Me? I'd like to kick the bucket at my own place of residence, thanks...

The National Audit Office (NAO) and the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence advise that all patients should have access to 24-hour nursing services. But a report by the NAO in 2008 found that only just over half (53.2 per cent) of local health authorities provided such a service to all patients seven days a week.

The variation has created a postcode lottery in areas such as Dorset, where round-the-clock nursing care is funded in the east of the county but not in the west. Charles Campion-Smith, a GP in Dorchester and Macmillan adviser, said that there was no cover in his area from 10pm to 6am the next morning.

Oooooo...can we have half-assed nationalized healthcare here, too?

Read the article. The main issue is the fact that nearly 70% of all terminally ill folks in the UK wish to die at home. However, only 20% are given that comfort. The reason they tout suggests that the Physicians just don't address the issue. I would bet it has more to do with having the time to address the issue, and whether the hospital loses funds by not having a captive patient.

Only one in five deaths occurs in a person’s home, despite two thirds of people saying that that is where they would prefer to die. By contrast, about 60 per cent of people die in hospital.

Giving the people what they want is so yesterday.

More than a third of family doctors are not reviewing the needs and wishes of dying patients, while round-the-clock nursing care is not available to give patients support and pain relief at weekends and at night in many areas.

This is what Obamacare would reap...

And the 2016 Summer Olympics go to....Rio de Janeiro

That's right, folks. Chicago con Obama lost out to scoped automatic weapons on the back of motorcycles in downtown N. Rio ( Dom Helder Câmara and dos Democráticos to be precise).

To be fair...downtown Chicago is a cesspool of juvie violence as well. Perhaps not quite as brazen, however.

Taken in context...there is a reason for the inquiries...

VICE PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN complains that he is being driven crazy because so many people are betting on America’s demise. Reports of it are not just exaggerated; they are, he insists, ridiculous. Like President Obama, he will not accept “second place” for the United States. Despite the present crippling budget deficit and the crushing burden of projected debt, he denies that the country is destined to fulfill a “prophecy that we are going to be a great nation that has failed because we lost control of our economy and overextended.”

Gosh...Joe...name the last Vice President or President of the United States that had so many inquiries from everyday citizens on this issue.

Guess what, pal. You're the first...

That means something...

Congrats...Canadian Olympic Women's Hockey team...(and don't listen to the IOC)

Players came back onto the ice more than half an hour after the 2-0 victory over the United States. Still in their uniforms and with gold medals draped around their necks, they swigged from bottles of champagne and cans of beer and smoked cigars.

Excellent! You won...enjoy it. You set your lives on hold for years and worked your butts off to win the Olympic gold medal. You had a delicious rivalry with the US Olympic Women's team (even to the point of blows in the lead up to the the big dance)...and you perservered.

Then there is the droning idiocy coming out of the International Olympic Committee suggesting we all be "eunuchs" without cause:

Gilbert Felli, the IOC's executive director of the Olympic Games, said he was unaware of the incidents until informed by an Associated Press reporter.

"If that's the case, that is not good," Felli said. "It is not what we want to see. I don't think it's a good promotion of sport values. If they celebrate in the changing room, that's one thing, but not in public. We will investigate what happened."

Blow it out your politically correct nostrils, you jackass. These ladies weren't competing for certificates of participation. They played to win...and pulled it off on their home turf in front of their screaming fans. I back it...and I'd like to see the US flaunt a bit more in their victories as well.

"The members of Team Canada apologize if their on-ice celebrations, after fans had left the building, have offended anyone," the statement said. "In the excitement of the moment, the celebration left the confines of our dressing room and shouldn't have. The team regrets that its gold medal celebration may have caused the IOC or COC any embarrassment.

I hate the patronizing apology approach. What they should have released was this:

"We're sorry that the IOC is a bunch of whiny, politically correct morons who think that celebration of a monumental goal is offensive to anyone. In the real world, we toast achievements with suds, bubbles and stogies. And, we plan on doing so continuously for the next few days...at least."

PS: I was rooting for the US team...and I appreciate the Canadian's actions full throttle.

Sticks and Stones may break my bones, and names will get you three years at Saint Marguerite Prison

PARIS — France’s National Assembly approved Thursday night a proposal to add “psychological violence” to a law intended to help victims of physical violence and abuse, despite doubts that the law is specific enough to have much impact.

