Hundreds Die Needlessly in British Healthcare

Waiting lists in Britian created by their bureaucratic, monopolistic healthcare system, causes hundreds to die each year. Hillary, Obama, Edwards, and all the other Democrats want to lead us down the same route.

BBC - Up to 500 heart patients die each year while they wait for potentially life-saving surgery, a report has said.

An editorial in the British Medical Association journal Heart said that the only way to prevent these deaths would be to perform the operations as soon as the heart condition was diagnosed.

This is what happens in the private sector, it said, but NHS patients are often put on a waiting list because of other pressures to health service resources.

Only an "enormous injection" of cash could change the situation.

However, the British Heart Foundation (BHF) said it was inevitable that hospitals would have to prioritise treatments and prevention was just as important as surgery.

'Inevitable deaths'

Ben Bridgewater, a heart consultant at Wythenshawe Hospital in Manchester, wrote the article.

He was reviewing the findings of two studies - one from New Zealand and one from Holland - both of which indicated that it was inevitable that some patients would die while waiting for surgery.

This was even true in New Zealand, where a thorough system of clinical assessment is supposed to ensure the patients who need treatment most get it first.

Doctors in the UK have long called for such a system to be introduced in the NHS.

But, because any waiting at all seemed to result in some additional deaths, immediate surgery was the only way to cut mortality.

He said: "This currently happens in the UK in the private sector but will not happen in the NHS without an enormous injection of resources."

Guns Defend Elderly (and Women)

The old man would have been dead if not for the gun. He would be dead if he was British. Of course, it'll never get a lot of press, so the average Joe never hears about when guns are used to defend people. Guns protect the weakest in society. A 93 year old can't use kung fu.


Cops: Man, 93, Shoots Violent Robber
Associated Press ^ | July 27,2007

EL DORADO, Ark. (AP) - An elderly man beaten unconscious by an assailant wielding a soda can awoke and shot the man during an attempted robbery, police said.

Willie Lee Hill, 93, told police he saw the robber while in his bedroom Wednesday night. Hill confronted the man and was struck at least 50 times, police said. He was knocked unconscious.

Covered in blood, Hill regained consciousness a short time later and pulled a .38-caliber handgun on his attacker. The suspect, Douglas B. Williams Jr., saw the gun and charged the man, who fired a bullet that struck Williams in the throat, police said.

"I got what I deserved," Williams, 24, told police when they arrived, officers said. Investigators reported finding, among other items, a Craftsman drill bit set, three pocket knives and two hearing aids inside his pockets.

Paramedics took Hill and Williams to the Medical Center of South Arkansas for treatment. Doctors sent Williams to the Louisiana State University Medical Center at Shreveport, where he was listed in critical condition Friday.

Employees at the Medical Center of South Arkansas refused to give Hill's condition or say if he'd been discharged from the hospital Friday, citing medical privacy laws.

Police plan to charge Williams with residential burglary, second- degree battery, theft of property and theft by receiving.

Borders' Opinion on Obama Book

Borders' thinks Obama 's book is fiction. Who are we do disagree

R.I.P. Doug Marlette

One of the few cartoonists, whose name I knew because of the above cartoon, to which he received a lot of death threats from the practitioners of the religion of peace.

RALEIGH, N.C. - Doug Marlette, the North Carolina-born cartoonist who won a Pulitzer Prize and created the popular strip "Kudzu," was killed in a car accident Tuesday morning in Mississippi, authorities said. He was 57.

Marlette, who joined the Tulsa (Okla.) World last year, was the passenger in the car, which struck a tree after skidding on a rain-slicked road, said John Garrison, the coroner in Mississippi's Marshall County.

Sicko and Britian's NHS

Michael Moore's Sicko portrays Britian's government run healthcare to be fabulous. However, he conviently leaves out all of Britian's healthcare problems. We've discussed the long lines and the rationing of care. In addition, there is also a decline in the quality of care itself. That means obsolete equipment and a decline in cleanliness. This decline has led to a radical rate of staph infections. Now, one in 10 patients get infected.

NY Times - When James Wollacott badly wrenched his knee while jumping on a trampoline in the back garden of his house, the healthy, athletic 20-year-old imagined a quick operation and a swift recuperation.

Instead, he spent three months in the hospital last year, bedridden and gravely ill, battling high fevers and a merciless staph infection. The infection was M.R.S.A., short for methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, known as the ''superbug,'' and Mr. Wollacott picked it up when doctors inserted in his kneecap four titanium pins. ...


One in 10 patients contracts a staph infection while staying in England's hospitals, which rank among the oldest and most crowded in Western Europe. Because superbugs multiply easily in unhygienic surroundings, dirty hospital wards and unclean hands contribute to their spread from patient to patient....

In Britain, staph infections have taken root for several reasons. A number of hospitals were built decades ago and are not designed to isolate infected patients; few have single and double rooms. Instead, wards of six or eight people are common, and there are frequently not enough wash basins. The government is also under pressure to prune long waiting lists for elective procedures, a factor that has aggravated crowding and increased workloads.

''The average wait can be up to six or seven hours,'' Mrs. Rayner said. ''I'm not letting a man with an open wound sit in a ward with a room full of people, full of I-don't-know-what bugs.''

Mrs. Rayner caught a minor case of M.R.S.A. three years ago, when she was in the hospital for an operation on her knee. She has been in several hospitals for a variety of reasons since then, and says she is appalled by the filth and the hygiene practices. In one case, she watched dirt and dust pile up in the corner of a ward. Nurses and assistants did not always wash their hands. She had to call for a basin when she needed to vomit, and then the nurse ran off and left her alone.

