Category Archives: News

News

Canadian government cuts funding to hospital that refused to kill patients

Leave a comment
Price of healthcare per Canadian household (Source: Fraser Institute)
Price of healthcare per Canadian household (Source: Fraser Institute)

It’s election time in the United States, and many of the Democrat candidate are putting forward government-run health care as an improvement to our current system. Candidates like Bernie Sanders are pointing to the “success” of health care in countries like Canada. I’ve blogged previously about single-payer health care in Canada, but this new story from last week even shocked me.

Catholic News Agency reported:

A hospice in Canada has lost its funding and is being forced to close after refusing to offer and perform medically assisted suicides.

The Irene Thomas Hospice in Delta, British Columbia, will lose $1.5 million in funding and will no longer be permitted to operate as a hospice as of February 25, 2021. Fraser Health Authority, one of the six public health care authorities in the province, announced on Tuesday that it would be ending its relationship with the hospice over its refusal to provide medically assisted deaths to its patients.

Per Fraser Health’s contract with the Delta Hospice Society, which administers the Irene Thomas Hospice, a one-year notice had to be provided before funding could be withdrawn without cause.

“We have made every effort to support the board to come into compliance and they have been clear that they have no intention to,” said British Columbia Health Minister Adrian Dix in a statement.

Government-run health care is very popular in Canada, even with many self-described Catholics. They probably couldn’t foresee that handing all the money for health care to the government would cause them to have to choose between being fired from their jobs and killing innocent people. Fortunately, they chose to leave their jobs in order to not kill innocent people. I would expect that people in Nazi Germany or Communist USSR were faced with similar choices: kill others or starve.

Health care in Canada

So, it’s important to understand how health care works in Canada. You pay into a system based on your ability to earn, and then when you need care, you get in line behind people who never paid. That’s called “equality” and “fairness”. You can’t pay a doctor directly to get faster or better care, because in a single payer system, paying a doctor to get immediate or better treatment is illegal.

So while you’re waiting in line, who decides whether you get treated? The secular leftists in government decide, because they decide what the government will pay for. You work and pay into the system. You pay the salaries of the government workers. And then they dole out health care as they see fit, according to their secular leftist worldviews.

If you need an abortion, that’s free and taxpayer-funded. Drug needles? They’re free. In vitro fertilization? You get two rounds for free. Sex-reassignment surgery? That’s free too. But if you’re old, then you might not get any treatment. After all, your days of voting are behind you. Many people die on waiting lists, especially poor people who can’t fly to America for better care. That’s Canadian health care.

People die on waiting lists in Canada

Here’s an example, reported in the UK Daily Mail:

A girl who died of leukemia was given a final send off after her friends signed her casket with loving messages on January 30.

[…]Laura might have experienced a few more milestones if a Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, hospital had been able to accommodate a bone marrow transplant for the young woman.

Numerous donors were a match with Laura and ready to donate, but Hamilton’s Juravinski Hospital didn’t have enough beds in high-air-pressure rooms for the procedure.

Hospital staff told her they had about 30 patients with potential donors, but the means to only do about five transplants a month.

[…]Dr. Ralph Meyer, Juravinski’s vice-president of oncology and palliative care, told Ontario’s TheStar.com there are plenty of others facing the same situation as Laura in Canada.

It just wasn’t important for the government of Canada to spend a lot of money buying one vote. It was much more cost-effective for them to spend a little bit of money on many voters who just needed birth control and abortions. There are a lot of votes to buy from people making reckless decisions with sex. But they don’t have the money for one expensive cancer patient. They let her die because they didn’t need her vote to get re-elected.

And keep in mind, her parents wouldn’t have been able to pay the doctors to do anything. They paid for all the health care they got through their taxes. And those taxes were used to pay for all the people who needed birth control, abortions, sex changes, IVF, etc. When it was time for the government to pay for their daughter, the government had no money left to save her. And her parents had no money left to take her to America, because they trusted the atheist elites in the government to provide their family with health care. That’s why they paid them up front with their taxpayer dollars.