Carefully covering both genders, the proposed law stipulates that letting a wife, husband, partner or concubine “act or repeatedly say things that could damage the victim’s life conditions, affect his/her rights and his/her dignity or damage his/her physical or mental health is subject to a three-year jail term and a 75,000 euro fine,” about $102,750.

Danielle Bousquet, a Socialist, and Guy Geoffroy, a member of the ruling center-right Union for a Popular Movement, wrote the draft law, supported by 30 other legislators. It received backing last November from the government and Prime Minister François Fillon, who called it “very significant progress.”

Ms. Bousquet...you are old. Your face is shaped like a horse, and those glasses make you look like a poor child's homemade version of Mr. Potato Head. Notice...I said "Mr." On top of that, Ms. Bousquet, your thighs cause so much friction when you walk, that people cringe everytime you stop at the petrol station. Oh...and you are a classic idiot.

Come and get me facists. I just broke your precious little "sticks and stones" law. Gosh, the French are filled with such pseudo-eruditical nonsense that is self-proclaimed as civility. It makes my teeth hurt.

Global Warming brigade really grasping now...

Although global warming could cause the number of tropical cyclones to decrease around the world by the end of the century, the storms that do form probably will be more intense, a study in the journal Nature Geoscience finds.

Just like all the other snake oil out there, I don't buy this study in the first place...but suppose it's true. How much more fierce are those lesser number tropical cyclones going to be?

Landsea says the potential increase in strong hurricanes is "pretty tiny. We're not looking at any drastic increase by 2100." For example, he says, a 150-mph hurricane might increase only to a 157-mph hurricane. "In my perspective, that's a little change, a long ways in the future."

That's hilarious. We have this big threatening article in USA Today entitled:

"Fewer, fiercer tropical cyclones are in our future, study finds"

...and we are talking about a Hurricane packing a 157 MPH punch as opposed to a 150 MPH punch...(Laughing)

Nostalgic Nastiness...

(Oh ho...I just found something I wrote on a previous blog back in 2001. I'm going to repost it, because it's nasty and fun. Plus, it is my eulogical send off for Susan Sontag):

I’m With ‘Crash’ Davis, Ms. Sontag

November 13, 2001

One often wonders who is there to assist Susan Sontag in the event of a thunderstorm. There is always that risk in the undertaking of self-righteous nose raising that she may drown in the downpour. Be comforted in the realization that drowning requires the depletion of oxygen on the intake. Sontag has long been accustomed to existing without adequate oxygen reaching the brain.

Thomas Wolfe has her pegged as “just another scribbler who spent her life signing up for protest meetings and lumbering to the podium encumbered by her prose style, which had a handicapped parking sticker valid at Partisan Review.” That’s why Wolfe makes the big bucks.

At the risk of portraying a valid point wrapped up in the fictitious Durham Bull soliloquy of “Crash” Davis, “I believe…in the soul ... the small of a woman's back, the hangin' curveball, high fiber, good Scotch, that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap...” So, in the interest of comparison, what is it, exactly, that Sontag believes? She believes in herself. That is a meritorious endeavor. However, despite that very act being the goal of any caring parent to instill upon their child, there are serious repercussions to placing one’s confidence in an irrelevant claptrap.

Face it, she is amusing. No matter the issue. No matter the importance. Sontag is the moral equivalent of Benny Hill in a nunnery. She ensconces her percipience, and in the fashion of a drunk baker twists, kneads, and manipulates her message into a preexisting expectation of where her lapdog gnomes of the cultural garden expect her to be. That is all well and good except for the fact that the very foundation of her pedestal is a bunch of hooey. The Sisters of St. Augustine would, certainly, experience trepidation in the acts of Benny Hill. A thinking populace is no more swayed by Sontag.

In fact, I invite Sontag to speak at length, on any topic and at every occasion. It’s not because she says things I want to hear, or encourages a healthy discourse. I don’t and she doesn’t. However, the very nature of her ludicrous points of view is damaging to the credibility of anyone who, somehow, mirrors that high school lesson of “guilt by association.”

