Wednesday, March 23, 2016

Easter: Beethoven's 6th Symphony



Beethoven had been severely hearing impaired for years when he wrote this. According to wiki

Beethoven is reported to have dated his hearing loss from a fit he suffered 1798 induced by a rage at the interruption of his work—having fallen over, he got up to find himself deaf. His hearing only ever partially recovered and, during its gradual decline, was impeded by a severe form of tinnitus.[49] As early as 1801, he wrote to friends describing his symptoms and the difficulties they caused in both professional and social settings (although it is likely some of his close friends were already aware of the problems).[50]

Saturday March 26th will be the 189th anniversary of this giant leaving us.




Character


Beethoven's walk in the nature,Julius Schmid
Beethoven's personal life was troubled by his encroaching deafness and irritability brought on by chronic abdominal pain (beginning in his twenties) which led him to contemplate suicide (documented in his Heiligenstadt Testament). Beethoven was often irascible. It has been suggested he had bipolar disorder.[96] Nevertheless, he had a close and devoted circle of friends all his life, thought to have been attracted by his strength of personality. Toward the end of his life, Beethoven's friends competed in their efforts to help him cope with his incapacities.[94]
Sources show Beethoven's disdain for authority, and for social rank. He stopped performing at the piano if the audience chatted amongst themselves, or afforded him less than their full attention. At soirées, he refused to perform if suddenly called upon to do so. Eventually, after many confrontations, the Archduke Rudolph decreed that the usual rules of court etiquette did not apply to Beethoven.[94]
Beethoven was attracted to the ideals of the Age of Enlightenment. In 1804, when Napoleon's imperial ambitions became clear, Beethoven took hold of the title page of hisThird Symphony and scratched the name Bonaparte out so violently that he made a hole in the paper. He later changed the work's title to "Sinfonia Eroica, composta per festeggiare il sovvenire d'un grand'uom" ("Heroic Symphony, composed to celebrate the memory of a great man"), and he rededicated it to his patron, Prince Joseph Franz von Lobkowitz, at whose palace it was first performed.


Would you rather have his music, or would you rather have had him slugged into a quiescent, brain damaged ward of the 'Mentally Healthy' State of today by pill pushing Quacks?

Monday, March 21, 2016

Pentagon Withheld $78 Million From Wounded Combat Vets Over 25 Years

weaselzippers.us

Again the Veterans get the short end of the stick, let the Feds withhold welfare payments and all hell breaks out.
The Pentagon has been deducting money erroneously from combat-wounded veterans’ severance pay for 25 years, an error officials knew about for years and that might have affected upwards of 13,000 troops, according to lawmakers and a veterans advocacy group.
Now lawmakers are trying to return the money — estimated to be $78 million — through a bi-partisan bill introduced Thursday.
Federal law prohibits taxation of the lump sum disability severance paid to troops who separate from service after combat-related injuries. But the pay system used by the Department of Defense has been automatically deducting taxes from those payments since 1991, according to a joint statement from the National Veterans Legal Services Program and Sens. John Boozman, R-Ark., and Mark Warner, D-VA.
The error often cost individual troops thousands of dollars.
The National Veterans Legal Services Program, a nonprofit veterans service organization, first discovered the problem and brought it to the attention of lawmakers.
“Most troubling is that we learned the government had known about this problem for decades yet continued to take this money from thousands of disabled veterans,” Tom Moore, an attorney with the National Veterans Legal Services Program, said in the joint statement.

Thank You Dapandico and Stars and Stripes. 

Snooping ER Docs Ask HALF of (Suicidal) Patients If They Have Access To A Gun

fiercehealthcare
March 21, 2016 | By 

Despite national guidelines, emergency doctors only ask about half of suicidal patients if they have access to firearms, according to a study published inDepression and Anxiety. Researchers, led by Emmy Betz, M.D., of University of Colorado School of Medicine, interviewed more than 1,350 emergency department patients who had either attempted or considered suicide. While ED doctors are urged to question suicidal patients on whether they have the means to attempt suicide, researchers found documentation indicating the patient was asked in only about half of cases. "Based on models using national suicide statistics, ED-based interventions might help decrease suicide deaths by 20 percent annually," the study states. Study abstract

Thank You Mr Budyrk and fiercehealthcare.

