Free Republic

In Charles Krauthammer's May 30 must-read column, "Carbon Chastity," he rightly lambastes environmentalists as resurrected communists/socialists who have latched on to the environment and climate change as a means to advance their anti-people social agenda. The specific occasion for his justifiable outrage is a recent proposal by a British parliamentary committee to institute a personal carbon ration card for every citizen. The plan would place limits on food and energy consumption in the form of credits not to be exceeded — except through the potential for heavy-carbon users, often the wealthy, to purchase credits from lower-carbon users, often the less...

Many parts of America, long considered the breadbasket of the world, are now confronting a once unthinkable phenomenon: food rationing.

Anti-life "HillaryCare" Socialized Med Scheme Back as House Passes CHAMP Bill; Senate Follows Suit Today Cuts funding for abstinence, covers abortifacient drugs, leaves Seniors with less options By Peter J. Smith WASHINGTON, D.C., August 2, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The advent of socialized health care and massive taxpayer abortion subsidies may take the United States by stealth, unless the new health care bill proposed by Democrats Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and Rep. John Dingle (D-MI) is vetoed by President Bush. Today the US House of Representatives voted 225-204 for a massive expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), a...

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- A top pro-life organization is asking members of the House to vote against a bill concerning Medicare over concerns that it could lead to euthanasia. National Right to Life wants lawmakers to oppose the Children's Health and Medicare Protection Act (CHAMP Act) because it could ration lifesaving medical treatment. NRLC says the bill, in its current form, would "prevent older Americans from protecting themselves from rationing."Under the legislation, seniors would be prevented from adding their own money on top of what the government will pay in order to get Medicare health insurance less likely to ration...

Iran curses Ahmadinejad over petrol rationing By Colin Freeman in Teheran, Sunday Telegraph Last Updated: 12:15am BST 01/07/2007 The petitions kiosk outside President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's home in Teheran, set up as a hotline to Iran's self-described "humblest servant", receives all kinds of requests. Petrol stations were torched by youths Yet amid the pleas for help with debts and joblessness, and tussles with Iran's byzantine bureaucracy, there is one letter that the men at the counter particularly remember. "A woman asked if Mr Ahmadinejad could find her a good husband," said one proudly. "It shows how popular he is - you...

Iran is battling widespread violent unrest in wake of a decision to launch fuel rationing. Riots erupted in major Iranian cities after the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad introduced gasoline rationing. In many cases, rioters torched gasoline stations and state-owned banks in response to the huge lines. The riots, regarded as the worst since student protests in 1999, have spread to Ilam, Shiraz and Teheran. On Thursday, rioters, accusing the government of corruption, attacked banks and business centers as police acknowledged that they had not been prepared for the wave of unrest. [In Washington, Congress introduced a bill that would...

TEHRAN, June 28 — Unrest spread in Tehran on Thursday, the second day of gasoline rationing in oil-rich Iran, with drivers lining up for miles, gas stations being set on fire and state-run banks and business centers coming under attack. Dozens were arrested, and the Tehran police chief, Ismail Ahmadi Moghaddam, complained to reporters that the police had been caught unaware by the decision to ration fuel. The anger posed a keen threat to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was elected two years ago on a platform of bringing income from oil to the nation’s households. Instead, even though Iran is...

'Too Fat' Patients Denied NHS Operations By Thomas Moore Health correspondent Updated: 23:27, Saturday April 28, 2007   Patients are being denied operations on the NHS simply because they are overweight or smoke, a survey by Sky News has found.   Six million people affected Nine primary care trusts have a specific policy to refuse joint replacements to obese patients. And four will not consider orthopaedic surgery if patients smoke.In all, six million patients live in areas affected by so-called lifestyle rationing.Jean Ryan has been told she cannot have her hip replaced until she loses weight. But she says that...

Iran votes to impose petrol rationing By Gethin Chamberlain and Kay Biouki in Teheran, Sunday Telegraph Last Updated: 12:24am GMT 11/03/2007 Iranians are bracing themselves for a fresh round of belt tightening after their government voted to impose petrol rationing coupled with sharp rises in the price of fuel. The rationing system will limit Iranians to 22 gallons (100 litres) of petrol a month, two full tanks for a typical family car. It is a direct result of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's adherence to an economic model, based on Iranian self-sufficiency, that has caused housing and other living costs to soar....

