Archive for Triumph of the Human Spirit
The Panels That Dare Not Say Their Name: Death Edition
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Since the US senate is getting close to voting on some version or other of a national health system, Keyser thought it funny that he came across this item from a place that already has the sort of monopolistic government-run health care system that US leftists hanker after:
AN 80-year-old grandmother who doctors identified as terminally ill and left to starve to death has recovered after her outraged daughter intervened.
Hazel Fenton, from East Sussex, is alive nine months after medics ruled she had only days to live, withdrew her antibiotics and denied her artificial feeding. The former school matron had been placed on a controversial care plan intended to ease the last days of dying patients.
Doctors say Fenton is an example of patients who have been condemned to death on the Liverpool care pathway plan. They argue that while it is suitable for patients who do have only days to live, it is being used more widely in the NHS, denying treatment to elderly patients who are not dying.
Fenton’s daughter, Christine Ball, who had been looking after her mother before she was admitted to the Conquest hospital in Hastings, East Sussex, on January 11, says she had to fight hospital staff for weeks before her mother was taken off the plan and given artificial feeding.
Ball, 42, from Robertsbridge, East Sussex, said: “My mother was going to be left to starve and dehydrate to death. It really is a subterfuge for legalised euthanasia of the elderly on the NHS. ”
Fenton was admitted to hospital suffering from pneumonia. Although Ball acknowledged that her mother was very ill she was astonished when a junior doctor told her she was going to be placed on the plan to “make her more comfortable” in her last days.
Ball insisted that her mother was not dying but her objections were ignored. A nurse even approached her to say: “What do you want done with your mother’s body?”
On January 19, Fenton’s 80th birthday, Ball says her mother was feeling better and chatting to her family, but it took another four days to persuade doctors to give her artificial feeding.
Fenton is now being looked after in a nursing home five minutes from where her daughter lives.
Peter Hargreaves, a consultant in palliative medicine, is concerned that other patients who could recover are left to die. He said: “As they are spreading out across the country, the training is getting probably more and more diluted.”
A spokesman for East Sussex Hospitals NHS Trust, said: “Patients’ needs are assessed before they are placed on the [plan]. Daily reviews are undertaken by clinicians whenever possible.”
In a separate case, the family of an 87-year-old woman say the plan is being used as a way of giving minimum care to dying patients.
Susan Budden, whose mother, Iris Griffin, from Norwich, died in a nursing home in July 2008 from a brain tumour, said: “When she was started on the [plan] her medication was withdrawn. As a result she became agitated and distressed.
“It would appear that the [plan] is . . . used purely as a protocol which can be ticked off to justify the management of a patient.”
Deborah Murphy, the national lead nurse for the care pathway, said: “If the education and training is not in place, the [plan] should not be used.” She said 3% of patients placed on the plan recovered.
Hmm. Three percent recovery rate from the death plan, huh? Who says the National Health Service isn’t effective? Keyser would say that a 97% success rate in killing patients is pretty damn good.
Now, whether or not one thinks it a good idea, it’s perfectly obvious that one of the main purposes of a centralized health care system is to keep down costs through a denial of service. Anyone who says otherwise is either a liar or an idiot (or wins the daily double with both). And while the phrase “death panel” may not appear in any bill, whatever you want to call it, a central board to determine which services to deny to patients will be a death panel in practice.
And all those old people who support the AARP’s leftist policies (with their membership fees at least) may found out that they’re the ones who will be looked at most closely by organizations like the (Orwellianly named) NICE (the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, which is the UK abbreviation for death panel. Getting to keep your doctor doesn’t mean so much if his (or her) hands are tied by NICE.
Triumph of the Human Spirit: Dog Edition
Posted by: | CommentsIf they can do it, so can you!
Tear the Fucking Thing Down Already: Brutalist Church Edition
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Long-time Lair readers may recall a post from almost a year ago deploring the designation of some hideous church in the aptly named “brutalist” style as a landmark, which would perpetuate this blight until the distant future when Charleton Heston can berue its preservation as the last vestige of western man. That’s the abomination up there.
Well, the plucky members of the congregation have been fight for years to be allowed to pull the thing down on the grounds that a) it’s to expensive to maintain so they’d like a smaller one and b) there’s a law saying the government can’t fuck with churches unless there’s some really big reason, the preservation of a piece of appallingly ugly cement not being big enough. Naturally, no good deed can go unchallenged in this day and age, and some pack of assholes known as the DC Preservation Brigade have been fighting them tooth-and-nail, hell-bent and determined to maintain this thing as a symbol of how bad taste was in the middle of the last century once architecture schools had been taken over by a bunch of tedious leftists who (in true hipster fashion) wanted to get back at “the Man” by building him inhuman buildings (and at his expense, too!).