News

Are there any consequences to taxpayers who live in “Sanctuary Cities”

4 Comments
Crime rates in major cities, all Democrat-run
Crime rates in major cities, all run by Democrat mayors

I thought this story from the weekend was very interesting. Chicago is well known as a far left city. They have the toughest restrictions on legal firearm ownership and self-defense. They are extremely soft on criminals. And they are also a “sanctuary city”. That means that they refuse to cooperate with federal law enforcement when they are dealing with illegal immigrants with criminal convictions.

Here’s the story from the Daily Wire:

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot is on the defensive this weekend after Immigrations and Customs Enforcement announced that a convicted felon, now facing charges of sexually assaulting a toddler in a downtown Chicago McDonalds bathroom, was supposed to have been turned over to ICE and deported — and had been deported before.

“ICE said in a news release Thursday [Christopher] Puente was placed into Chicago police custody in June of 2019 after he was arrested for theft,” according to a Chicago ABC affiliate. “According to ICE, Chicago police were expected to hold Puente until he could be taken into their custody, as Puente was expected to be deported.”

Because Chicago is a so-called “Sanctuary City” and has lenient bail policies, Puente was released back into the community.

Puente is now charged with raping a 3-year-old girl in the bathroom of Chicago’s landmark “Rock & Roll McDonalds,” a major tourist destination just north of the city’s downtown, and just west of its “Magnificent Mile” shopping district. Puente allegedly lured the girl away from her father, who was attending to the girl’s brother inside a bathroom stall. Puente, police say, dragged the girl into his stall, locked the door, molested and assaulted her. The girl’s father, alerted by her screams, rescued her, but could not catch Puente, CPD says, who bolted from the bathroom and out the door of the McDonalds, into the street.

[…]Chicago’s branch of ICE says “Puente had been deported to Mexico in 2014 over a prior burglary conviction, but tried to get back in five days later, claiming to be a citizen, and later skipped out on a hearing before an immigration judge. He was ordered deported again in 2017 in absentia,” according to CBS Chicago.

“Puente has been previously convicted of burglary, forgery, trespassing, domestic battery and related offenses and has a record dating back 20 years,” CBS noted.

This sort of thing happens all the time in sanctuary cities. Here is one from earlier from New York City, another sanctuary city, run by another far-left Democrat mayor.

New York Post reports:

Federal officials on Tuesday blamed Mayor de Blasio for a fatal sex attack on a 92-year-old Queens woman — saying his “sanctuary city” policy kept the accused killer from being held for deportation last year.

“It was a deadly choice to release a man on an active ICE detainer back onto the streets after his first arrest included assault and weapon charges, and he now faces new charges, including murder,” said Thomas Decker, New York field-office director of enforcement and removal operations for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“New York City’s sanctuary policies continue to threaten the safety of all residents of the five boroughs as they repeatedly protect criminal aliens who show little regard for the laws of this nation.”

ICE said it lodged a detainer request with the NYPD for Reeaz Khan, an illegal immigrant from Guyana, on Nov. 27 — the same day he was busted for allegedly attacking his dad during a fight in their South Richmond Hill home.

Now I have a  friend who calls himself a Christian but who votes Demcorat, and he thinks that Democrat policies on immigration are very compassionate and generous. Whenever I ask him about cases like this he says “illegal immigrants are no more violent than natural born Americans”. That’s a false statement, and I’ve blogged about the statistics on that before. But the more important point is this: none of the illegal immigrants should be here to commit these crimes. The crimes committed by people who are here legally cannot be prevented by kicking them out. They belong here. But the crimes committed by illegal immigrants never have to happen in the first place, because they shouldn’t even be here. That’s the important point that the compassion crowd always seems to forget.

Also, where is the compassion of the victims of these criminals from people on the left? Or do law-abiding taxpaying Americans count for less than criminal illegal aliens?