Petrol will be rationed in Iran from March January 11, 2007 LONDON, January 11 (IranMania) - Under Fuel Management Bill ratified last week as well as the results of a study on budget bill for the Iranian year beginning March 21, the government has decided to ration petrol, develop public transportation and encourage people to use cars to run on gasoline and gas as of next spring, reported the Persian daily Iran. The government’s plan is aimed at optimizing fuel consumption and preventing wastage and excessive use of the vital fuel. The government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had a similar...

Market forces can be very powerful indeed. ... When the Government created its supermarket network Mercal, it was supposed to be a way of delivering cheaper goods to the poor. Mercal ... paid no custom duty, received all the currency it wanted at the official rate of exchange, was handled by military at all levels so it only had to pay labor for a reduced non-military workforce. Finally, it ... would pay no taxes. ... The Government established price controls for certain foodstuffs and they applied to ... products sold by Mercal. As inflation drove prices up, the Government allowed...

by Mark Finkelstein September 25, 2006 - 13:34 A liberal is someone who will always be able to find the dark lining, so long as it's a Republican sun that's shining. And so here's the latest dispatch from the No-Good-Deed-Goes Unpunished Directorate of the Department of Dark Linings: Energy prices are down, maybe heading even lower . . . and that's bad. So writes HuffPoster Raymond Learsy today. He begins by citing that irrefutable authority, Al Gore, for the proposition that "we are near the tipping point of climatic catastrophe." He next bemoans that "never or at least rarely ever,...

A national healthcare system may be the Holy Grail of American liberalism. If only the government managed medicine, the argument goes, costs could be restrained, quality assured, and access extended from the poshest beach house to the humblest shotgun shack. On NBC’s “Meet the Press” last fall, Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D.–Ill.) advocated a “universal health-care system over the next 10 years.” If Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (D.–N. Y.) reaches the Oval Office, she likely would take another crack at socialized medicine, as she did so disastrously in 1994. Amy Ridenour of the National Center for Public Policy Research sees this...

The Assembly narrowly approved a bill Monday that would provide health insurance to all residents, a move that would make California the only state to offer government-operated universal health care. The bill, which passed the 80-member house on a largely party-line vote of 43-30, received strong Democratic backing. But supporters say pressure from the insurance industry and Republican lawmakers is likely to doom the measure when it reaches Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. The governor's office has declined to take a position on the bill, but Schwarzenegger in the past has voiced his opposition to single-payer systems. The bill by Sen. Sheila...

Fat is not a feminist issue, as Susie Orbach once claimed. Fat is a class issue. Rich, educated people are not fat; you see almost no children in private schools who are overweight. Fatness and obesity are directly related to lower education and lower incomes. What is sad is that at a time when this country is richer than ever and ought to have better schools than ever, we have far more fat people than ever — a dangerous explosion of flab. Last week the Department of Health issued a report grimly called Forecasting Obesity to 2010 and its findings...

BOSTON (Reuters) - About two-thirds of cardiac arrest patients taken to hospitals by emergency medical technicians die anyway, and probably most could be declared dead at the scene, according to research published on Wednesday. The report in the New England Journal of Medicine suggests that certain emergency medical services -- not those staffed by paramedics -- could ease the distress of loved ones and dramatically reduce the number of hopeless but expensive hospital trips. The assessment of 1,240 cardiac arrest rescue runs over two years in Ontario, Canada, found that only 1 in 500 people survived to be discharged from...

Harm DoneCodifying the decline of the medical profession. In 2000, The New England Journal of Medicine reported that patients being euthanized in the Netherlands sometimes experienced significant side effects (apart from death, that is), such as nausea, convulsions, or coma. This belied the assertion oft made by euthanasia proponents that being killed by a doctor necessarily provides the euphemistic “gentle landing” of euthanasia lore.  Responding to the Netherlands report, the NEJM published an editorial authored by Dr. Sherwin Nuland, author of the bestselling book How We Die and an internationally prominent physician and bioethicist from Yale University. Nuland, a...

Truck stops ration fuel Driver: 'For the next month it's going to be rough out here' © 2005 WorldNetDaily.com Two days after Hurricane Katrina struck the oil-laden Gulf Coast, many of the nation's truck drivers are encountering unprecedented fuel rationing as they brace for a spike in prices. Wayne Kitchen, a Greer, S.C.-based driver for Bavarian Motor Transport, told WorldNetDaily he hasn't seen a shortage of this kind in his 30 years in the industry. "It's scary," he said, noting many independent truckers already are on the brink of financial ruin due in large part to record fuel prices. "This...

