course…but still. Dude totally glossed over several real problems that exist and persist in Canada’s system today.

Health care would have worked so much better in this country had it been able to stick to its original mandate: providing care for the chronically ill and accidentally injured. But as society got more and more lazy, and as Canadians took less and less interest in being active participants in their own health (see: obesity), it was inevitable that the system would become overloaded.

Regarding this post by Ken, I find that where Health Canada is concerned, only certain issues regarding are ever addressed, and then, not always with the proper statistics or education. I take everything they say or do with a grain of salt myself.

The guys who run this ostensibly humourous site are often too eerily good:

…the secret reason why all white people love socialized medicine is that they all love the idea of receiving without having a full-time job. This would allow them to work as a freelance designer/consultant/copywriter/photographer/blogger, open their own bookstore, stay at home with their kids, or be a part of an internet start-up without having to worry about a benefits package. Though many of them would never follow this path, they appreciate having the option.

If you need to impress a white person, merely mention how you got hurt on a recent trip Canada/England/Sweden and though you were a foreigner you received excellent and free health care. They will be very impressed and likely tell you about how powerful drug and health care lobbies are destroying everything.

Though their passion for national health care runs deep, it is important to remember that white people are most in favor of it when they are healthy. They love the idea of everyone have equal access to the resources that will keep them alive, that is until they have to wait in line for an MRI.

This is very similar to the way that white people express their support for public schools when they don?t have children.

Not that socialized health care is necessarily “free” — ever wonder why many European nations have exorbitantly high tax rates?

Quebec residents should pay $25 for every visit to a doctor, a provincial task force on medicare said Tuesday.

The Castonguay task force’s much-anticipated report also called for an increase of up to one percentage point in the Quebec sales tax to help pay for medicare.

And over in the UK, in order to reduce waiting room times they’re holding patients outdoors in the ambulance they arrived in. Which incidentally makes the ambulance/waiting room unavailable to go get anyone who is in urgent need of transport to the ER.

Universal, free is three lies for the price of one.

(Source)

(In Soviet Russia, hat tips you: Kathy Shaidle)