Saturday, August 22, 2009

The French healthcare system, even if taken at its best, is like an expensive jewel on a beggar’s neck

Europeans very often are quite ignorant about the United States. The same way, American liberals are ignorant about the real situation in Europe. And it is not as beautiful as the liberals would want it. But every time I point that in a conversation, I get the same reply: “What about the free healthcare?”
Thus writes Bojidar Marinov after describing his encounter with a French professor who "was a staunch proponent of European socialism against American 'cowboy' capitalism." "Oh, but you don’t have free healthcare", she told him.
Well, then, let’s look at the most lauded and exalted example healthcare in Europe: that of France.

In the Houston Examiner of August 8, 2009, Jenny Kakasuleff presents a pretty picture of the French healthcare system. She mentions studies by the World Health Organization that rank France number one in health care. She lists different types of care that the French system supplies and the quality of the system compared to the healthcare system in the US. In a few words, the French socialized system of healthcare is what we want.

What Kakasuleff doesn’t mention is what that system costs the French people. Not only that, she forgets to make a comprehensive comparison between the life of a French family, and the life of, let’s say, a family in Houston. Every good thing has costs, some visible, and some invisible, and before we buy something, we need to know what we need to trade for it.

My first question always is the same as in the above dialogue: How much money do you make? I don’t just want to know if you have only one part of your lifestyle in a perfect condition, I want to know your comprehensive lifestyle and how well off you are. It makes no sense to buy a new Mercedes-Benz on credit and brag about it, if after the monthly payment you barely have anything left to put food on the table. So, I want to find out if that lauded healthcare system in France comes with the same level of wealth in the other aspects of the French lifestyle. We can’t just look at one thing and compare. We need to look at the whole picture.

So looking at the statistics, I find out that in 2003 the Gross National Income per capita in the USA was $37,750. I don’t know how exactly they came up with this number, but I can work with it. The same website tells us that the GNI per capita in France is $27,640. (All the numbers there are in US Dollars.)

So, even before I look deeper into it, the French citizen makes $10,000 less a year, before taxes. Question: Is this worth it? Think of how much healthcare you can buy here in the US for $10,000 a year. People here in the US get much more in healthcare than what the French system can offer, for much less than $10,000 a year.

Let alone the fact that in France fuel is three times more expensive, food is more expensive, clothes are more expensive, and in general, almost everything is more expensive than in the USA. One dollar in America can buy much more than the same dollar in France.

What about the taxes? What we get paid is one thing, what we get to keep and use is another.

Let’s see.

In 2007 total government revenues in the USA were at $2.6 trillion, the highest in the history of the US. Divided by 300 million population, the Federal government took from each one of us $8,700 a year. It is outrageously too much, I believe. But let’s see what the French government did to its own people.

In the same year, the total tax revenues in France were 818 billion Euro. Divided by 64 million French, this makes about €12,780 Euro per capita. Or approximately $17,250 at the rates of that year.

Subtracted from the figures above, statistically the average American has about $29,000 a year left in his pocket, while the average French has only $10,000.

Granted, the numbers are rounded, they are not perfectly exact, and I could probably be more thorough in my research. But the difference between the two nations is too big to be ascribed to inaccuracy. In case you wonder if I have made any calculation errors, you can check with the French Embassy and learn that the average family income in France was €20,440 Euro (around $26,000) in 2004. Take out the taxes, and consider the higher prices in France; and then compare to America.

So, my question is: What is it that the French government provides to its people that an average American can’t buy for much less than $19,000 a year?

I am skeptical about Kakasuleff’s claims concerning the successes of the French healthcare system. There are quite a few claims to the opposite, by French nationals themselves. But even if the French system was as perfect as claimed and gave its citizens much better and healthier life, they don’t seem to have much left to enjoy it. They have to pay higher prices for gas, for housing, for food. They have to live in smaller houses than the average Houstonian. And how many French can afford a vacation every year, or two cars per family?

The French healthcare system, even if taken at its best, is like an expensive jewel on a beggar’s neck. However interested I am in my health and the health of my family, I don’t get sick as often as I drive my Buick or as I rest in my spacious air-conditioned house. And I can pay much less than $19,000 a year and get much better healthcare than the French.