News

Stephen C. Meyer and Marcus Ross lecture on the Cambrian explosion

1 Comment
Cambrian Explosion
Cambrian Explosion

Access Research Network is a group that produces recordings  of lectures and debates related to intelligent design. I noticed that on their Youtube channel they are releasing some of their older lectures and debates for FREE. So I decided to write a summary of one that I really like on the Cambrian explosion. This lecture features Dr. Stephen C. Meyer and Dr. Marcus Ross.

The lecture is about two hours. There are really nice slides with lots of illustrations to help you understand what the speakers are saying, even if you are not a scientist.

Here is a summary of the lecture from ARN:

The Cambrian explosion is a term often heard in origins debates, but seldom completely understood by the non-specialist. This lecture by Meyer and Ross is one of the best overviews available on the topic and clearly presents in verbal and pictorial summary the latest fossil data (including the recent finds from Chengjiang China). This lecture is based on a paper recently published by Meyer, Ross, Nelson and Chien “The Cambrian Explosion: Biology’s Big Bang” in Darwinism, Design and Public Education(2003, Michigan State University Press). This 80-page article includes 127 references and the book includes two additional appendices with 63 references documenting the current state of knowledge on the Cambrian explosion data.

The term Cambrian explosion describes the geologically sudden appearance of animals in the fossil record during the Cambrian period of geologic time. During this event, at least nineteen, and perhaps as many as thirty-five (of forty total) phyla made their first appearance on earth. Phyla constitute the highest biological categories in the animal kingdom, with each phylum exhibiting a unique architecture, blueprint, or structural body plan. The word explosion is used to communicate that fact that these life forms appear in an exceedingly narrow window of geologic time (no more than 5 million years). If the standard earth’s history is represented as a 100 yard football field, the Cambrian explosion would represent a four inch section of that field.

For a majority of earth’s life forms to appear so abruptly is completely contrary to the predictions of Neo-Darwinian and Punctuated Equilibrium evolutionary theory, including:

  • the gradual emergence of biological complexity and the existence of numerous transitional forms leading to new phylum-level body plans;
  • small-scale morphological diversity preceding the emergence of large-scale morphological disparity; and
  • a steady increase in the morphological distance between organic forms over time and, consequently, an overall steady increase in the number of phyla over time (taking into account factors such as extinction).

After reviewing how the evidence is completely contrary to evolutionary predictions, Meyer and Ross address three common objections: 1) the artifact hypothesis: Is the Cambrian explosion real?; 2) The Vendian Radiation (a late pre-Cambrian multicellular organism); and 3) the deep divergence hypothesis.

Finally Meyer and Ross argue why design is a better scientific explanation for the Cambrian explosion. They argue that this is not an argument from ignorance, but rather the best explanation of the evidence from our knowledge base of the world. We find in the fossil record distinctive features or hallmarks of designed systems, including:

  • a quantum or discontinuous increase in specified complexity or information
  • a top-down pattern of scale diversity
  • the persistence of structural (or “morphological”) disparities between separate organizational systems; and
  • the discrete or novel organizational body plans

When we encounter objects that manifest any of these several features and we know how they arose, we invariably find that a purposeful agent or intelligent designer played a causal role in their origin.

Recorded April 24, 2004. Approximately 2 hours including audience Q&A.

You can get a DVD of the lecture and other great lectures from Access Research Network. I recommend their origin of life lectures – I have watched the ones with Dean Kenyon and Charles Thaxton probably a dozen times each. Speaking as an engineer, you never get tired of seeing engineering principles applied to questions like the origin of life.

If you’d like to see Dr. Meyer defend his views in a debate with someone who reviewed his book about the Cambrian explosion, you can find that in this previous post.

Further study

The Cambrian explosion lecture above is a great intermediate-level lecture and will prepare you to be able to understand Dr. Meyer’s new book “Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design“. The Michigan State University book that Dr. Meyer mentions is called “Darwin, Design and Public Education“. That book is one of the two good collections on intelligent design published by academic university presses, the other one being from Cambridge University Press, and titled “Debating Design: From Darwin to DNA“. If you think this lecture is above your level of understanding, then be sure and check out the shorter and more up-to-date DVD “Darwin’s Dilemma“.