When she was interviewed by the New Yorker in the days after the September 11th terrorist attack she did not disappoint. The piece’s title “Observations by Susan Sontag” would have been enough. Where most would use that encumbrance as the header in their personal diary entry. Sontag, somehow, perceives her view as something to be showered upon the great unwashed. I always wondered what entitled her to that luxury. Surely, it wasn’t something that she regurgitated in the past. I have read a number of her “works.” The most impressionable on me was not her intended message I fear.

Early in her career she wrote a number of essays dealing with art. She expounded on Antonin Artaud, proclaiming him a failure. Sontag deduced that Artaud was unable to complete a thought and that his numerous varied works “amount to a broken, self-mutilated corpus, a vast collection of fragments.“ It never occurred to Sontag to look at Artaud’s endeavors as a means to a goal. Despite his own admission of his difficulties in grasp and concentration, perhaps he enjoyed what he did. Perhaps he enjoyed the challenge that accompanied the profession. Perhaps it was the striving for improvement that drove Artaud to cover the gambit of art, cinema, poems, prose, painting, music et al. Instead, Sontag could only see her picture of another artist’s work. There lies the cornerstone of her failings. And there lies the basis of her warped assessment of the events of September 11th. Her audacity to categorize Artaud as a failure in her definition of the word shows the epitome of hypocrisy when you digest, quite forcefully, one of her most well known pieces.

In Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966) the intuitive response, as she would call it, was the concept of avoiding the intellectual and analytical evaluation of a piece. “The 'meaning' of art lies in the experiencing both style and content together without analysis. “ That’s an interesting revelation coming from someone who, quite solidly, categorized Artaud as a failure based on the inability to stay focussed on a specific idea. I suppose, sometimes one has to twist, knead, and manipulate until the soft pretzel resembles what the public would recognize and consume.

Regardless, in the New Yorker Sontag queried, “Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a "cowardly" attack on "civilization" or "liberty" or "humanity" or "the free world" but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?”

In her “intuitive response” Sontag failed to acknowledge the minor analytical detail that she is an American Citizen, and that the acts of the terrorists were defined by the actors to be murderous, callous acts in cold blood against all American citizens. No. Instead, we ‘intellectuals’ should ponder the all encompassing innate observations and deliberate the feelings of the rat bastards who butchered 4,537 human beings in the name of their “God.” To Sontag, that would be the reasonable response.

Sontag doesn’t think America plays fairly. “How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq? And if the word "cowardly" is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others.

What a wonderful argument for the necessity to initiate an immediate program to provide “certificates of participation” to all parties of conflict (no matter the purpose) so as not to have to go through the uncomfortable foible of having to declare a winner or recognize right from wrong, sane from insane, smart from dumb. I am reminded of the profound words of chronic law abuser Rodney King and my heart just runs with endearing warmth. “Can’t we all just get along?” The answer is “no,” and there are very valid analytical (sometimes intellectual) reasons for that disclosure. Life is not an exercise in participation. Life is not something to be pondered. It is more than that I hope. Maybe it is an ongoing mission in personal accomplishment and achievement. Life could be an effort to better yourself in all capacities. It is not an application in holding back your own potential so as to allow others achievement at your expense. The whole concept of freedom affords the opportunity to accomplish goals as an individual and as a nation. Making the battlefield one of equality is the “intuitive response” of inept logic. Show me a boxer with short arms, and I’ll show you a throw rug.

“Let's by all means grieve together. But let's not be stupid together. A few shreds of historical awareness might help us understand what has just happened, and what may continue to happen. "Our country is strong," we are told again and again. I for one don't find this entirely consoling. Who doubts that America is strong? But that's not all America has to be.”

By all means we grieve together. And, by all means, we shall not be stupid together. Instead, I leave that to Susan Sontag alone. Historical awareness is a conscious motivation to act in a capacity that would guarantee a desired outcome and future deterrent. History holds the souls of Beirut in 1983, Kenya in 1998, Tanzania in 1998, Somalia in 1993, Yemen in 2000, Saudi Arabia in 1996, New York in 1993, and New York, again, in 2001. We are finished with the history lesson Ms. Sontag. The class is entirely too loud. Our country is strong. We are strong in character and pride. I find that extremely consoling, because I realize that character and pride are not given, but earned. They are earned, sometimes, at the expense of those who would try to tarnish those innate qualities within us. A strength-of-purpose lives within the knowledge that our Republic has the ability to control our own destiny so that those cherished freedoms are not on loan from others.

