‘Fat Gene’ No Excuse

Once again it is proven there are very few things in which we humans, as independent moral agents, do not have a choice.

It was not good to criticize an obese person because they may have been a carrier of the ‘obese gene’ and therefore had no choice whether they were chunky not trim, but studies out recently point to the fact that exercise counteracts the effects of that gene.

WebMD: Exercise Can Overcome Obesity Gene

The study showed, as past research has, that people with certain variations of the FTO gene were more likely to be overweight. However, the researchers found that being genetically predisposed to obesity “had no effect on those with above average physical activity scores.”

LATimes Blog: Lessons From The Amish: We’re Not Doomed To Obesity

OK, folks, it’s time for another round of Health Lessons We Can Learn From the Amish. Four years ago we discovered that the Amish maintained super-low obesity levels despite eating a diet high in fat, calories and refined sugar. They key was their level of physical activity — men averaged 18,000 steps a day, women 14,000. That’s monumental compared to the paltry couple of thousand or so most of us eke out in a day.

A recent study revealed even more about the Old Order Amish: They maintain low obesity levels despite having a gene variation that makes them susceptible to obesity. The secret here? You guessed it — lots of physical activity.

The important thing to remember is that we have choices, and our response to those choices affect out lives. If we are slothful and do not maintain our bodies by diet and exercise, we have none but ourselves and the choices we are responsible for to blame for the fat adorning us.

Why Hurry?

Words to truly live by: “Hakuna Matata”

Yes, I’m really off my rocker this time: words to live by courtesy of a Disney movie? Of course!

I’ll take my wisdom where I can find it.

In the news today there is a mea culpa without the “mea culpa” bit.

The media can make or break a story: report a sensational bit of blood however far-fetched it is and the Evening Alphabet Soup can lend credence to the slimest of fabrications.

Take HPV and the vaccines released recently: overnight there was a frenzy about how every young girl needs to get these vaccines. Especially the part about government knowing best: parents who did not want to have their little girls inoculated against sexually transmitted diseases (because every father who loves his daughter is a pervert) were considered worse than priests in the ‘dark ages’.

I don’t have daughters (yet) and I would be against inoculating for any sexually transmitted disease. It’s not that I want them to contract them, it’s that odds are heavily against their needing such a vaccine. Your children may be animals without self-control, but that’s no reason mine should be too.

Well, the media loudly proclaimed that every little girl needs a lollipop and Gardasil, and now they can eat it: the efficacy of the drugs are being questioned, seriously.

I’m not too concerned about one little dust up over some popular (and cash-cow if it were mandated) drug. I’m concerned about the idea that anything good must be rushed.

From the innocuous: Anybody watch “The New World” and like it? (raises hand) I loved the fact that this movie takes it’s time to tell a rich and moving story. Sit down and watch it. Turn off your clock and turn the DVD player around so you can’t see the time. Forget your appointments. You’ll have to. And you’ll find yourself enjoying it almost like you’d enjoy a good book. No instant gratification here.

To the important: The environment. Important? Yes! Jump to seeding the entire sky with silver oxide to force moisture accumulation to jump-start carbon dioxide processing? Not on your life. It will not be over today or tomorrow (despite what the Evening Alphabet Soup’s favorite movie says. We have time to work together to increase our energy efficiency and continue our amazing work managing this amazing planets incredible resources better than we have. That is one thing this nation has done better than anyone else.

To the political: Change for change’s sake. Heh. Have I got some excellent ocean-front property in Kansas to sell you.

So, while all y’all are running about like chickens with your heads cut off screaming about how the sky is falling while rubbing the lump the tennis ball left you. I’ll be over here getting things accomplished.

Quiet please! I’m enjoying this thunderstorm.

Also on StopTheACLU.

Duh!?! And Other Interesting Stuff

First, the Duh!

Gay men get HIV, and they’re getting it faster. 12% faster, says a new CDC report.

And of course, to remind those hotheads whose brains have boiled out: HIV is the disease the US Government released in Africa to desimate the black population.

The rest of us know it’s transmitted by homosexual relations between men. And that it’s not bias or bigotry that caused it, but pride, willful ignorance, and the natural result of an unnatural act.

Now the Interesting Stuff

Investor’s Business Daily reports that an architect the the Canadian socialized health-care system, that one we hear is so incredible and worthy of emulation from the leftist socialist running for POTUS, has had a change of heart:

“We thought we could resolve the system’s problems by rationing services or injecting massive amounts of new money into it,” says (Claude) Castonguay. But now he prescribes a radical overhaul: “We are proposing to give a greater role to the private sector so that people can exercise freedom of choice.”

Counteracting the tales of woe and terror which are peppering the debate south of our northern border, the IBD tells a tale of truth which ought to give those considering the proposed socialized utopia pause:

Sick with ovarian cancer, Sylvia de Vires, an Ontario woman afflicted with a 13-inch, fluid-filled tumor weighing 40 pounds, was unable to get timely care in Canada. She crossed the American border to Pontiac, Mich., where a surgeon removed the tumor, estimating she could not have lived longer than a few weeks more.

