Boinkie's Blog: 09/01/2010

Wednesday, September 29, 2010

cat item of the day

according to the BBC, the Pope blessed the cat of the Birmingham oratory.

well, what else would you expect from a man whose cat "wrote" his biography?

he also reportedly blessed their bomb detecting dogs.

after all, dogs believe in transubstantiation.

Labels: stuff

Monday, September 27, 2010

sick sick sick

a puff story that the "abortion" pill is still controversial.

Points missing from the story:

1) religion. Nope, none here.

2) why won't local docs give out the pill? Nope, no dicussion, even though the powers at the AAFP were urging docs do this.

3) five percent hemorrhage, get infected, or don't abort, needing a "surgical procedure", making one suspect the fetus died and they had an incomplete abortion, which is very very dangerous.
no discussion of what we docs know: That these women often get seen but not reported in the statistics. Indeed, I am old enough to remember the many complications we had to hospitalize when NYCity made abortion "legal", and I know an anecdotal report on a death. Yet years later, we were told there were few complications and no deaths, probably because the problems were cared for outside of NYCity.

4) were the "nurses" at these clinics fully supervised Nurse practitioners, and if so, who did they practice medicine under? An out of state doc?
Did they do Ultrasounds? Did they travel out to the clinics? Do they do an exam, or an ultrasound to check for ectopic pregnancy?

the dirty little secret is that the "window of opportunity" is small for this drug, and if you give it later, you run into problems.

5) Heh. the medicine is made in China. they even have a paragraph about "quality control" there.

6) they do note that it's impossible to find out the profit made by the "non profit" organization that makes the pill....why is this a secret?

Thursday, September 23, 2010

Pope Benedict in England

a long list of links at the Anchoress.

includes this editorial that the NYTimes allowed to be printed, that suggests the constant cry that the church needs to modernize may not be true, considering the shrinking of Protestant churches that did just that..

best comment:
agenda. David
September 21st, 2010 | 5:20 pm | #8

Well, you chaps are a little parochial in the US. There is a wider world out there.

It was extraordinary to live through this weekend. By the end of the weekend, The News of the World, the UK’s biggest and most ferocious tabloid (sorta like The New York Post on steroids) was calling B16 “The People’s Pope”.

Papa Benedict had gone from “God’s Rottweiler” to “God’s English sheep dog” (Anne Widdecombe).

And you guys missed it all. Pity.

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

stuff in the news

Not Dead yet discusses the euthanasia movement's twisted agenda, painting a man who killed his disabled daughter as a hero, not a monster.

TroubleIsEverywhere blog writes sarcastically:

OH YAY! Gentle reader, I'm here to inform you that once again Tracy Latimer's murderer is in the news, which means we can deal with another week or two or months or years of people wibbling on about how Tracy Latimer's murderer is such a sweet innocent man who only murdered his disabled daughter because Tracy wasn't really a person and deserved to be murdered, and how he's such a victim of the system, and woe is poor him, and how cripples really DO have no life and it's totally okay for people to murder disabled children...
Tracy Latimer. She laughed, she smiled, she had friends, she went to school. And he murdered her while the family was at church, in a way we've deemed is inhumane when applied to dogs. What an innocent woobie he is.

Yes, all that nonsense about "assisted suicide" is a front for the agenda.

Years ago, a Michigan "ethicist" (who was partly responsible for the local medical society not condemning Kavorkian) had an article supporting assisted suicide in the AAFP journal.

He started it with an anecdote about a worn out caretaker, who when his doc commented that it would be good if the patient died, agreed.

I pointed out in a letter that was actually published that no one seemed to notice the irony of a propaganda piece in favor of "assisted suicide" started with an anecdote suggesting killing a mentally disabled (Alzheimer's patient) lady who was neither dying nor had asked to die.

Saturday, September 11, 2010

The killing of the unwanted

there is a dirty little secret that some docs at one hospital murdered patients, even though they had enough morphine etc. to keep them comfortable. the reason: The doctor involved was exhausted.

Most were probably terminal, but NotDeadYet, the disability group, points out that one young man was merely paraplegic (paralyzed from the waist down), obese, and an immigrant...and was found dead after the female doctor death visited his room:

Mahaney says he based his essay on the content in the 2009 NY Times article "The Deadly Choices at Memorial" by Sheri Fink.