"whether they have the means to attempt suicide"

Do the they ask patients about their access to a car?

Deaths Due To Guns And Due To Cars Now At The Same Rate in The US

Do they ask about patients access to knives?

Do they ask about patients access to tennis shoes and railroad tracks?

But Don't Worry about it. They've got Just the cure (to line their own pockets) for patients.


US 18C95 Sec 1958: Murder For Hire

But, But, if we could just get Rid of all the guns, . . .
Heard that one. Ain't gonna happen. 
Trying to get rid of them only increases the criminal misuse of them By criminals.
But, But, we have to at least get rid of those awful Assault Weapons. 

A Thumbhole in the stock.

Up to 40% of Docs don't even know what's on the bought and paid for FDA Label.


And Yet, we continue to let them get away with this shit.

J&J/Depuy Hip Replacement Verdict: Pay $502 Million To 5 Plaintiffs (of More Than 7000 Nationwide) In Texas

lawyersandsettlements

March 18th, 2016. By 

Top Settlements

Hip-Hip-Hooray! Well, sort of–though it probably doesn’t go far enough to take away all that the victims have been through. But here’s a whopper. To the tune of $502 million. That’s the verdict awarded to five plaintiffs in a bellwether trial concerning Johnson & Johnson’s DePuy Pinnacle metal-on-metal hip replacement devices.
The math goes $142 million in compensatory and $360 million punitive damages. The verdict was reached following 37 days of testimony in the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas Dallas Division.
The trial consolidated cases involving five separate plaintiffs who are residents of Texas. The lawsuits, including those of more than 7,000 plaintiffs nationwide in the multidistrict litigation (MDL), claim that the DePuy implants were defective and caused metal debris to enter into patients’ bloodstreams, causing severe injuries and sometimes leading to revision surgery.
According to attorneys for the plaintiffs, the evidence in the testimony against J&J was ground breaking, particularly in relation to what, in effect, amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes to orthopedic surgeons to use and recommend this product.
Plaintiffs’ attorneys also discovered several instances in which physicians lied in medical clinical testing of the devices and forged consent forms for patients who were using the product to lie about the results the patients experienced with the product.
Risperdal Settlement… Ortho-McNeil-Janssen Pharmaceuticals also got hit with a large Risperdal settlement this week—$124 million to be precise, ending nine years of litigation dealing with allegations it illegally promoted the anti-psychotic prescription drug Risperdal for unapproved or “off-label” uses. Ah, that old chestnut.
The charges were brought by South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson. In February he announced that Ortho-McNeil-Janssen will pay $124,324,700 in satisfaction of the settlement to South Carolina.
According to the lawsuit, Ortho-McNeil-Janssen employed aggressive marketing techniques to persuade doctors to prescribe the drug to their patients, including children with disabilities and elderly dementia patients. The company sent more than 7,000 letters to doctors, allegedly overstating the efficacy of Risperdal without FDA approval.
Risperdal (generic name Risperidone) is an atypical antipsychotic that works by changing the activity of certain natural substances in the brain. Developed by Janssen Pharmaceuticals, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, Risperdal was approved by the FDA in 1993 for the treatment of schizophrenia in adults. Risperdal side effects include gynecomastia (male breast growth), tardive dyskinesia, high blood sugar and diabetes, stroke, heart attack and even death. As of September 2012 more than 420 Risperdal lawsuits had been filed, 130 of which are gynecomastia claims. 
Ok, that’s a wrap folks…Have a good one. See you at the Bar!

Thank You LucyC and Lawyers and Settlements

pic cred to topclassactions.com

Saturday, March 19, 2016

VA Scandal, Department May Take More Than A Year To Fire Embattled Execs

The Republicans have had 7 years to fire Obama and they haven't got that done either.

fiercehealthcare
Report: Phoenix VA let suicidal vets leave


This week, nearly two years after the discovery of falsified records that kickstarted the Veterans Affairs (VA) scandal at the Phoenix VA Healthcare System, the agency recommended the removal of three Phoenix executives--but the process of actually firing them is far from over, according toCronkite News.