Because she’s a woman, and it’s her ovaries, it’s a real tear-jerker.

No, the point is that the capitalistic, profit-based system provides better care to a greater number of people with two primary reasons:

1. The costs cause people to evaluate themselves whether they really need that procedure, freeing the system from a glut of unnecessary and frivolous procedures.
2. Those same costs entice more skilled labor and research and development into medical/technological advances, enhancing quality and quantity of available care.

Read more at IBD.

Republican ‘”Obama”, Only With History And Substance’ Jindal takes the hard line

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, who has actually accomplished things in his life, was outraged over the Supreme Court’s liberal judges finding the death penalty is not applicable or valid for use in extreme cases of child rape, so he signed a bill allowing chemical castration in certain specific cases of rape and sexual abuse.

Sponsored by Democrat Senator Nick Gautreaux of Meaux, LA, arguments surrounding the bill were mostly on scope and effect, rather than validity and right.

It sounds like, unlike the members state houses in many of the states, the members of the Louisiana State House are a group who actually have backbones connected to their brains.

Unfairness

“He will get the best care possible.” - Katie Couric about Kennedy’s cancer

I’m not saying Kennedy doesn’t deserve the best care possible; but here’s a question, why does he, more than anyone else, deserve the best care possible? Because he is a well-known senator?

I have a friend who is undergoing tests soon to see if she has a fast-moving terminal form of cancer. This friend is kind, caring, loyal, and very deserving of quality care.

Kennedy will get the best possible care because he will pay for it. Either with the superb insurance plans covering members of government which they vote for themselves, or because of the relatively limitless extent of his financial ability or those who will donate to his medical bills.

Katie Couric uses her “Notebook” session to point out that Kennedy has fought hard for making the same care that is available to him available to every American (legal or not). The problem with this is one perhaps best summed up by Thomas Sowell in his recent series of articles titled “Too “Complex”?” (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3): It’s economics that provide the true and lasting solutions, but economics doesn’t bleed, and politics follows blood.

This friend of mine is bright and sweet, she’s young and incredibly skilled. If anyone deserves a future, she does. She’s articulate and thoughtful, her life is well examined. She’s tenacious and self-reliant, taking high loads of classes at a tough school while working to pay the bills.

She’d be an preeminent poster child for any socialized medicine program.

With the socialized medicine Senator Kennedy has fought for being such a good thing, why have we not gone for it already? After all, it’s been tried elsewhere, it must have been successful, right?

Well, most readers know how successful it has been. Failure.

If socialized medicine, such as that promoted by Senators Kennedy and Clinton, were the reality in America, it would be hell.

As it is, my friend is able to fly to across the country on a few days notice, receive a biopsy, get the results back within a matter of hours, and have a reliable diagnosis presented to her.

It costs money, but with friends paying for her airline ticket, and her doctor asking a colleague for a favor, she can get her procedure done in time to participate in an international internship if the prognosis is good.

If there were socialized medicine here in the US, she would be shunted into a line, put on a waiting list, told to wait her turn.

In a system with little or no incentive either to self-regulate our medical needs or limit considered options to necessary procedures, there would be bloated numbers of people seeking medical help for slight and psychosomatic symptoms.

With the fast-moving nature of the cancer my friend may be suffering from, there is little chance she’d even make it in for an exam, let alone a biopsy, before she died.

May Senator Kennedy enjoy the benefits of a capitalistic medical system, and may his efforts to deny that benefit to the rest of us perish.

**Written by both American Texan and Matthew**

Kennedy Cancer

I do not believe God can generally be termed retributive to those of us He allows to continue on this earth. Instead, Grace and Mercy are His hallmarks as He seeks to draw us to Himself, giving us ample and sufficient evidence for His existence, glory, and purpose.

God in His sovereignty allowing Senator Kennedy is not an act of justice or punishment. It is another likely completely misunderstood example of God’s sovereignty working in our world to cause us either to draw near to Him or to condemn ourselves with the hardening of our own hearts.

I do not believe Senator Kennedy is a man of honor. I do not believe he is a man of courage. Nor of conviction, nor of morals.

But he is a man.

And in his humanity, I grieve for him, for his family, and for others who are hurt by this new struggle he is facing.

Now, if only Katie Couric were able to stop herself from being quite so thrilled at this opportunity for political grandstanding on behalf of this fixture of the Senate.

Predicted: Spectacular Failure

In the Cleveland Plain Dealer Blog, V. David Sartin lays out differences in the two Democrat candidates health-care plans.

Can two practical failures, moral evils, and spectacularly bad ideas be compared?

Hillary Clinton and Barak Hussein Obama can claim as many times as she pleases that their plan will only cost X, but when the plan is applied, there is no telling how high the actual cost will go.

A key fact of every other socialized health-care plan across the globe is that the actual costs far exceed the proposed cost.

And is it really going to be cheaper? In my current insurance setup I (a single, healthy person) am paying about $40 from each paycheck of $1200 (or 3.5%) every two weeks. Meanwhile I am paying about 15-20% in taxes from that same paycheck.