Susan Sontag would say I didn’t understand her point. But, in the very color of her position I understood the whole encompassing view of her work. It initiated an intuitive response. I didn’t take away a single, one-sided, analytical perception as to what she was trying to express in each sentence or phrase. It was pure, unadulterated discord; all of it.

A lesson in reverse to Susan Sontag, never teach the unwashed how to juggle knives, lest they learn to throw them.

I'm hoping for half a grave twist on that...

Over six years ago this made a dent in my noggin...

I thought I would dust off one of my favorite Mark Steyn quotes that seems rather relevant today. He first leveled it in a National Post piece back in November of 2002. For some reason, the National Post didn't hold onto it for posterity and you'll stumble on their "Sorry, this article is no longer available" page. However, here's the quote. It made an impression such that I remember it to this day:

"Democrats have perfected the art of being simultaneously maudlin and vicious, and above all else ruthlessly partisan in their pious denunciations of partisanship."
--- MARK STEYN November 3, 2002

The reference was commentary by rather partisan politicians at Paul Wellstone's memorial service. You can absorb the whole thing, these days, in the Freerepublic archives. But, that quote is the one that left a mark...and applies in full to the Democrats of today.

Plea deal? The milk already expired!!!

Najibullah Zazi, the Colorado airport shuttle driver accused in an alleged plot to attack New York City with homemade bombs, is cooperating with authorities in preparation for an apparently plea deal, the Associated Press reports.

Plea Deal!!!!????

Just to make sure I have this straight. This clown is in the process of making bombs in Colorado with the specific intention of driving to New York and blowing something up. He has explosives training courtesy of an al-Qaeda terror camp in Pakistan. Hence, he is a freakin' terrorist. He is an enemy to this country...and he is human excrement.

Zazi's apparent cooperation suggests that prosecutors hope to expand the case and bring charges against other suspects in his case and possibly other terror probes, the AP says.

This dirtbag, mouthbreathing troglodyte was arrested in September 2009. What possible unpersishible information could he provide that would be of any use to anyone five months after being picked up? The Department of Justice dog and pony show is absolute fatalism and prescribed suicide. The pissant terrorist should have been bled of his possible information five months ago while the "milk" was still fresh.

Watching Liberals kick themselves in the teeth is more fun than watching curling...

Last month, Brooklyn federal Judge Nicholas Garaufis ruled that the city had purposely discriminated against hiring blacks when it continued to use a test that was deemed biased against minorities.

Again, I invoke the "we just want to be treated like everyone else" mantra.

So...pass the damn test. I can only imagine the idiocy applied to indicate that the written firefighter test was...ahem...bias. It's a common victim mentality that always finds the excuse explaining failure.

A group of women sued the department in 1979 after failing the physical, claiming it was discriminatory.

You know...because...they unfairly made the women lift heavy stuff...which...you know...never happens at a fire, car accident or inner city mishap.

The women who sued were allowed to take a different test. As a result, 41 females entered the department in 1982.

Okayyyyyy...instead of lifting the long hose...lift that smaller one. We only need the long hose sporadically. What's a couple lives here and there...no biggie.

In 1983, the city devised still another test for women testing speed instead of strength.

Short hose too heavy? Okayyyyyy...see how fast you can sprint down the street to that Duane Reed and get us some bandages and sauve...we're going to need them.

The next year, the judge ordered the test changed again to be less physical and increased the weight of the written exam.

What? You might get winded running down the street? Jeez...Okayyyy...ummm...well, just stand over there and try not to get in the way.

"It's a physical job. It requires physical strength," said Deputy Chief Paul Mannix, who said he wasn't speaking for the department. "People ask why there aren't more women in the Fire Department. Why aren't there more women in the NFL or Major League Baseball?"

Egggggg...zactly!!!

But, I do enjoy how the Liberal inner city enclaves keep kicking themselves in the teeth while feeling really special about their diversity. So a couple buildings burn, people die...no big deal. Liberals FEEL better about themselves...until they have a fire, of course.