Guest Post

Hey, Slagle.

I saw your web page, and enjoyed the article on Europe. I have been living in Europe for a few months, and will be here for the next several years.

Please don't quote me by name, but I feel compelled to confide in you a secret about the national health care in much of Europe.

The truth is, in Denmark, Finland, and probably much of the rest of Europe, everyone pays for health care out of pocket at a private doctor's office. I swear I'm not making this up. There is the official national health care system,which people go to if they don't have any sort of urgent need and don't care too much about whom they see, and then there is the private system, whichis unmolested and functions well.

During a vacation in Denmark a few years ago, my wife needed to see a doctor. Our hotel immediately called a private doctor -- they could hardly contain themselves when we asked about the public ones -- and arranged a house call to our hotel room. The doctor showed up, met her for maybe an hour, and charged on the order of $50. We met him again a couple days later for a follow-up visit in his office, seeing only him -- no army of LPNs, nurse practitioners, and medical assistants-- and spent maybe another hour with him, at a cost of around $40. In nearby Finland, the private doctors operate 24/7, at least in Helsinki, and are within pretty much everyone's budget.

The great socialized medicine experiment in Europe is completely different from the single-payer system touted in the US, or the ban on private medicine in Canada. It is, at least in Denmark and Finland, the old US system: some free public clinics, and otherwise an unfettered capitalistic private system. And it seems to function well, except for the free public clinics. The contrast with the United States is not that the system is more socialistic, but that it is less so. They can treat you for something even if they can't decide on what the proper diagnostic code is, and they can tell you how much it will cost to see the doctor before you have actually seen the doctor, without giving you a stack of forms to fill out first. There are no obscure regulatory requirements to make sure that they aren't scamming Medicare.

The next time you hear someone talk about the free health care in Europe, you might suggest a first-hand look. Americans can get to Denmark and Finland fairly cheaply, too, especially if they fly Iceland Air, which incidentally is privately held and relatively unmolested, and one of the few commercially successful airlines, no doubt thanks to the pro-market government that has ruled in Iceland for the past 16 years.

2005: A Space Bureaucracy

In the aftermath, of Katrina, there is a rainbow. When the sky cleared, NASA found a wonderful new excuse. According to USA Today, "The space shuttle may not fly until late 2006 at the earliest because of technical problems and the devastation of key shuttle facilities by Hurricane Katrina,"
In reality though, according to shuttle program manager Wayne Hale, there probably wasn't going to be a flight before March of 2006 because of problems on the recent Discovery flight; and the target date was probably closer to May anyway.
Once the pride of a great nation, the space program has descended into tragic comedy, and NASA is a shadow of its former glory. This past July, the Shuttle flew for the first time since 2003, when the Columbia exploded on re-entry. The program had been grounded for two and a half years, trying to correct the problem of a new environmentally-friendly insulation foam, that tends to come loose on liftoff.
For the life of me, I cannot figure out this most recent mission of the Discovery. There seemed to be no purpose, other than seeing if they could launch it without losing any foam or tiles (they didn't). Most of the mission was spent searching the body of the spacecraft, looking for damage. If they're going to have to do this every time they launch, there's not going to be a lot of time left for any real space work. It's almost as if you had taken your car to the mechanic, and said, "I have a problem with the wheels loosening at expressway speeds," and rather than tighten them, the mechanic installs four video cameras so you can see if they start falling off while your driving.
The shuttle design is now thirty years old, and its safety record makes a Ford Pinto look like an armored car. One third of all Shuttles built have ultimately failed to bring all the passengers home. While only 1.75% of all shuttle flights ended disastrously, If the domestic airline industry had a similar safety record, there would be roughly 20 plane crashes an hour in this country.
I think that sometimes it's better just to scrap a vehicle, than to keep trying to fix it. This is a voice of experience, from someone who has spent a lot of time cursing underneath a rustbucket. While I hold no degree in astrophysics, I have left knuckle skin on many hopeless vehicles, and have drank more repair shop coffee, than most auto service managers. My advice is this: when a car gets old enough to legally drive itself, it's not worth spending money on anything more than gas and wiper fluid.
Just put the age of the Shuttle into perspective: when the first shuttle, the Enterprise, rolled out onto the tarmac, Star Trek heart-throb William Shatner was only 45 years old, and had most recently appeared in a Columbo episode. The first actual shuttle flight was Columbia in April of 1981, while TJ Hooker was in pre-production, which makes it roughly as old as the Chrysler K-Car. Could you ever imagine anybody putting a dime into fixing a K-car today? Only in a overgrown bureaucracy like NASA, would such an expenditure seem logical and reasonable. It's time to call the wrecker, and make a trip to the dealership.