The most conservative estimates of the increase in fees due completely to taxes will be about double, with an expected load of 30-40% in taxes alone, most of this going to pay for the increased costs involved in Government shouldering the burden for health insurance.

Government is not efficient, it is really the antithesis of efficiency. If you were to give the government and a private company each a dollar, the private company will accomplish more with their dollar than the government. Much more, even with the corporate salaries and such. A business which does not use it’s dollars well fails.

Government has no such check. It can use it’s dollars as wastefully as it pleases and there is nothing to stop it besides oversight by you and I. And government does not like us watching it, despite it’s own desire to watch us and our business more and more closely.

Even beyond the obvious efficiency issues though, is a constitutional and moral issue: Is it the governments responsibility to provide health-care to each and every one of it’s citizens.

Individually we are each very much for personal freedom: allow us to do as we please, please.

If we surrender control of our health choices to the government, are we not giving an extremely powerful entity control over our lives to an unprecedented extent?

A private health insurance company can ask us to live more healthily, can raise our rates based on our risk factors and history. But it cannot compel us with force of law and punishment besides increased costs and denied service.

The government can.

And as the government seeks always to expand it’s grasp in every way: say as much as you like that it will not abuse it’s power. Government will compel us, with force of law and real punishment, to live according to it’s ideal of health.

Now is that freedom?

Or is having universal, expensive health-care really worth that cost?

It Aint’ No Gay Disease

Update: Bumped, Will and I have been going at it for a few days. Read the comments…

The Study:

In the UCSF study, researchers found that men in a clinic for HIV-positive patients who had a history of having sex with men were 13 times more likely than other HIV-positive patients to get a particular form of community-associated staph infection called MRSA USA300. But this does not mean that there is a new “gay” form of MRSA, the study’s authors say. USA300 has been around since 2002 and has appeared in at least 38 American states among heterosexual and homosexual patients. What is new is the rapid rate the bacteria spread among this particular population of gay men, studied between 2004-2006. Why these men are more vulnerable than the heterosexuals studied is still a question. Researchers stopped short of labeling USA300 a sexually transmitted disease, but they did note that the infections in the men they studied were commonly found on parts of the body where skin-to-skin contact occurs during sexual activity.

The Rebuttal:

Gay men’s health advocates point out that MRSA can be spread through any kind of skin-to-skin contact, either sexual or nonsexual, without regard for sexual orientation. And they have been very critical of the media for its focus on the sexual aspects of the story. “It’s very unfortunate,” says GMHC’s Stackhouse. “It’s very stigmatizing, it’s alarmist, it’s homophobic and it’s just unnecessary.”

There you have it. Just because the disease can be transmitted by other forms of skin-to-skin contact, the fact that it is 13 times more likely to occur in those who engaged in homosexual relations than in those who didn’t means it’s homophobic to consider homosexual behaviour an increased risk for MRSA.

Read it all on Newsweek.

Healthcare, California Style

Either it pays for itself or it’s 4 billion of your dollars down the hole in 5 years.

The State of California (sometimes it’s more a state of mind than anything substantive) is facing a 14.5 billion dollar shortfall, and yet, in their reckless pursuit of assuaging all societal inequities, the majority of the Democrat Legislators and the Republican Governator are seeking to enact socialized medicine in California.

Using additional fees on each and every employer, worker, and hospital, plus a $1.75 tax hike on each pack of cigarettes, the system seeks to ensure universal coverage in the Golden State.

California’s big problem right now is that it’s legal climate has driven all meaningful business out of the state. It is getting more and more uneconomical to maintain a business in the state as stifling and confiscatory taxes, fees, and regulations increase alarmingly.

As businesses flee the state and close down, revenues will continue to decrease in an increasing trend.

California is a good example of liberal policy carried to it’s logical conclusion.

Soon, my parents and siblings and relatives will be waiting in line at the clinics to received government-mandated testing and/or procedures.

Think I’m getting a bit apocalyptic? What about the push to require the HPV vaccination of all girls? Somebody somewhere will have some golden idea that sounds great and looks like the “greater good” and someone else will believe them. That’s all it takes where there is no accountability and more stultifying bureaucracy.

The health care plan aims to extend insurance to roughly 70 percent of the state’s uninsured population by expanding government health programs, forcing businesses to provide coverage to workers or pay a fee to the state, and imposing new taxes on hospitals and tobacco. If the proposal wins the support of the Legislature, voters would have to approve a ballot initiative in November in order for it to become law.

In a best-case scenario, the plan’s revenues would cover its costs in the first year, Legislative Analyst Elizabeth Hill wrote in her review released Tuesday evening. However, by the fifth year, she estimates the program’s annual costs would exceed revenues by $300 million.

From the San Jose Mercury News.

Read more articles on this, from Google.

And what about the plans being touted by each and every Democrat running for president? If the State of California will suffer this badly, let us just tank the entire US economy while we’re at it.

Remember, reform is not worthwhile if it makes the problem worse.