So Ms. Kakasuleff had it wrong. You can’t compare one thing only. You need to look at the whole picture. We need to fix the problems with our healthcare system, no doubt about it. But it is hardly a wise choice to follow the example of a nation where one thing is a success—allegedly—while every other aspect of the nation’s life is an abject failure.
Don't forget to check out Frenchman Guy Sorman's "checkup" and the IBD editorial that the latter partly inspired…
And don't forget to return to Bojidar Marinov for his You Can’t Change Only One Thing

Some Perspective, if you Will


- Norman Mattoon Thomas, 1944, socialist,

pacifist, and six-time presidential candidate

of the Socialist Party of America

Friday, August 21, 2009

People's State of Oregon's ObamaCare (about to go nationwide) Denies Chemo Medicine; Offers Assisted Suicide Instead

(Thanks to RV)

Critics say that greed is the driving force of capitalism; My answer is that envy is the driving force of socialism.

remembers Svetlana Kunin.




Government-controlled health care destroyed human dignity.






Listen to an American version (spasiba to Janina and Valery); maybe the One can bring the Soviet song to America's schools…

(Early) Weekend Quiz

Our brothers and sisters to the south of here are hotting things up a bit:

First they kidnapped their bosses; then they threatened to blow up their own factories. Now, in the latest phase of France's summer of discontent, disgruntled workers are turning to environmental blackmail as a stick to beat the management into submission.

Angry lorry drivers at Serta, a struggling transportation company, are threatening to pour more than 8,000 litres of toxic fuel additive into the Seine if their demands for redundancy pay-offs are not met. Acknowledging the "dramatic" effect this could have on the river's fish population, they insist they will not be dissuaded unless their bosses give in.

"It's less dramatic than ... people being made redundant and sacrificed," Jean-Pierre Villemin from the CFDT union told French radio. "It's the only means we have of getting what we want."

No doubt Greenpeace is breathing fire on the mere suggestion, right?

Antoine Faucher, campaign director of Greenpeace France, said the threats, though worrying, were in fact a reflection of growing concern for the environment. "It's significant because today, perhaps unlike previous years, the environment is recognised in itself as a resource," he said. "To take it hostage may be of greater value now than it was before."
Now, a question ..... Would Greenpeace have the same laconic/nuanced reply if an official and respected firm threatened to employ the very same tactique de négociation?

No penalty for guessing.

You’ll Note that there is no “SILF” Phenomenon

Which is to say that there is virtually no normal, well actualized person who, as the case is with a MILF, want an crazy Skank-ILF like Maureen Dowd, or for that matter find any sort of appeal, sexual or otherwise of the stern, humorless leftist women that she’s supposed to be a social poster child/ role model for.

Mo Dowd, joining in on the pointless swarm of personal attacks on a woman politician accuses Palin of being on facebook, calling facebook “more commonly used by kids hooking up and cyberstalking,” merely because a strong, confident woman whose life work is not Dowd’s career advancement is there.

Strangely enough, so is the stern and humorless Mo Dowd.

If you feel that it’s viscous, tasteless, or otherwise rude that one would sexually objectify a “eminent” New York Times reporter, why then, don’t you ask why Dowd does the same herself as a rule, forgoing arguments or information of any depth whatever. Which is to say that in the absence of any reason why one should not ask the question, or with any evidence of human decency in her, why can’t one ask if Dowd needs to get stupped? For that matter, why would it be rude to ask why it is that she seems completely unlikely to be able to maintain a friendship with anyone who isn’t a (NSFW) like-minded political ideologue?

After all Mo’s MO is to advance unidentified concepts by degrading people who for social reasons she doesn’t seem to like. At the NYT, this makes one some sort of great figure, a mainstay and anchor of the editorial paramilitaries, and somehow some sort of “rebel” all the while.

If their incongruity tells you anything, it’s that they are sick people whose time has long passed.

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Things People say that they Think make them Sound Smart

The convergance of rushed, low quality blogging and academia continues.

Informed by feminist investigations of embodiment and bodiliness, we ask: How do we understand our bodily relationship to other animals? How do we embody animals, and how do animals embody us? How are carnal modes of incorporation, intimacy, and inhabitation kinds of contacts forged between “HumAnimals”?
Given the title “Meet Animal Meat”, and otherwise being cute with a few opinionated phrases, now counts for dialectics in Graduate level Sweden.
What, or more precisely, who, we eat is determined by the patriarchal politics of our culture. Patriarchy is a gender system that is implicit in human/animal relationships… Manhood is constructed in our culture by access to meat eating and control of other bodies.
Clearly, someone needs to get stupped. The inference that cannibalism is supposed to be soundly based on the blanket acceptance of the humanity of all other animals, regardless of whether or not a dog is a dog, in this desiccated idiot’s world, the dog can also be human, whereas a human (male or female, even though she seems to be trying to stake one’s humanity on being female) , may still only be a human.