The next step after the recommendations is a 30-day review period, during which all three will still draw paychecks. If, at the end, the VA decides to terminate their employment, they still have the option to appeal, extending the process even further. "There should be no appeal process, no reassignment and no pension. Federal employees should not be a protected class," Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) said, according to the article. "It shouldn't be this hard to fire someone who is bad at their job."

Appeal options vary among the three executives, according to the article. Chief of Staff Darren Deering, M.D., can file a grievance, a process that can take 75 days following the initial 30-day review. Associate Director Lance Robinson and Chief of Health Administration Services Brad Curry can both appeal twice to the Merit Systems Protection Board, a process that can take more than a year, and even after exhausting that option can take their fight to court.

Even as the review begins, there is more troubling news about the VA. A newreport finds the Phoenix facility knowingly allowed 10 suicidal vets to leave the emergency department despite the fact that seven were on a medical hold. The VA has only been able to account for the whereabouts of half of the 10. "My question, 'What happened to those five other vets?'" whistleblower Brandon Coleman toldABC-15. "They're not getting the care they need and suicidal vets continue to walk out of the VA's ER."
The probe's findings have spurred several changes at the facility, according to theABC-15 article, including timer delays on exits, only assigning staff to monitor one suicidal patient at a time and moving suicidal patients' rooms farther from exits.

 To learn more:
- read the Cronkite News article
- check out the report
- read the ABC-15 article


Thank You Mr Budryk and FH.

Friday, March 18, 2016

Eugenics: A Warning From Canada On Assisted Suicide: Lives, Physicians' Rights Of Conscience At Stake

