News

Cancer victim who alerted media about dropped health plan draws IRS audit

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Mark Steyn at National Review reports.

Excerpt: (links removed)

A couple of weeks back, cancer patient Bill Elliot, in a defiant appearance on Fox News, discussed the cancelation of his insurance and what he intended to do about it. He’s now being audited.

Insurance agent C Steven Tucker, who quaintly insists that the whimsies of the hyper-regulatory bureaucracy do not trump your legal rights, saw the interview and reached out to Mr Elliot to help him. And he’s now being audited.

As the Instapundit likes to remind us, Barack Obama has “joked” publicly about siccing the IRS on his enemies. With all this coincidence about, we should be grateful the President is not (yet) doing prison-rape gags.

Meanwhile, IRS chief counsel William Wilkins, in his testimony to the House Oversight Committee over the agency’s systemic corruption, answers “I don’t recall” no fewer than 80 times. Try giving that answer to Wilkins’ colleagues and see where it gets you. Few persons are fond of their tax collectors, but, from my experience, America is the only developed nation in which the mass of the population is fearful of its revenue agency. This is unbecoming to a supposedly free people.

Elliot is being audited back to 2009. Tucker is being audited all the way back to 2003.

More from The Blaze.

Excerpt:

Appearing this week on “Rocky D” on Charleston, S.C.’s WQSC, Elliott said that after a media frenzy, his insurance company worked it out with him to allow him to keep his coverage — but there’s a new hitch.

“Monday I got a certified letter, I went down and got it and it’s from the IRS and they are auditing my books from 2009,” Elliott said.

He said he didn’t own a business at that time, and in fact was working for the government. He said he’s paid his taxes every year and is not any kind of a tax evader.

There was one more part of the notice — Elliott said that “due to federal budget cuts,” the meeting between him and the IRS won’t take place until April 2014.

“It doesn’t matter. It could’ve been today if they wanted it to,” he said.

The radio host said, “you stood up and spoke out about how Obamacare screwed over your insurance and probably would kill you and what’s the next thing that happened? You get audited by the IRS. That is not a coincidence.”

“No it’s not,” Elliott said.

And it might not just be Elliott: C. Steven Tucker, an insurance broker who contacted Elliott after his Fox News appearance, said that after he helped assist Elliott with his coverage, the IRS “are now coming after ME all the way back to 2003.”

Elliott told Kelly that he actually voted for Obama over Mitt Romney last year specifically because he liked what Obama had promised about being able to keep your doctors and your insurance plans.

People sometimes complain at me for using the word fascism, but I don’t know what else to call this. What do you call it when your government goes after you for speaking out against them? I call that fascism. It’s government stepping in to impose their views on individuals by force.

Look, if you want big government to make everyone “equal” by redistributing wealth and nationalizing private industry, then you’re a fascist. That’s where your view leads. Fascism is the normal endpoint of destroying the free enterprise system under the guise of pursuing “equality”. When government takes over industries from the private sector, you are going down the road to fascism. If you don’t like private property, you’re a fascist. If you don’t like the rule of law, you’re a fascist. If you don’t like free trade, you’re a fascist.

News

New study: breast cancer rates in China skyrocketed because of one-child policy

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Life Site News reports. (H/T WGB)

Excerpt:

Pro-abortion advocates have relentlessly denied a link between abortion and breast cancer, but a new study has emerged from China that seems to show that such a link not only exists, but that the risk rises with each abortion a woman has.

Dr. Joel Brind, professor of endocrinology at Baruch College, City University of New York and a director at the Breast Cancer Prevention Institute, called the findings a “real game changer” for deniers of the so-called ABC link.

The study, titled “A meta-analysis of the association between induced abortion and breast cancer risk among Chinese females” was published this week in Cancer Causes and Control, a peer-reviewed international cancer journal.

[…]The researchers say they were initially puzzled by their findings, stating that Chinese women “historically” have had lower rates of breast cancer compared to women from western countries such as the US.

They found, however, that incidences of breast cancer in China increased at an “alarming rate” over the past two decades, corresponding with the rise of the Chinese Communist Party’s one-child policy.

[…]The overall risk of developing breast cancer among women having only one abortion increased by 44 percent.

Calling it the “dose-response relationship” researchers also found that the risk of breast cancer increased as the number of abortions increased. Two abortions increased the risk by 76 percent, three by 89 percent.

“In summary, the most important implication of this study is that IA was significantly associated with an increased risk of breast cancer among Chinese females, and the risk of breast cancer increases as the number of IA increases,” concluded the researchers.