How, then, did he forget about Emmet Everett? From the NY Times story:

Robichaux remembered Pou saying that the LifeCare patients were “not aware or not alert or something along those lines.” Robichaux recounted to investigators that she told Pou that that wasn’t true and said that one of LifeCare’s patients — Emmett Everett, a 380-pound man — was “very aware” of his surroundings. He had fed himself breakfast that morning and asked Robichaux, “So are we ready to rock and roll?”

The 61-year-old Honduran-born manual laborer was at LifeCare awaiting colostomy surgery to ease chronic bowel obstruction, according to his medical records. Despite a freakish spinal-cord stroke that left him a paraplegic at age 50, his wife and nurses who worked with him say he maintained a good sense of humor and a rich family life, and he rarely complained. He, along with three of the other LifeCare patients on the floor, had no D.N.R. order.

Everett’s roommates had already been taken downstairs on their way to the helicopters, whose loud propellers sent a breeze through the windows on his side of the LifeCare floor. Several times he appealed to his nurse, “Don’t let them leave me behind.” His only complaint that morning was dizziness, a LifeCare worker told Pou.

And this...

Several medical staff members who helped lead boat and helicopter transport that day say they would certainly have found a way to evacuate Everett. They say they were never made aware of his presence.

Dr. Anna Pou was the last person to see Everett. He never left the room and he was reported dead. It's reasonable to conclude that Pou killed him.

So if a cop in Arizona stopped him for speeding or a broken tail light, the liberals would be up in arms for a human rights violation.

But if a sociopathic female doc killed him because he was inconvenient, no problem.

Saturday, September 04, 2010

Patron of accountants

Most of the sermons in my daily prayer book go over my head (there is a daily bible reading and reading from one of the saints). But one guy whose writings are easy to understand is today's saint, Gregory the Great.

Forget the Catholic encyclopedia: This was a Roman Praefect , which may be why he is down to earth.
Wikipedia relates how he organized relief for the poor at a time when famine and barbarians left many destitute:

The church already had a system for circulating the consumables to the poor: associated with each parish was a diaconium or office of the deacon. He was given a building from which the poor could at any time apply for assistance.^[55]^[56] The state in which Gregory became pope in 590 was a ruined one. The Lombards held the better part of Italy. Their predations had brought the economy to a standstill. They camped nearly at the gates of Rome. The city was packed with refugees from all walks of life, who lived in the streets and had few of the necessities of life...

In 590, Gregory could wait for Constantinople no longer. He organized the resources of the church into an administration for general relief. In doing so he evidenced a talent for and intuitive understanding of the principles of accounting, which was not to be invented for centuries...

A central papal administration, the notarii, under a chief, the primicerius notariorum, kept the ledgers and issued brevia patrimonii, or lists of property for which each rector was responsible.^[57] Gregory began by aggressively requiring his churchmen to seek out and relieve needy persons and reprimanded them if they did not.

For those of us whose hands did the much needed work, his words about prayer ring true:

Since taking on my shoulders the burden of pastoral care, I have been unable to keep steadily recollected because my mind is distracted by many responsibilities.

I am forced to consider questions affecting churches and monasteries and often 1 must judge the lives and actions of individuals; at one moment I am forced to take part in certain civil affairs, next I must worry over the incursions of barbarians and fear the wolves who menace the flock entrusted to my care; now I must accept political responsibility in order to give support to those who preserve the rule of law; now I must bear patiently the villainies of brigands, and then I must confront them, yet in all charity.

If I preserved the rigorously inflexible mode of utterance that my conscience dictates, I know that the weaker sort of men would recoil from me and that I could never attract them to the goal I desire for them. So I must frequently listen patiently to their aimless chatter. Because I am weak myself I am drawn gradually into idle talk and I find myself saying the kind of thing that I didn’t even care to listen to before. I enjoy lying back where I once was loath to stumble.

Who am I — what kind of watchman am I? I do not stand on the pinnacle of achievement, I languish rather in the depths of my weakness. And yet the creator and redeemer of mankind can give me, unworthy though I be, the grace to see life whole and power to speak effectively of it. It is for love of him that I do not spare myself in preaching him.