Some hospitals do a better job than others. The problem is rare among England's handful of private hospitals, although those facilities seldom see the most vulnerable patients..."

I was a fanatic says former radical Islamist

Interesting confession from a former jihadi. I think politicians and actors should read and reread the statement where he says the people that blame British government for terrorist were doing their propaganda.


Daily Mail - When I was still a member of what is probably best termed the British Jihadi Network - a series of British Muslim terrorist groups linked by a single ideology - I remember how we used to laugh in celebration whenever people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for Islamic acts of terror like 9/11, the Madrid bombings and 7/7 was Western foreign policy.


By blaming the Government for our actions, those who pushed this "Blair's bombs" line did our propaganda work for us.

More important, they also helped to draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology.

The attempts to cause mass destruction in London and Glasgow are so reminiscent of other recent British Islamic extremist plots that they are likely to have been carried out by my former peers.

And as with previous terror attacks, people are again saying that violence carried out by Muslims is all to do with foreign policy.

For example, on Saturday on Radio 4's Today programme, the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, said: "What all our intelligence shows about the opinions of disaffected young Muslims is the main driving force is not Afghanistan, it is mainly Iraq."

I left the British Jihadi Network in February 2006 because I realised that its members had simply become mindless killers. But if I were still fighting for their cause, I'd be laughing once again.



Mohammed Sidique Khan met with the author on two separate occasions

Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the July 7 bombings, and I were both part of the network - I met him on two occasions.

And though many British extremists are angered by the deaths of fellow Muslim across the world, what drove me and many others to plot acts of extreme terror within Britain and abroad was a sense that we were fighting for the creation of a revolutionary worldwide Islamic state that would dispense Islamic justice.

If we were interested in justice, you may ask, how did this continuing violence come to be the means of promoting such a (flawed) Utopian goal?

How do Islamic radicals justify such terror in the name of their religion?

There isn't enough room to outline everything here, but the foundation of extremist reasoning rests upon a model of the world in which you are either a believer or an infidel.

Formal Islamic theology, unlike Christian theology, does not allow for the separation of state and religion: they are considered to be one and the same.

For centuries, the reasoning of Islamic jurists has set down rules of interaction between Dar ul-Islam (the Land of Islam) and Dar ul-Kufr (the Land of Unbelief) to cover almost every matter of trade, peace and war.

But what radicals and extremists do is to take this two steps further. Their first step has been to argue that, since there is no pure Islamic state, the whole world must be Dar ul-Kufr (The Land of Unbelief).

Step two: since Islam must declare war on unbelief, they have declared war upon the whole world.

Along with many of my former peers, I was taught by Pakistani and British radical preachers that this reclassification of the globe as a Land of War (Dar ul-Harb) allows any Muslim to destroy the sanctity of the five rights that every human is granted under Islam: life, wealth, land, mind and belief.

In Dar ul-Harb, anything goes, including the treachery and cowardice of attacking civilians.

The notion of a global battlefield has been a source of friction for Muslims living in Britain.

For decades, radicals have been exploiting the tensions between Islamic theology and the modern secular state - typically by starting debate with the question: "Are you British or Muslim?"

But the main reason why radicals have managed to increase their following is because most Muslim institutions in Britain just don't want to talk about theology.

They refuse to broach the difficult and often complex truth that Islam can be interpreted as condoning violence against the unbeliever - and instead repeat the mantra that Islam is peace and hope that all of this debate will go away.

This has left the territory open for radicals to claim as their own. I should know because, as a former extremist recruiter, I repeatedly came across those who had tried to raise these issues with mosque authorities only to be banned from their grounds.

Every time this happened it felt like a moral and religious victory for us because it served as a recruiting sergeant for extremism.

Outside Britain, there are those who try to reverse this two-step revisionism.

A handful of scholars from the Middle East have tried to put radicalism back in the box by saying that the rules of war devised so long ago by Islamic jurists were always conceived with the existence of an Islamic state in mind, a state which would supposedly regulate jihad in a responsible Islamic fashion.

In other words, individual Muslims don't have the authority to go around declaring global war in the name of Islam.

But there is a more fundamental reasoning that has struck me as a far more potent argument because it involves recognising the reality of the world: Muslims don't actually live in the bipolar world of the Middle Ages any more.

The fact is that Muslims in Britain are citizens of this country. We are no longer migrants in a Land of Unbelief.

For my generation, we were born here, raised here, schooled here, we work here and we'll stay here.

But more than that, on a historically unprecedented scale, Muslims in Britain have been allowed to assert their religious identity through clothing, the construction of mosques, the building of cemeteries and equal rights in law.

However, it isn't enough for responsible Muslims to say that, because they feel at home in Britain, they can simply ignore those passages of the Koran which instruct on killing unbelievers.

Because so many in the Muslim community refuse to challenge centuries-old theological arguments, the tensions between Islamic theology and the modern world grow larger every day.

I believe that the issue of terrorism can be easily demystified if Muslims and non-Muslims start openly to discuss the ideas that fuel terrorism.

Crucially, the Muslim community in Britain must slap itself awake from its state of denial and realise there is no shame in admitting the extremism within our families, communities and worldwide co-religionists.

If our country is going to take on radicals and violent extremists, Muslim scholars must go back to the books and come forward with a refashioned set of rules and a revised understanding of the rights and responsibilities of Muslims whose homes and souls are firmly planted in what I'd like to term the Land of Co-existence.

And when this new theological territory is opened up, Western Muslims will be able to liberate themselves from defunct models of the world, rewrite the rules of interaction and perhaps we will discover that the concept of killing in the name of Islam is no more than an anachronism.