Tag Archives: culture

Patient Privacy

Posted on by
Reply

The Wall Street Journal article headline says it all.

Google Strikes Deal With Hospital Chain to Develop Healthcare Algorithms

Alphabet, through its Google subsidiary, is going to be given access to patient records—patient identification, medical history, drug prescription and use, Internet-connected medical device use and medical device-originated reporting—by a major healthcare provision chain, HCA Healthcare Inc.

Dr Jonathan Perlin, President of HCA’s Clinical Services Group and Chief Medical Officer assures us:

Data are spun off of every patient in real time[.]

In real time. As the patient is hooked into the Internet via an ostensibly privacy-protecting connection.

The claimed goal of this…partnership…is to

develop algorithms to help improve operating efficiency, monitor patients and guide doctors’ decisions, according to the companies.

However,

Google will access data when needed with consent from HCA….

But not necessarily with the consent of the patient, it seems.

Perlin does promise that patient-identifying data will be stripped before HCA passes patient data to Alphabet.

Of course.

Never mind that patient monitoring is tough to do without those data. Never mind that developing algorithms for monitoring patients is tough to do without those data in the mix for, you know, testing.

Alphabet’s penchant for taking user personal data for its own purposes, including monetizing those data for the company’s benefit, is long-standing and well-known. Now the company, with the active collusion of a major hospital chain, is expanding that reach into patient medical data—Alphabet user or not.

Patient privacy be damned. It’s a brave new world.

Biden, Planned Parenthood, and Abortion

Posted on by
Reply

President Joe Biden’s (D) fleshed out budget proposal will have an indication of his fiscal attitude toward abortion and taxpayer dollars.

It’s an important indication, too, as Melanie Newman, Senior Vice President of Communications and Culture for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, was cited in the article as noting:

removing the [Hyde] amendment from the budget “would send a clear signal from the president of the United States that our federal laws should support everyone’s ability to access comprehensive healthcare services, including safe, legal abortion.”

But what about the babies’ ability to have access to comprehensive healthcare services, including safe, legal birth, and life?

Oh, wait—babies don’t vote.

Nor do babies donate to Planned Parenthood.

Race as a Discriminant of Merit

Posted on by
Reply

A Wall Street Journal editorial gets at this as the editors urge the Supreme Court to take up Students for Fair Admissions v Harvard, a case in which Harvard uses race explicitly as a meritorious discriminant for admission.

Harvard personnel actually insist they aren’t discriminating against Americans of Asian descent; they’re merely favoring Americans with black or brown skin. Anyone not chewing the halls’ ivy can see the obvious disingenuousness of that claim; the WSJ‘s editors are entirely correct to push the Court to take up the case.

The larger stakes are whether the Supreme Court will wink as America divides in ways that have proved so destructive in the past.

And

In America today the principle that drove the civil-rights movement—equality for all—is fast giving way to the view that race must be a dominant factor in every decision from college admission to eligibility for a federal farm program to the makeup of corporate boards to who gets priority for a Covid vaccine.

But then the editors wander astray.

It is true that the racial discrimination alleged in Harvard isn’t the same as that of the Jim Crow South. In that era federal government intervention was required to break the state-enforced discrimination against black Americans. Race preferences were rooted then in the false claim of African-American inferiority.
No one thinks Harvard is discriminating because of animosity toward Asian-Americans, much less because it believes they are inferior.

The discrimination is so closely related, though, as to be a conjoined Siamese twin of Jim Crow. Harvard management personnel are setting race-based preference in favor of blacks, rather than against them, precisely because those school managers still believe the claim of African-American inferiority; the school’s management personnel still believe[] [blacks] are inferior.

Law and Order Candidates

Posted on by
Reply

Call up into your memories, no matter the pain, of the rioting, looting, arson, murders all last summer in Progressive-Democrat-run jurisdictions: Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland, New York City, Atlanta, and on and on.

Recall the move by those same Progressive-Democrats, and increasingly by their colleagues in other jurisdictions, to defund the police, to reduce the number of police on the payroll, to “reimagine” policing. And the ensuing rise in murders in those cities.

Especially pertinent to that last, is the newly elected St Louis Mayor, Tishaura Jones (D), coming into office with an ongoing rise in homicides to the highest rate in 50 years. Her answer to that rise?

[D]efund the city’s police budget by $4 million and to eliminate nearly 100 vacant officer positions.

Now we get the Progressive-Democrat Left making clear that they want even more of this. Here’s Ezra Klein, Left journalist, making that desire explicit:

Klein posted several examples of Democrats facing political hurdles over an increase in crime and then concluded the backlash could help Trump win back the Oval Office in 2024, should he run again.
“The politics of this could really tip, and not just in cities—if these numbers keep getting worse, then as with Nixon and Reagan in the ’70s and ’80s, it could bring ‘law and order’ conservatives (including Trump) back to power in 2024[.]”

Klein tried to disguise his—the Left’s—fear of law and order as a fear of the return of authoritarianism and outright racism. He’s misleading with that, given that it’s the Progressive-Democrats who ruled by a “phone and a pen,” and today by unilateral, don’t want to negotiate with Republicans, Party fiat.

Klein also ignored, in his pious disguise, the openly racist policies of the Left, from their selection criteria for school admission that use race (and gender), their critical race “theory,” their identity politics.

Klein also ignored, particularly regarding policing, the murders of black police officers by Party’s supporters antifa and BLM during those riots and lootings, and the black-on-black homicide rates, the latter which don’t have the cachet of race that the Left so desperately need for their narrative.

Klein also carefully ignored Party icons like Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D, CA) actively inciting riot and trying to intimidate the jury in the Chauvin murder trial before the jury was sequestered.

Racism and authoritarianism, indeed.

Thus, the left’s fear: we’ll be faced with law and order candidates in 2022 and 2024.

The horror.

“Out of Balance Scales”

Posted on by
Reply

Juan Williams has joined the Left’s baying at Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer over the latter’s rudeness in staying on the job, rather than politely retiring and getting out of their way. He began his own howl with a question that opened his recent op-ed at The Hill.

How political is today’s Supreme Court?

He continued, citing the well-known statistics journal The Washington Post:

The current 6-3 conservative majority on the court makes it “more conservative than the elected branches [House, Senate and presidency—all controlled by Democrats] to a degree not seen in 70 years.”
The out-of-balance scales of Supreme Court justice can be traced to the heavy hand of Senate Republicans.

Only a Progressive-Democrat like Juan Williams could say with a straight face that a Supreme Court that adheres to the plain, obvious, and rational meaning of the text of our Constitution and statutes is “out of balance.”

And only a Progressive-Democrat could decry his political opponents for insisting on a Court whose Justices adhere to their oaths of office and defend our Constitution rather than blithely “reinterpreting” convenient clauses according to their personal views of the day—or making it up as they go along (expecting the law to catch up) as one of Williams’ favorites, Justice Thurgood Marshall, so famously (or infamously) bragged—or insisting that Justices extend that concept to adhering to the statutes as written and then enacted by our political branches of government rather than rewriting them to suit their personal views of societal wishes.

And then the baying:

The realistic fight is to keep the current imbalance on the court from getting worse.
That begins with nudging Justice Stephen Breyer, one of the three remaining Democratic nominees on the court, to retire now.
Breyer is 82 years old. If he leaves the court now, he will be replaced by a Biden nominee….

How rude of Justice Breyer. How utterly political he is, to stay on a job for which he’s fully capable and well qualified still to do.