Anyone paying tuition to engage ideas that this “pedagogue” is not so much offering but promoting is a fool. It isn’t scholarship when it’s simplistic enough to be cogently summarized on a matchbook cover. I would also suspect that there isn’t much interaction in any realistic way in the study of HuManImal Studies either, at least any which would require a defense of the founding assumptions about non-maleness somehow being connected to non-humanness, except when all animals can be associated with humans.

Sure makes sense, doesn’t it? All animals are to be treated as sentient, but males are to be demoted, and there is supposed to be something ‘inherent’ enough in that to make it a subject of what remains of the dignity academic philosophical inquiry has to offer.

The cheap thing to say at this stage is that all of this “scholarship” is either out of fear or response to a mere aphorism: man meat.

Save the Trees, Save The Bees, Save the Whales, Save Those Snails

Via Andrew Thomas (thanks to Larwyn) who writes that

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

It's funny how these supposed champions of the Enlightenment can't grasp that people can disagree with them for honest reasons

To listen to the White House and its supporters in and out of the media, you would think that opposition to "ObamaCare" is the hobgoblin of a few small minds on the right
writes Jonah Goldberg, the author of Liberal Fascism.
Racists, fascists, Neanderthals, the whole "Star Wars" cantina of boogeymen and cranks stand opposed to much-needed reform.

Left out of this fairly naked effort to demonize many with the actions of a few is the simple fact that ObamaCare — however defined — has been tanking in the polls for weeks. President Obama's handling of health care is unpopular with a majority of Americans and a majority of self-proclaimed independents.

…Lashing out at the town hall protesters, playing the race card, whining about angry white men and whispering ominously about right-wing militias is almost always a sign of liberalism's weakness — a failure of the imagination.

…It's funny how these supposed champions of the Enlightenment can't grasp that people can disagree with them for honest reasons. Instead, we simply must be Limbaugh's automatons, which is to say racist, fascist thugs.

In addition to the slander, such complaints are monumentally, incandescently lame coming from a party that controls Washington. According to liberals themselves, these evil-mongers are a tiny minority, a bunch of "AstroTurf" frauds. So why not ignore them and get on with the work you were elected to do?

…Suspicion of bad motives is only reinforced by Obama's determination to steamroll to victory. Indeed, Democratic dudgeon that the town hall protesters don't want civil debate is hysterical, given that Obama wanted this over before the August recess. No wonder the president who thought the time for talk was over long ago now doesn't like the talk he's getting.


A Previous “Imminent Health Insurance Crisis”

From 1950, and 1961, and now yet again: “crisis”

Again, as then, the issue was larger than turning private charity into a government run agency (with plenty of patronage possibilities), or the incremental nationalization of social institutions, it’s a matter of liberties, and the degree and type of government that we want. In truth, the reason no-one “understand the bill” as the left accuses the obstinate right of, is because it’s an open-ended enlargement of government monopolization of another sector of society without a concept behind it. They CANNOT tell you what the goals are beyond the “policy proposals” that could fit on a bumper sticker.

The “system is broken” because government is tinkering with features, and not dealing in economic concepts, and certainly not following along with something that’s a natural fit for American society and our economic structure.

ArtHausArt: La rage du perroquet

All the elements were in place for a relaxing evening at Le Perroquet: Duvel(s), check; Salade Atlantique, check; Good company, of course.

Then the rage broke out, the Jokerised photo de la grande Obama. Claims of "blanc hottes" and rednecks ruled the conversation. Whence your humble junior contributor mentioned that l'affiche de la délinquance was actually the product of a leftish (in a good way) Palestinian-rooted college senior in the US, consternation était affiché. Needless to say, links were exchanged:






An added benefit, reading the quotes of one Shepard Fairey, artist/creator of those Hope posters, as well as the "Bush Vampire" motif. Leftist and artist, the thin-skin-o-meter is no longer is able to measure l'hypocrisie high-brow:

"I have my doubts about the person's intelligence," Fairey said on the phone from Pittsburgh. "It's not grammatically correct. It would be 'socialist' ... Obama is not Marx. He didn't create socialism." Semantics aside, "I don't agree with the political content of the poster," Fairey said. "They don't realize that Medicaid is a socialist program."