Every individual in Britain could be issued with a "personal carbon allowance" - a form of energy rationing - within a decade, under proposals being considered seriously by the Government. Ministers say that increasingly clear evidence that climate change is happening more quickly than expected has made it necessary to "think the unthinkable". They believe they need to start a public debate on energy rationing now if Tony Blair's aspiration of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by two thirds by 2050 is to be achieved. Under the scheme for "domestic tradeable quotas" (DTQs), or personal carbon allowances, presented to the Treasury...

A HOSPITAL told a road accident victim that she would have to wait a year and a half for an NHS brain scan, but could have the procedure done privately at the same unit in two weeks, The Times has learnt. In a case that highlights the crisis in diagnostic tests, King’s College Hospital, London, warned Rachel King that, because of “heavy demand”, the MRI scan that her consultant had sought could be delayed for 80 weeks. But a handwritten note at the end of the letter gave a telephone number for the hospital’s “self-pay” private clinic, where she could...

Following is the full text of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's essay ``Live Not By Lies.'' It is perhaps the last thing he wrote on his native soil [before the collapse of the Soviet Union] and circulated among Moscow's intellectuals [at that time]. The essay is dated Feb. 12, the day that secret police broke into his apartment and arrested him. The next day he was exiled to West Germany. At one time we dared not even to whisper. Now we write and read samizdat, and sometimes when we gather in the smoking room at the Science Institute we complain frankly to one...

A momentous article, "Medical Science Under Dictatorship," by Dr. Leo Alexander, the Chief U.S. Medical Consultant at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, first printed in the July 14, 1949 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine, has been reprinted as a monograph, and it could not have been reprinted at a more opportune moment. Today, the concept of managed care, cost containment, and rationing threatens to eradicate the ethics of Hippocrates in medical practice, with the physician less beholden to his individual patient than to the managed care entity which employs him or pays his salary. In fact, many...

The way to arrest spiraling costs is to admit that we already do what we say we never will—ration health care—and then figure out how to do that better.For all its flaws, medical care in the United States has improved enormously over the past several decades. Deaths from heart disease have fallen by 40 percent since 1970. In the mid-1980s HIV was an automatic death sentence; it's not anymore. Since 1990, thanks to better detection and treatment, cancer mortality rates have been falling. (Breast-cancer mortality is down by 20 percent since 1990.) Altogether, medical advances have helped to raise U.S....

It's been almost two years since my mother woke up one autumn morning in the apartment we shared and said she didn't have the strength to move. It was a couple of months before her 96th birthday and her dementia and frailty had been getting worse. I took her to a downtown hospital and, after a night on a stretcher in the emergency room, she was transferred to a room on the geriatric floor. I knew, of course, that she might never come home again. But I also knew that she would choose not to go gently into the night,...

<p>A group of doctors and medical ethicists, including physicians from Brown and Harvard universities, is working to develop national guidelines for the rationing of expensive intensive-care unit treatment -- and to get doctors to openly admit they withhold care from patients who would benefit the least. Physicians and nurses too often make rationing decisions based on their own biases or their hospital's financial condition, members of the task force say. This happens most often with ICU care, which accounts for 20 percent of all hospital costs, or $142 billion in 2001.</p>

German patients over 85 years old should not receive new hips or dentures, says the head of the youth organization of Germany's opposition Christian Democratic party. In doing so, 23-year-old Philip Missfelder has reopened a public debate on the rationing of health care in Germany. o Earlier this summer a television report quoted two experts, professor Wiemeyer (Bochum University) and professor Breyer (Konstanz University), who asked the government to abstain from operations for patients older than 75. o Professor Breyer later suggested his real goal was a policy debate that would lead to clear rationing rules decided by politicians, rather...

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use. Denver Water officials decided today to allow customers to water their lawns twice a week but not to allow any new lawns - at least until mid-May, when they will revisit that issue. Denver Water also decided to limit the numbers of zones that can be watered each day to 8, rather than the 10 that had been discussed as a possibility after the March blizzard. Each zone can be watered for 15 minutes. The decision, which had been expected, fits into the two-days-a-week pattern that has been emerging in other...

City water supply might go dry The City of Frederick faces the possibility of exhausting its water supply — including its reservoirs — before summer's end, according to data presented by city water chief Marc Stachowski on Thursday. In order to deal with the most severe, waterless future, the city might implement planned water outages, similar to power "brownouts," said Fred L. Eisenhart Jr., director of the city's public works department. The potential problem lies in the city's reliance on the Monocacy River, and the "trigger point" that will take the river's 3 million gallons of water out of...