Wrath of Katrina

And God looked down on the wicked people of New Orleans, and it displeased him greatly. This once devout city, had become a portal to perdition. Where there was once churches teeming with the faithful, there was now drinking and debauchery, Voodoo and Girls Gone Wild. He sent a Hurricane to open the levees, and a deluge enveloped the streets, so that the sinful could walk them no more. Just like Babylon, Sodom, and Gomorra, the wrath of God destroyed an entire city for the sins of her people.
I know this sounds silly, and outside of a handful of religious zealots, this kind of talk is considered hateful and ignorant. But there is a group of people who are saying the same thing: that Katrina was the result of men turning their back from God, and engaging in excess.
The clouds had barely parted before Leftists rushed to blame human activity for Katrina. On August 30, while the flood waters were just beginning to rise, Ross Gelbspan of the Boston Globe said, "The hurricane that struck Louisiana and Mississippi on Monday was nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service. Its real name is global warming."
Many environmentalists blame the United States refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol, for the global warming that supposedly led to this storm. The Kyoto Accord was short sighted, and would have been ineffective even if the United States had signed it. Ten years later it makes about as much sense to sign on to Kyoto as it would to write a cough syrup prescription for Nicole Brown Simpson.
When the Kyoto Accord was drafted, China was considered a developing nation, and exempted from the treaty. Today, China is the world's second largest consumer of fossil fuel, and they release trainloads of CO2 daily. If Kyoto were signed, most American manufacturing would have eventually moved there, in search of cheaper energy, so that net CO2 emissions would be unchanged from where they are today. Meanwhile, the American economy would have been devastated. Since the treaty would have done little or nothing to lower the CO2 levels in the atmosphere, but great damage to the American economy, then certainly Kyoto supporters must think the American economy is solely to blame for Global Warming.Such is the conclusion you must come to, If you listen to the rants of the Left.
On August 29, Twitching heroin addict Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a blog post: "As Hurricane Katrina dismantles Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, it’s worth recalling the central role that Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour played in derailing the Kyoto Protocol and kiboshing President Bush’s iron-clad campaign promise to regulate CO2."
He also thinks that his knowledge is based on science, rather than nervous paranoid delusions. He said , "Well, the science is clear. This month, a study published in the journal Nature by a renowned MIT climatologist linked the increasing prevalence of destructive hurricanes to human-induced global warming."
But the science is not clear. I wonder if he even read the article he cites. A quick perusal of that Nature article in ques tion, written by Kerry Emanuel, a professor of atmospheric science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, indicates that Bobby Junior, is as adverse to intellectual curiosity, as his uncle Teddy was to swimming underwater. It turns out that Kerry Emanu el believes that there has been no increase in the "prevalence of hurricanes." From the article:
"Global climate model predictions of the influence of global warming on storm frequency are highly inconsistent, and there is no detectable trend in the global annual frequency of tropical cyclones in historical tropical cyclone data."
In fact, Kerry Emanuel seems a little uncomfortable being cited as proof linking Katrina to global warming. In a recent Salon article he said:
"Not that many hurricanes get that powerful, but we've had hurricanes like Katrina before," he said. "Camille was about the same strength. Andrew was about the same strength. Katrina was just unfortunate, because it happened to hit a very densely populated area."
Other hurricane experts concur; Dr. Chris Landsea, of NOAA; the nations foremost expert on Hurricanes said in his resignation letter to the IPCC: : "All previous and current research in the area of hurricane variability has shown no reliable, long-term trend up in the frequency or intensity of tropical cyclones, either in the Atlantic or any other basin."
In the August 30 New York Times, Dr. William M. Gray, a professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University said recent hurricane activity, "is very much natural"
Apparently, the belief that hurricanes are the result of global warming is based on nothing more than faith, or in other words, "religion." Most of the Left believes that nature is avenging man's habit of indiscriminate pollution. It's a story as old a religion itself: Zeus gets angry for Prometheus stealing fire, Yahweh is mad that Eve bit the apple, and RFK Jr. is mad that commoners are riding around in limousines nowadays.
It is not your standard biblical sins that caused this cataclysm, but the sin of consumption. It wasn't fornication and bacchanalia that brought the wr ath of the goddess, but the modern sins of SUVs and air-conditioning, eating at Mc Donalds and shopping at Wal Mart. Yes, the All American lifestyle created this storm.
It's time to place the Environmental Apocalysts, into category of disdain , with bible salesmen, snake oil merchants, and charlatans.