Many of us realise that Medicaid is a socialist/statist programme. Many of us also realise that others did not create "hope".

Lost in the entire discussion le Perroquet was the continued possibility of Robert Capa's famed Spanish Civil War photo, and hard left totem, being an absolute fake:

Just another night on the Bruxelles art scene. ¡No Pasarán!

"Death panel"?! Of course not! "End of life" care — BHO's choice of words — sounds so much nicer

Thomas Sowell points out.

Get out there and live by the new Golden Rule, “Do Unto Liberals as they Have Done to You”

I am above the name calling
writes Col. Allan West.
I would never say President Barack Hussein Obama is a thin skinned, inept, malignant narcissist. It is beneath me to call Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid a weak spineless wimp. It is unconscionable to refer to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi as a maniacal pathological liar.
On Pamela Geller's Atlas Shrugs (merci à Larwyn), the colonel goes on to say:
Concerned American citizens are being called Nazi’s, evilmongers, racists, tea bagging rednecks, and right wing extremists. They have been accused of organized protest and even had an email set up,, which enables their “fishy behavior” to be reported. And there have been Americans who received unsolicited emails from David Axelrod with the White House letterhead to their private email accounts. Three of my friends have received such.

We are witnessing something really disturbing in America.

At issue is not the reaction of concerned American citizens but rather the response from the Democrats, liberal media, and the DNC. It seems they are resorting to their normal Saul Alinsky “Rules for Radicals” tactics; Rule #5, Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.

…It is amazing to me that when the opposition to President Obama’s questionable policies expresses their dissent they are demeaned. When I flip over to CNN and MSNBC, not often but to understand what the opposition thinks, I find that they don’t think. They only seek to create a racial confrontation by fomenting the belief that white American’s refuse to accept a black POTUS.

What the liberal socialists had best recognize is that their venom is no longer effective, we are anesthetized to their bite. Seems we found anti-venom and we all have been injected to produce anti-bodies. We are not going to back down.

President George W Bush was constantly attacked from his inauguration in Jan 2001 to the day he departed office Jan 20, 2009. Dare you speak of the anointed one? You are a racist.

Left wing blogs attacked Governor Sarah Palin and made allegations that her young Son Trig is not hers. But when the opposition questions the birth certificate authenticity of President Obama they are referred to in derision as “birthers”.

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Heal your Inner Labor MP

J. R. Nyquist detests saps, and wishes it was in print. One can only imagine what the cover art will look like.

Guilt is the stick across your back sent to make you better. Is guilt unpleasant? It’s supposed to be, and it better be. Feel guilty often, and have plenty of regrets. People who have no regrets are dangerous. They will suck you in and suck you down.
Do not confuse this man with the sneery Lucy Kellaway. He does not even want to mock you passive-agressively in the role of cubicle-farm agony aunt. He wants to smite his enemies and pillage their fields, so to speak; but for the most part insists that we should not hear them whine and manipulate the rest of us.
Chapter 4 should be titled “You’re Not So Special.”
Emotional hostage takers: beware. There’s a new weltanschauung in town.

The Fuse is Lit! (No Pasaran)

Michael Barone to Dear Young Obama Voter

Michael Barone writes a letter to "Dear Young Obama Voter".

Monday, August 17, 2009

Is Euranet propaganda?

Hell no! It’s ignorant fluff with less entertainment value than a Community College radio station at 2 in the afternoon, when some DJ nicknamed “the Bongmeister” lets his vending machine repairman neighbor cover for him while his DTs are acting up.

Such was the case with this brilliant, penetrating exposé, where the intrepid reporter was shocked to discover that exorcisms actually exist and that even thought they weren’t an actual product of a William Peter Bladdy feature, the existence of Catholicism in Poland surely must be.

Defending the mighty feather-pillow of virtue, Euranet and Radio Netherlands stringer Richard Walker asks of those who raise the point of biases in production (which is to say, about 3 radio reports a week):


Which technically speaking, is probably right because the reports are so lacking in substantive anything that biases in reporting are hard to detect, assuming that you aren’t taking on issues local newspapers might not even bother with, and operate on the assumptions that there are no Catholics left to mock.

So where does funding you can trust come from?
By which he means ”meal ticket”, and sitting at said meal, he can present his ignorance of things not run by states having “required” opinions or otherwise having first, before HIS FIRST notion of “maximizing profits”, to cover the real “first” thing: appealing to an audience, and letting that audience’s actual appeal inform whether or not the form of presentation should stay on the air. The reason he needs EU funding is because, as he notes correctly, individuals, no matter what subsector out there, would be willing to fund that kind of reporting by lending their ears to the potential advertisers.

