Friday, August 21, 2009

Not Even Good for Dehydration.

Take off the quotation marks around evidence based and you have yourself a convert for life.

Saturday, August 15, 2009

Good Work, Gents.

It's rare, but some days you just have to appreciate The Sun. Puerile in a way few would dare - a bold claim for a British newspaper.

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Duh-duh-duh-death panels.

American politics resembles British politics about as much as their take on wrestling does. In both cases, it's a case of distance from the classical Greek system, which is rather neat if you need a pithy introduction to an otherwise content-light blog post.

The current Bete noir of the howling vortex of wrongheadedness that currently constitutes the American Right is a move towards socialised healthcare. Living in Britain, as most of the people reading this most likely do, we take a system by which people are treated as best they can with a grain of salt. It's a monolithic enterprise, employing an integer percentage of the population. It's failings are many, manifest, sometimes amusing, frequently frightening. It is however, all considered, really rather good, and certainly better than many people could pay for themselves. Private healthcare can be rather nifty, but I'm sure few people who live under a socialised system would imagine medical insurance companies to be friendly, trustworthy institutions.

Which leads me to this. If you don't fancy clicking through, it's a business-orientated breakdown of how healthcare in this country works. Not too exciting, particularly as it's written in a bizarrely hostile tone from someone from a nation with lower life expectancy than ours. Still, the pertinent sentence is this:

"People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless."

FUCK.

Amazingly, these people actually stand a chance of derailing the process to set up a government alternative to private insurance. This is an example of a literate one. A slightly less literate one is described here:



Yeah. Death Panels. This is why I can't follow British politics any more. I'm gorged on the artificial flavourings over the pond.