CNSNews
By Lynn Wardle | March 18, 2016 | 3:14 PM EDT
Linda Jarrett reads through notes at Dying with Dignity offices in Toronto. Canada's highest court, unanimously struck down a ban on doctor-assisted suicide for mentally competent patients with terminal illnesses. (AP Photo/The Canadian Press/Chris Young)
Historically, assisted suicide (aiding a person to take his or her own life) was prohibited by the common law in Canada, as in all common law jurisdictions. Indeed, at common law suicide resulted in forfeiture of all goods and chattels of the suicide victim to the state.  A person who assisted a person to commit suicide also committed a felony. 
Prohibitions against attempting suicide and assisting suicide were codified in Canada in 1892.  The attempting suicide law was challenged as infringing upon the protection for individual liberty in section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but the criminal prohibition against assisted suicide was upheld by the Supreme Court of Canada in Rodriguez v. British Columbia (Attorney General) in 1993.
The statutory prohibition of attempting suicide was repealed in Canada in 1972.  However, the criminal prohibition against assisting a person to commit suicide remained in Canada.
In February 2015, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the prohibition of medical assistance in dying violates the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.Carter v. Canada (Attorney General), 2015 SCC 5.  Now Parliament is working to codify the Carter ruling.
A special parliamentary committee was appointed to consider how to reform the law.  On February 25, 2016, the Special Joint Committee on Physician-Assisted Dying delivered to the Parliament of Canada its Report on “Medical Assistance in Dying: A Patient-Centred Approach, February 2016, 42nd Parliament, 1st Session.”
The Report contains 21 recommendations.  Some of them are unobjectionable, but some are troubling to some thoughtful observers and medical ethicists, and a few are dangerously disrespectful of the rights and consciences of marginalized populations. The Report evades, brushes aside, or bulldozes over some very serious ethical issues.
One of the most disturbing recommendations in the Report proposes that all Canadian physicians have a legal duty either to provide Medical Assistance in Dying (“MAID”) or to provide an “effective referral” to someone who will provide MAID. 
Recommendation 10 in the Report pays lip service to “respect[ing] a health care practitioner’s freedom of conscience while at the same time respecting the needs of patient who seeks medical assistance in dying.” This recommendation correctly recognizes that there can be a direct conflict of rights and interests between a patient who seeks MAID and a health care provider with ethical or moral standards opposed to providing MAID. 
However, Recommendation 10 subordinates the values, rights and ethical interests of the health care provider who objects to providing MAID to the wishes of a patient who seeks MAID.  It concludes: “At a minimum, the objecting practitioner must provide an effective referral for the patient.”  
While many practitioners who object to personally providing suicide assistance might not object to referring a patient to someone else for that assistance, others may have strong moral and ethical objections to participation by referral in MAID.  Why are their rights ignored?
Additionally, the Reported proposed that all publicly-funded health care institutions should be required to provide medical assistance in dying.  That excludes a significant category of institutional health care providers (especially many religiously-affiliated institutions) from protection of their ethical standards. 
The Supreme Court of Canada stated in Carter, “[i]n our view, nothing in the declaration of invalidity which we propose to issue would compel physicians to provide assistance in dying.” Carter, at para. 132.
Of course, the issue is what physician action constitutes “assistance” in suicide or MAID. 
The first question is “who decides” what physician action constitutes giving “assistance” in suicide or MAID.  As that is a medical decision and as Recommendation 10 is intended to protect the physician’s rights of conscience and ethical integrity, one would reasonably expect that normally the physician would decide whether referring a patient to another health provider for MAID amounts to providing “assistance” in suicide or MAID.  After all, the exception is created to protect the conscience of health providers who have ethical or moral or religious objections to assisting in providing MAID. 
However, the Parliamentary committee opted (without explanation) to adopt a general governmental standard (rather than an individualized physician standard) for whether making referral for MAID constitutes giving “assistance.”   Then, it decreed that giving an “effective referral” to a MAID provider would not amount to “assisting” in suicide or in MAID.  That shows the bias of the Committee and its disrespect for the conscience rights of providers.
The Committee Report calls for national strategy for palliative and end-of-life care. Many witnesses testified about the disturbing short-comings in the provision of adequate palliative care in the Canadian healthcare system, which may be a cause of many requests for MAID. If adequate palliative care is made available, that would alleviate the type of terrible pain that drives some people to seek death as a method of “pain relief.”
The Report also calls for appropriate mental health supports and services for those seeking assisted dying.  That, also, may eliminate some requests for MAID. 
These two recommendations are laudable. The intellectual debates about assisted suicide (about “dignity” and “autonomy” and the “right to die,” etc.) often mask very tragic practical issues about resources and access to them.  It is the pain, the suffering, the untreated mental illness, the absence of affordable and available palliative care, and other alternatives that often drive persons to consider suicide and to seek assistance in dying.
Legalization of suicide and MAID has long been recognized as a “slippery slope” to the disposal of the most dependent, needy, marginalized, and unwanted in a society.  Who can forget the abuses that grew out of similar policies adopted in the 1930s in Germany?  Dr. Leo Alexander, a medical advisor to the Nuremberg prosecutions identified a direct link between Germany’s early euthanasia program (for the disabled, etc.) and the “final solution” mass murder of Jews, Poles, and other “undesirables” that resulted.
Protesters advocate for physician-assisted suicide in front of the Supreme Court. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
MAID is a slippery slope to the kind of social and medical ethics that corrupts and erodes the core virtues essential for survival of a free, liberal society.  Our nations is founded on respect for the equal worth and inalienable value of all human life.  All human lives have inherent worth.
The future of republican self-government in Canada is implicated by legalization of MAID in Canada.  Since these ideas are transportable, it would be wise to pay attention to what is happening in Canada. Already, six American states (CA, OR, WA, MT, NM and VT) have recently legalized MAID.

Thank You Mr Wardle and CNS.

"Raping Me Is His Prayer To God. It's Allowed. It's Halal."

frontpagemag

A terrifying look at the Islamic State's religious duty to rape.