"Maximizing profits", are we? Gruel being served up by "the bosses" again? If he got any more facile and archaic, it would stop being funny. Rule number one of radio is to get as many listeners as you need to keep doing what you're doing. In fact, I would wonder if outside of a handful of real cultural lightening-rods, ANYONE is living lavishly off of radio work, outside of state-run media, that is.

The idea that if MUST be funded “because if people wanted it, no commercial operation would produce it” is curious, if not also mildly interesting, if I can say so in the most unbiased way possible.

Which brings me back to one of the great bugaboos of their editorial interest: like the funding they want to see grow, the appeal of the magic of free stuff falling out of the sky, but a distaste for any form of philosophy that requires one to challenge your own weaknesses and the easiness of taking the path of least resistance.

If wizardry isn’t a form of philosophically vacuous religious quackery that the Catholic Church may warn the faithful about, what is? Oh, right! The ‘unbiased view’ that the Church may be mocked since all believers should themselves accept that their beliefs are quackery, but that ‘magical stuff for free out of thin air’ isn’t.

So it goes with the trying to read out the incantations that are supposed to keep your project funded. My feeling about the logical inconstancies is that they can only cause psychic pain if you’re smart enough to notice them, which in EUvia would make you biased, but biased in a way that’s opens you up to invective, as opposed to the popular kind that makes people who agree with you nod their chins sheepishly.

Let’s leave it at this: if you’re decent enough to respect the beliefs of another human being, you are able to find the cheap kind of bias in about 10 seconds flat. If, on the other hand, you are entirely incapable of recognizing that other people can have a world view unlike your own, even if they generally look like you, then you’re too stupid to be aware of the judgment that might present a bias. So, like, hey – no brains, no problem! Right?

Therein we find the basis of government funded mass media.

Sunday, August 16, 2009

Brussels after dark, continued

Only the best, of course... Drinking straight from the decanter is frowned upon.

"A Very Corrupt System": Six Years in Jail Without a Trial

Thanks to federal matching funding for domestic violence "claims", William Christopher has not seen his son (Joshua, now 10) for nine years…

This is a way of bringing in a Nazi police state…

Up your GONGO, M8!

Or if you prefer to call them by the accurate and damning descriptor, “Government Organized Non-Governmental Organizations”. Their purpose? To make the public love policies that were not initiated by the public, among other things, and the EU is one of the biggest violators of the trust of good governance in this respect, according to the TIMBRO think tank.

Further European integration is a practical political ideal, and many powerful European leaders dream of a united and strong Europe to offset such global powers as the United States and China. Yet Europe’s citizens are conflicted when it comes to further political and economic integration, and have consistently voted down referenda that would move Europe in this direction.

To bridge this gap, the EU launched a communications effort to burnish the image of European cooperation. It includes traditional printed materials such as books, leaflets and brochures, but also encompasses television, radio, training programs for journalists and legislation designed to give the EU a facelift. More, efforts are underway to create a common European identity in the hopes of building support for closer economic and political cooperation. These activities extend beyond the normal realm of factual information, treading dangerously close to propaganda.
Which is quite true when you look at most media, where goings on in Brussels are clearly being reported from deep in the heart of a broadly emailed press release. The problem with this kind of uncritical tripe being promoted to Europeans is that a great many of them have a history of eventually accepting it at face value until they find themselves trying to find the truth in either tea leaves or rumors and conspiracy theories.

TIMBRO’s Director, Maria Rankka indicated quite plainly that there’s a dishonesty to it, if not a violation of that supposedly sacred social contract going on as well:
"The EU, at the tax-payers' expense, actively advocates more European integration and prevents free debate on the future of Europe, extending the limits of what we normally regard as communication," the study says.
Some of the stuff even looks like it’s meant to produce a conditioned response.
In one striking example, the report notes that schools keen to benefit from Brussels' €69 million a year free milk scheme must display an A3-format poster outside their canteens showing the EU flag and stating that EU money paid for the drink.

Brussels is currently rolling out a similar-scale free fruit project.
Or anything else for that matter. But what seems to be lacking here is the widespread sense that there is something wrong with selling something hard when 1) you either don’t have to, or 2) knowing that support isn’t what you want it to be; but going on to try to say that it’s also quite magically also a government by and for the people.