IA means “induced abortion”.

More:

The researchers called their findings “consistent” with those of Dr. Brind, who found in a 1996 meta-analysis that women had a 30 percent greater chance of developing breast cancer after aborting their child.

“Not only does [the study] validate the earlier findings from 1996, but its findings are even stronger,” Brind told LifeSiteNews.com.

[…]The Chinese research follows on the heels of two similar studies earlier this year. One study published in the IndianJournal of Community Medicine in May found a 6-fold greater risk of breast cancer among Indian women with a history of induced abortion when compared to the women with no such history. A similar study from Bangladesh published in the Journal of the Dhaka Medical Collegein April found that women with a history of induced abortion had a 20-fold increase in likelihood of developing breast cancer when compared to women with no such history.

In a report last month, Brind called the findings of the two studies “of the sort of magnitude that has typified the link between cigarettes and lung cancer.”

Here’s the results and conclusion from the actual paper:

Results

A total of 36 articles (two cohort studies and 34 case–control studies) covering 14 provinces in China were included in this review. Compared to people without any history of IA, an increased risk of breast cancer was observed among females who had at least one IA (OR = 1.44, 95 % CI 1.29–1.59, I 2 = 82.6 %, p < 0.001, n = 34). No significant publication bias was found among the included studies (Egger test,p = 0.176). The risk increased to 1.76 (95 % CI 1.39–2.22) and 1.89 (95 % CI 1.40–2.55) for people who had at least two IAs and at least three IAs, respectively. Subgroup analyses showed similar results to the primary results. Meta-regression analysis of the included studies found that the association between IA and breast cancer risk attenuated with increasing percent of IA in the control group (β = −0.022,p < 0.001).

Conclusion

IA is significantly associated with an increased risk of breast cancer among Chinese females, and the risk of breast cancer increases as the number of IA increases. If IA were to be confirmed as a risk factor for breast cancer, high rates of IA in China may contribute to increasing breast cancer rates.

Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “war on women”, especially when you couple it with sex-selection abortion, which pro-abortion people favor. But I have to caution everyone about using studies like this as your whole case against abortion.

Pro-life debater Scott Klusendorf explains:

First, I think it’s wrong when we make how abortion impacts women our primary message. There is a place for that being a secondary message, but it should never be our primary message. Abortion is wrong not because it adversely affects women. It’s primarily wrong because it intentionally takes the life of a defenseless human being. We’ve got to keep our focus clear on that.

I’ve summarized some of the previous studies on abortion/contraception in this recent post.

News

New study: prayer improves self-control and emotional stability

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Mysterious WGB posted this article from the UK Daily Mail.

Excerpt:

Praying helps people stay in control of their emotions and behaviour, according to a new study.

People turn to prayer ‘as a coping response to the high demands in life’ and are rewarded with increased strength and ability to resist temptation, researchers said.

Previous findings have shown that when people try hard to control their emotions and thoughts, the risk of aggressive outbursts and binge drinking or eating rises.

But the latest study, by German psychologists at Saarland University and the University of Mannheim, found that praying helps people maintain self-control.

‘A brief period of personal prayer buffered the self-control depletion effect’, wrote the team, whose findings are published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology online.

‘These results are consistent with and contribute to a growing body of work attesting to the beneficial effects of praying on self-control.’

Praying has already been linked in the past to reduced levels of infidelity and alcohol consumption.

Also, I feel that I should mention this interesting study, if we are going to have a Twilight Zone post today. (H/T STR)

Excerpt:

Abstract

We examined whether atheists exhibit evidence of emotional arousal when they dare God to cause harm to themselves and their intimates. In Study 1, the participants (16 atheists, 13 religious individuals) read aloud 36 statements of three different types: God, offensive, and neutral. In Study 2 (N = 19 atheists), ten new stimulus statements were included in which atheists wished for negative events to occur. The atheists did not think the God statements were as unpleasant as the religious participants did in their verbal reports. However, the skin conductance level showed that asking God to do awful things was equally stressful to atheists as it was to religious people and that atheists were more affected by God statements than by wish or offensive statements. The results imply that atheists’ attitudes towards God are ambivalent in that their explicit beliefs conflict with their affective response.

Now, I am blogging about this because it’s interesting, but I would classify this as being in the camp of near-death experiences and the Shroud of Turin. It’s interesting, but it’s not something that I would use to prove anything in a debate. Ever since I read this article from Christianity Today a while back, I’ve been sort of cautious about using prayer studies to argue for anything. Take this prayer study with a grain of salt.