Tag Archives: politics

It’s Murder

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That’s what one of the signs held by a protestor says in the lead image of the Wall Street Journal piece on the soon-to-be-fatal plight of baby Charlie Gard.  The baby suffers from a rare mitochondrial disorder that usually is fatal.  The baby’s doctors insisted this case can only be fatal, and a British court (and a European Union court!  Is there any stronger argument for the Brits taking themselves out of the EU?)—because in Great Britain Government gets the final word on babies, not parents—agreed and agreed with the doctors’ further demand that baby Charlie be taken off life support to die.

But.

An American doctor has treated babies with this mitochondrial disease, and he has had some success with his treatment.  He indicated he had a 10% chance of helping Charlie.

However.

Charlie Gard’s parents’ legal fight to keep him on a ventilator and take him abroad for experimental therapy, against the opinion of his doctors, ended Monday when they dropped the case, saying his muscular damage was worse than feared and the treatment wouldn’t help.

Charlie’s parents struggled for months (months!) to get their baby out of gaol so they could take him somewhere to get treatment, however long-shot.  Now the doctors claiming to treat him and the court that said “No further effort to treat is allowed” must explain the impact those months of interference and delay had on baby Charlie’s chances.

This is what Brits can look forward to, now that their government and its death panels have asserted their absolute control over the fate of British children.  The sign isn’t far wrong.

The Coming Campaign

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The Progressive-Democratic Party is rolling out a new plan of campaign for the 2018 elections.  It’s a populist one, but what interests me is this.  The Republicans have run, for the last several election cycles, on “take back our country.”

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D, MA), in endorsing her party’s new campaign plan, said

This is one step that Democrats are offering to take back our government[.]

What an instructive, illuminating difference.

Labor Under the Radar

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Rather, a labor reform bill making its way (too slowly, IMHO) in the House.  The bill has some interesting items in it:

  • require unions to obtain permission from workers to spend their dues on purposes other than collective bargaining
  • mandate a recertification election upon the expiration of a collective-bargaining agreement if a workforce has turned over by more than 50%
  • take card-check off the menu of options for holding a union election
  • allow employees to withhold their personal contact information from unions

What’s not to like?

What’s holding up the bill?

Space-Based Defense

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LtGen James Abrahamson, USAF (Ret) and Ambassador Henry Cooper, who were directors on President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, had some thoughts on this in their recent Wall Street Journal Letter to the Editor.

Brilliant Pebbles, the space-based interceptor we advocated, promised a high probability of kill (over 90%) of all of a “limited” strike of up to 200 attacking re-entry vehicles—the number then controlled by a Russian submarine commander. It’s better than anything we have today. It became the SDI era’s first formally approved ballistic-missile defense system, with a validated cost estimate of $10 billion in 1988 dollars (now $20 billion) for concept definition and validation, development, deployment and 20 years operation of that constellation of 1,000 Brilliant Pebbles. This isn’t expensive….

Such a thing is particularly inexpensive compared to the cost of those attacking re-entry vehicles getting through to their military and urban targets.

The best defense is a good offense: we should be orbiting offensive weapons, also.  Keep in mind, too, that offensive weapons in orbit need not be nuclear in order to satisfactorily service targets: the energy released by impact after “falling” to earth from orbit compares very favorably with the energy released from nuclear warheads and with none of the radiation or fallout complications.