So Keyser was pleased to learn that the DC government last month gave the church permission to raze the eyesore, but the fight goes on, as the meddlers continue to obstrust.
If there is a God in heaven, let him smite this travesty of all that is decent and confound His satanic foes! Down with the Third Church of Christ, Scientist – literally! The righteous indignation of the Lord God:
To Tuva and Beyond!
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Keyser just glanced at the “Feedjit” thingee on the left and happened to see someone who’d arrived on the Lair from Bashkortostan. Keyser’s first thought
Keyser generally thinks of himself as a geographically well-versed Pannonian, but even he can lose track of things in more obscure corner’s of the globe. Case in point. Keyser was in a hotel in Nafplio Greece about twenty years ago, and they had on the wall in the lobby a poster with the flags of countries from all over the world. As Keyser was looking over them, his eyes fell on the pennant of Burkina Faso. “What the fuck?” quoth Keyser to himself. “Never heard of it.” Turned out that in what used to be called “Upper Volta” a PC urge to stop implicitly denigrating the folks in Lower Volta had led them to rename the joint (thought this prove to be something of a local joke in that the new name actually means “May you contract worms that eat through the back of your eyes, you Lower Voltian curs” in Dioula, the national lingo.)
Anyhoo, Keyser googled “Bashkortostan” and Wikipedia proved its usual disappointing worth. Seems that that’s just some fancy new name for Bashkiria, a region of Russia in the north Caucasus. Why didn’t they just say so? Anyway, welcome to everyone in Bashkiria/Bashkortostan (though to be honest that new name sounds like some sort of cream you apply to cuts and abrasions “Bashkortostan! Available in fine drugstores everywhere.”)!
Speaking of cream, it turns out that our Bashkortostani friend wound up on the Lair from the post “Porn for Dwarves.” One of the amusements of blogging the way that Keyser does is to keep an eye on what leads people to the Lair, and that post is one of the Interwebz’ favorite Lair posts. There’s actually an intriguing trend going on regarding the images that attract googlers to the Lair, but Keyser won’t spoil your fun of finding out for yourselves which old post has suddenly taken on a life of its own. Let’s just say that it pertains to the opening of this paragraph and has a “homoerotic” theme (yes, yes, you don’t get that much on the Lair, but there was a good reason!).
As an aside, obscure parts of the ex-Soviet Union reminds Keyser of a story that he’s always liked. The famous physicist Richard Feynman had a friend who was a high school teacher, and one day (back in the early ’70s, if memory serves), they had a discussion about postage stamp collecting. Feynman mentions that as a child he’d collected the full set from Tuva, and the teacher friend said (not unreasonably), “Ain’t no such place.” Feinman replies, “Yes, there is,” and describes its history.
Tuva is a distant region of Russian being populated by speakers of an anomalous Turkic dialect and wedged between Russia and Mongolia (the place is also “famous” for the bizarre Tuvan throat singing). During the the chaos that broke out after the last Czar’s abdication, the place became independent, and during the ’30s issued not only a (small) emission of its own coins but also some triangular postage stamps, which was pretty bold back then. Unfortunately for the Tuvans, the place also sits on a big supply of uranium, and after learning from his commie traitor friends in the West that you could make a cool bomb out of the stuff, Stalin annexed the place in 1944 before much of anyone outside of stamp collectors could notice its existence.
So Feynman and his friend decide to go visit this obscure piece of property. This proved to be easier said than done, and the quest to gain permission to visit turned into a sort of quixotic quest for the holy grail. The attempt to get a visa became all the more pressing once Feynman was diagnosed with some sort of terminal cancer – who would reach their destination first, Feynman in Tuva or Death in Feynman? Anyway, because of Tuva’s strategic importance, you couldn’t just wander in with a tourist visa (“Western spy, why you take camera to important military location?”). But you could get a special visa if you could get an invitation from a local for some supposedly legitimate reason. Back in the day, you couldn’t go online and visit the “Tuvan Federation of Soviet Socialist Teachers’ Association” website. In fact, finding a copy of the Tuva white pages in Berkeley CA (where Feinman worked) was pretty much impossible. But eventually the intrepid would-be visitors got the address of some sort of education official, and wrote him a letter (“What’s it cost to mail a letter to Tuva?” “To where?”). The mail between California and Tuva wasn’t the swiftest, and the Soviet bureaucracy wasn’t too interested in expediting such a visit, but nonetheless they got their visas. Only trouble was they showed up the day after Feynman died. (This is all by memory, but Keyser thinks that’s actually how it worked out. There’s a whole book on the quest, if you’re curious.) Keyser’s always like that story. The redoubtable human spirit, and all that. It’s the sort of thing that makes a person translate the entire Bible into German even though he thinks the world’s about to come to an end. Keyser thinks of it as the “fuck it!” spirit. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!