“According to an obscure ruling in Islamic law, cited by the Islamic State, a man must ensure that the woman he enslaves is free of child before having intercourse with her.” — from this New York Times article, March 12, 2016.
Possibly the most horrifying of the Islamic State’s practices has been the systematic sexual enslavement of Yazidi women by and for its fighters. Since August 2014, thousands of Yazidi girls and women have been taken from their families, warehoused, and put on display in viewing rooms where they are inspected by potential buyers among the Muslims. Having examined the goods, these fighters make their choice and then sign a sales contract for these girls, who have now become their property that they are allowed to do with as they wish, including using them for sexual gratification, and then to resell them to others.
The IS fighters have been taught that because these Yazidi girls practice a religion other than Islam, and one without the minimal protections afforded to those who are fellow People of the Book (ahl al-kitab) with a written scripture, that is Christians and Jews, Muslim men have not only a right, but a positive religious duty to rape them.
From an August 2015 New York Times report:
In the moments before he raped the 12-year-old girl, the Islamic State fighter took the time to explain that what he was about to do was not a sin. Because the preteen girl practiced a religion other than Islam, the Quran not only gave him the right to rape her—it condoned and encouraged it.
He bound her hands and gagged her. Then he knelt beside the bed and prostrated himself in prayer before getting on top of her. When it was over, he knelt to pray again, bookending the rape with acts of religious devotion…. ‘ I kept telling him it hurts – please stop. Drawing closer to God.”
Other girls testified to the same treatment, mixing sex and acts of devotion: “Every time that he came to rape me, he would pray. He kept telling me this is ibadah,” a term from Islamic scripture meaning “worship.” He said that raping me is his prayer to God. It’s allowed. It’s halal.
What non-Muslims may find most disturbing is how these IS fighters, capable of the repeated rape of helpless schoolgirls, and of every other conceivable kind of cruelty toward non-Muslim men as well as women, unperturbedly violate by their behavior everything we regard as humanly decent, yet are terribly worried about only one thing: breaking even a single one of the many Islamic regulations of life, whatever its content. And when it comes to the rules regulating sexual slavery, they appear to worry most about the duty a Muslim man has to make sure that before having intercourse with one of his slave women, she not be pregnant. The origin of the rule is disputed, but most likely it once had to do with ensuring that a slave girl could both continue to work and to provide sexual gratification – hence the recommendation to her owner to practice al-azl, or coitus interruptus. But once the rule is set in stone, its origins do not matter.
IS buyers of slave girls demand assurances that the girls not be pregnant, and once they’ve bought a slave-girl, these serial rapists insist on feeding their girls contraceptives of every variety, that is, they keep them in re-sellable condition.One Yazidi girl recalled that “when prospective buyers came to inquire about her, she overheard them asking for assurances that she was not pregnant, and her owner provided a box of birth control as proof.” In other examples, would-be rapists first quizzed their victims on their last menstrual cycle, or insisted that their sex slaves take a morning-after pill, or when available, gave them a dose of an injectable contraceptive, Depo-Provera. In a particularly grim case of Mother Knows Best, one Yazidi girl, known only as J., recalled that when she was sold to a new owner, “it was the man’s mother who escorted her to the hospital. ‘She told me, ‘If you are pregnant we are going to send you back.’ About 30 or 40 minutes later they came back to say I wasn’t pregnant.” The fighter’s mother triumphantly told her son that the 18-year-old was not pregnant, validating his right to rape her, which he did repeatedly.”
What all this testing for pregnancies, these contraceptives of every variety, these worries on the part of IS rapists, offers is insight into the way Muslims enslave themselves to the complex of rules regulating every area of Muslim life, including that of sexual slavery. If the rule exists, it must unswervingly be followed. If something is prescribed as halal or proscribed as haram, there need be no further discussion. No independent judgment as to its morality enters into it.
The New York Times reporter on IS calls this rule about pregnancy and unsuitability for rape a “medieval injunction”: “[a]ccording to an obscure ruling in Islamic law cited by the Islamic State, a man must ensure that the woman he buys is free of child before having intercourse with her.” To prove she is not pregnant, the slave must complete her “waiting period” – that is, must pass one menstrual period.
But this is not a “medieval injunction.” It derives from various Hadith, including this Hadith of Abu Dawud in the 9thcentury:
Abu Said al-Khudri said:  “The apostle of Allah sent a military expedition to Awtas on the occasion of the battle of Hunain.  They met their enemy and fought with them.  They defeated them and took them captives. Some of the Companions of the apostle of Allah were reluctant to have intercourse with the female captives in the presence of their husbands who were unbelievers. So Allah, the Exalted, sent down the Quranic verse, “And all married women (are forbidden) unto you save those (captives) whom your right hands possess”.  That is to say, they are lawful for them when they complete their waiting period.”  [The Quran verse is 4:24]. (Sunan Abu Dawud vol. 2, no. 2150).
The note on this Hadith says that “After the distribution of the spoils of war a man may have intercourse with the female slave after passing one menstrual period, if she is not pregnant.  If she is pregnant one should wait till she delivers the child.”
The Times reporter could have used the subject of sexual slavery and birth control to describe and explain the varying degrees of authority in Islam, with the Qur’an coming first, the Hadith second, the Sira third, in importance. She might have discussed what Hadith scholars or muhaddithin took into account – the isnad-chain — in assigning rank of “authenticity” to individual Hadith, and might then also have explained how Believers assigned a rank of “authoritativeness” to the collections of Hadith by various muhaddithin (with Bukhari and Muslim considered to be most “authoritative”). Then she could have talked about the Hadith-derived rules for Muslim slaveowners.
But more importantly, she might have held up for closer inspection the way True Believers observe the rules that regulate every aspect of a Muslim’s life, completely without concern for their moral content. All of these rapists who insist on “doing the right thing” Islamically, which means providing contraceptives to their victims to ensure that they can’t get pregnant during the time that they are being raped, all those Muslim mothers delighted to discover that their son’s chosen sex slave is not presently pregnant, thereby “validating his right to rape her,” all those Muslim rapists declaring that they are by their actions fulfilling a duty of ibadah or worship – these are the ingredients of the moral upside-down-cake of Muslim theology, and not only when it comes to sexual slavery.
They may behead every other day a baker’s dozen of Christians, they may burn bound prisoners alive, they may bomb churches and kill Yazidis and slit the throats of Shia to their hearts’ content, but don’t accuse the IS members of breaking an Islamic rule about not raping pregnant women. They have standards. They listen to a higher authority.
 Tags: ISISIslamrape
Thank You FPM and Mr Fitzgerald.


