Category Archives: culture

The VA Fails Again

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This time it’s the Marion, IL, Veterans Administration clinic.

In 1971 Kirby Williams went to Vietnam as a US Army draftee and worked as a finance clerk. In 2010 he went to a Veterans Affairs clinic in southern Illinois where a radiologist took a scan of his kidneys.

Unfortunately, the radiologist missed a 2- to 3-centimeter mass in one of his kidneys, and by last December that mass had grown to between 7 and 8 centimeters. Now the 66-year-old has, at most, two to five years to live.

Williams isn’t the only victim.

Within weeks…of starting at the VA [in March of 2016!], he [Dr L Anthony Leskosky, a board-certified radiologist] noticed patients previously diagnosed as healthy had radiology scans from years prior documenting grave conditions. These conditions, such as cancers, aortic aneurysms, bleeding ulcers and obstructions in their small bowel and colon—if left untreated—could cause patients tremendous pain or even premature death.

“In radiology, we compare current scans to old studies, so I was pulling up the last two years of the scans. That’s when I noticed the radiologists had called their previous exams ‘normal,’ but I would see a mass on the older scans, and then on my scan, I would see the mass had enlarged, and in some cases become a spreading cancer. Usually that is not survivable,” Leskosky said.

As many as four to five times a day, Leskosky said, he found serious errors in prior readings….

Leskosky whistleblew on this and too many other such incompetencies, and the VA’s answer was to fire him rather than correct the problem.

That’s damning enough, but read the whole article.

President Donald Trump touts improvements in the VA, and there have been some.  However, they’re too little, too small, and too late, and the VA’s destructiveness continues.  The Veterans Administration must be disbanded and its budget sent to our veterans as vouchers with which they can seek medical care with doctors of their choosing at medical facilities of their choosing.  And get actual treatment.

Veteranos Administratio delende est.

Was I Right to Pull the Plug on a Nazi Website?

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That’s the title of a tortured op-ed in a recent Wall Street Journal by Matthew Prince, Co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare.  Recall that he and his Cloudflare helped kick a group of neo-Nazis off the internet last week, including the Daily Stormer Web site.  He bragged at the time about having done that, and as despicable as neo-Nazi and Nazi wannabe thugs are, that’s an easy brag.

In this op-ed, though, Prince is claiming to be having second thoughts.

However.

As an opponent of free speech, Mr Prince, of course you were right to censor any speech you personally would consider repugnant.  As a biased opponent of free speech, moreover, you’re entirely correct to leave your favored-of-the-Left hate groups—Antifa and BLM, for instance—untouched by your censorship.

But this—this is impressively shabby.

[T]he First Amendment doesn’t compel private companies to let anyone broadcast on their platforms.

No, more than merely shabby.  This is utterly, cynically disingenuous. It’s true in the narrowest, most legalist sense that the First Amendment only limits government’s ability to censor speech. But the principle underlying that Amendment, the individual liberty to speak freely in accordance with one’s own conscience rather than in comportment with a Know Better’s diktat is universal. It’s one of our unalienable Rights…among [which] are…Liberty….

Of course, as the son of a journalist [growing up] with discussions around the dinner table on the importance of freedom of speech, you know this full well.

Your Orwellian missive, with its artificial, bodice-ripping anguish, is at best mendacious.

Monuments

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The European Commission had a thought on the occasion of the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism, that while not explicitly about monuments is related:

The European Union was built on the common values of human dignity, fundamental rights, rule of law and democracy, and on the rejection of extreme nationalism.

We must never take these rights and freedoms for granted. We pledge to fight for them every day.

Extremism, nationalism, xenophobia and hatred can still be heard in public speech in Europe. Keeping these memories alive is not only a tribute to the victims but also a way to ensure that these ideologies can be forcefully rejected and such atrocities never happen again.

We stand firm in our defense of democracy, the rule of law and fundamental rights, in Europe and worldwide. There is no place in the European Union for extremism, intolerance and oppression.

These remarks dovetail tightly with a suggestion by Vice President Mike Pence:

I hold the view that it’s important that we remember our past and build on the progress that we have made.

I’m someone who believes in more monuments, not less monuments.  What we ought to do is we ought to remember our history, but we also ought to celebrate the progress that we’ve made since that history.

And

When I walked back in 2010 across the Edmund Pettus Bridge…we remembered Bloody Sunday and the extraordinary progress of the civil rights movement, and I can’t help but think that, rather than pulling down monuments, as some are wont to do…we ought to have been building more monuments[.]

Hmm….

Getting Ridiculous

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ESPN has withdrawn one of its sportscasters from calling a University of Virginia football game for the sole reason that he bears the evil name of Robert Lee.  Not Robert E Lee, the Civil War evil general’s name, just Robert Lee.  That’s too close to evil for the PC gang.

Instead Lee (if I might be permitted to use that name) was reassigned to “a different game” where he’ll be more out of sight.

ESPN notes that assignments are switched all the time.

Including for racist reasons.