So the next time you think you have a quest that seems impossible to you, like finding porn for dwarves, just remember that it is in fact possible to get a visa to visit Tuva, as long as you persevere.
Per ardua ad astra!
Darwin Awards: Canadian Entry
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One wouldn’t want to be accused of being “insensitive” about someone’s death, but really, this is a pretty embarrassing way to go:
A pedestrian talking on her cellphone while crossing the street is dead after being struck by a delivery truck last night.The 28-year-old woman was crossing Front St. at the crosswalk around 9:30 p.m. when the truck, making a right turn from Blue Jays Way, struck her.
Toronto Police said the woman was talking on her cellphone at the time and walked into the side of the truck. She fell to the ground and the rear wheels of the truck ran over her.
She was pronounced dead at the scene.
Apparently, not only was this woman absent in kindergarten when the class was instructed to “look both ways before crossing the street,” but she also missed the lesson about “don’t run into moving trucks, as you might fall under the rear wheels and get killed.” Or maybe she was too engrossed in a cell phone conversation to pay attention.
Okay, maybe Keyser does want to be accused of being insensitive.
An Octillion Here, an Octillion There, and Pretty Soon You’re Talking Real Money
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Contest over!
Readers with a retentive memory will recall that in a previous post, Keyser animadverted to the pengö-forint exchange rate of 400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1, and challenged you, his loyal readers, to “count that if you dare!” (this may come in handy when it comes time to convert “old dollars” to “Obamadollars”). Well, industrious Keyser reader Dr. Anton Phibes informs Keyser in the comments that the number he (Keyser) dared the readership to count is 400 octillion (though he doesn’t say whether this is a British or American octillion). Since Keyser’s brain begins to seize up at the quadrillions (which, coincidentally, is why he had to regretfully decline the offer to become Secretary of the Treasury), Keyser will have to take the Good Dr.’s word for it.
So, Phibes, the next time you’re trekking across the barren plains of northern Canada like a lost refugee from the Franklin Expedition, stop by at Keyser’s igloo to get your “I Counted to an Octillion and All I Got was this Stupid T-Shirt” t-shirt.
Ben Bernanke looks great in his.
Triumph of the Human Spirit: No Arms Edition
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Well, if they take students at flying school who don’t want to learn how to take off or land, just how to hold a steady course in the direction of tall, thin objects, then why not pilots without arms:
Jessica Cox suffered a rare birth defect and was born without any arms.…
She grew up worried every time she had be an aeroplane passenger.
But three years ago she was given the chance to overcome her fears.
She said: “A fighter pilot, who represents the charity Wright Flight asked me if I’d like to try flying one myself.
“At first I thought he was nuts. I would have been scared enough if I had arms, let alone without them.
“But he kept insisting I would love it and so I started to see it as the ultimate challenge.”
She learned to fly in rudderless light Ercoupe aircraft, where you only need your hands to control it rather than both hands and feet.
She took three years instead of the usual six months to complete her lightweight aircraft licence, had three flying instructors and practiced 89 hours of flying.
She said: “The first time my instructor let me take the controls I remember being terrified but I was hooked immediately.
“Most people were encouraging – but some thought I was taking a dangerous risk. I had to be very determined and persistent.
“It took me three hard years to complete – but it is the most fantastic feeling in the world.”
Seems our heroine is a motivaltional speaker, which presumably means she lets people pay her to tell them that if they think they have problems, try flying a fucking airplane without arms.
Pilot Flies Without Arms – Click here for this week’s top video clips
For more images, click here.
To Dream the Impossible Dream
Posted by: | CommentsKeyser Totally Wants to See This
Posted by: | CommentsKeyser remembers reading while waiting to see the dentist as a child a story in Time magazine about some crazy French guy who walked a tightrope between the two towers of the World Trade Center. Now they’ve made a movie about it!
Keyser saw some television show about the attack on the WTC, and there was a segment about this guy (Philippe Petit). Seems this insane stunt was something like the high-point of his life, and he was despondent about the destruction of the buildings. Anyway, the footage about the walk itself was totally incredible. It made Keyser woozy just to look at the stills.
h/t to Mrs. S.
Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way
Posted by: | CommentsFile this one under “triumph of the human spirit”:
A quadriplegic man accused of secretly videotaping young girls while they took showers pleaded guilty to reduced charges in federal court in Mobile.Robert Vezendy of Satsuma pleaded guilty Friday to possessing and receiving child pornography. The Press-Register reports that the plea bargain will result in the dismissal of three more serious charges accusing him of producing child porn in his home.
A prosecutor said authorities agreed to the deal partly because of the man’s physical condition. Vezendy has no use of his legs and only partial control over his arms.
Keyser gets the “porn on the ‘puter” part, but how did this perv manage to do the videotaping? Details notwithstanding, it is an inspiration to us all if even quadriplegics can overcome adversity to realize their dreams.