All cultures are equal. We must be more open and tolerant of 'Diversity'.

This is what you get when humanism dominates your culture, and your Government taxes you to pay it to take over your culture.


Psychiatry and Psychology Are Humanism, not Science. Your Healthcare dollars through CMS are paying them to spread Humanism.


http://americanhumanist.org/humanism/humanist_manifesto_iii


Think long and hard on this every time someone in Government or running for Government office runs their yap about spending more money to provide mental health services.

Thursday, March 17, 2016

Another Fast And Furious Gun Used To Kill Three Mexican Police Officers,

weaselzippers


Obama/Holder disaster lingers on…
Via Hot Air:
It took a while to track this down, but the ATF’s Operation Fast and Furious program claimed three more lives last summer. USA Today reported on Tuesday evening that the Department of Justice acknowledged in a summary presented to Congress that a weapon used in a shootout that killed three Mexican police officers originally came from the ATF in its botched attempt to generate headlines about “straw man” weapons purchases and set the stage for gun-control legislation (via Gabriel Malor):
A new accounting of guns that were allowed to be trafficked to Mexico as part of a botched U.S. firearms investigation shows that one of the weapons was used last year in a deadly shootout that left three Mexican police officers dead.
A Justice Department summary provided to two Republican congressional committee chairmen Tuesday found that a WASR-10 rifle, purchased six years before in the U.S., was one of three rifles fired in the July 27 assault in the town of Valle de Zaragoza. It was not immediately known which weapon caused the officers’ fatal wounds.
Nevertheless, Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives officials traced the WASR rifle to a Nov. 12, 2009, transaction that was part of the flawed federal gun trafficking operation, known as “Operation Fast and Furious.”
 Thank You Nick and Hot Air. 


And the comment of the day goes to Hovercat.

"If we keep arming the drug dealers, MEXICO will build the wall."

Leapfrog: Hospital Infection Rates Still Too High

fiercehealthcare
Watchdog group report finds high rate of central line and catheter-related infections
March 17, 2016 | By