Tag Archives: Europe

News

Norwegian authorities seize Indian couple’s children for feeding them by hand

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From the UK Daily Mail.

Excerpt:

An Indian couple have had their children taken away by Norwegian social workers because they were feeding them with their hands and sleeping in the same bed as them.

Anurup and Sagarika Bhattacharya lost custody of their three-year-old son and one-year-old daughter eight months ago after authorities branded their behaviour inappropriate.

[…]Norwegian Child Protection Services removed the youngsters from their home in May, 2011, leaving their parents horrified with the outcome of the report.

Father Anurup told Indian television channel NDTV: ‘They told me ‘why are you sleeping with the children in the same bed?’.

‘(I told them) this is also a purely cultural issue. We never leave the children in another room and say goodnight to them.’

Anurup added: ‘Feeding a child with the hand is normal in Indian tradition and when the mother is feeding with a spoon there could be phases when she was overfeeding the child.

‘They said it was force feeding. These are basically cultural differences.’

[…]The parents have been told that they can only see their children twice a year, for an hour during each visit until the kids turn 18 when they will no longer be bound by the current restrictions under current Norwegian law.

Norway’s Child Protective Service has come under much scrutiny in the past for excessive behaviour in their handling of child cruelty.

Lawyer Svein Kjetil Lode Svendsen said: ‘There has been a report in UN in 2005 which criticized Norway for taking too many children in public care.

‘The amount was 12,500 children and Norway is a small country.’

With the Bhattacharyas’ visas set to expire in March, they have revealed that they will be forced to stay against their will until the return of their infants.

Norway is a welfare state with a big intrusive government and small citizens. But Norway isn’t the only European country that likes to seize children from their families.

This article about homeschooling in Sweden was just posted this week.

Excerpt:

A leader of Sweden’s Liberal Party last week called for a change in the country’s social services law so that the government can take children away from home-schooling families more easily by allowing social workers to do so.

The call for the change comes amidst already stringent penalties in Sweden for home schooling. The Home School Legal Defense Association and Alliance Defense Fund have applied to the European Court of Human Rights on behalf of one family whose child was abducted by the government in 2009 and have filed a brief in a Swedish appellate court on behalf of another family fined an amount equivalent to $26,000 U.S..

Liberal Party politician Lotta Edholm called for the change to the country’s social services law in a Jan. 10 column in Aftonbladet, a prominent Swedish newspaper. Edholm then wrote on her blog: “Today I write with Ann-Katrin Aslund on Aftonbladet’s debate page that the social services law should be amended so that social services are able to intervene when children are kept away from school by their parents—often for religious or ideological reasons.”

This kind of thing happens all the time in Europe. It happens in Germany. It happens in France. It happens in the UK. This is what secular leftists believe – that children are the property of the state, citizens of the world, and they should not be overly influenced by their parents. It’s the government’s job to decide what children will believe, not the parents. The parents are just there to work to pay the taxes for the public day cares, public schools and social workers.

News

Only one Democrat senator voted to limit future IMF bailouts for Europe

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Sen. Jim Demint
Sen. Jim Demint

First, a quick re-cap on Jim Demint’s Amendment 501, which would have prevented the IMF from using $108 billion of American money to bail out foreign nations.

Excerpt:

The Senate on Wednesday defeated an amendment in a 44-55 vote that would have prevented the International Monetary Fund (IMF) from using $108 billion in U.S. monies to bail out foreign nations.

The author of the amendment, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), said he is concerned that the IMF is using U.S. funds to rescue irresponsible nations and banks. He said the U.S. can no longer afford to offer such aid.

“There is no excuse for us giving away money around the world when we cannot even keep our promises here in America today, promises we have made to our seniors, promises we have made to our veterans,” said DeMint.

Now, Jim explains in the Wall Street Journal why 55 Democrat senators shouldn’t have voted against it.

Excerpt:

If the United States wants to help Europe find a way out of its current debt crisis, we must be a strong, world economic leader, not merely the lender of last resort.

American taxpayers sent $40 billion to Greece last year, through the International Monetary Fund, to stave off an economic collapse. But the bailout did not prevent Greece’s day of fiscal reckoning. It only delayed it. Austerity measures are still needed throughout Europe’s socialized economy and the debt contagion has not been stopped. Financial chaos has spread from Greece to Ireland, Portugal, Italy and Spain, and it now threatens the very future of the 17-member euro zone.

Undeterred, President Obama last month told the press after breaking from a closed-door meeting with European leaders, “the United States stands ready to do our part to help them resolve this issue.” He would do better to focus his attention stateside. The most dangerous threat to the U.S. economy is not across the pond. It’s in the swampland of Washington, D.C.

[…]Greece’s economy reached its tipping point and was bailed out when government debt topped 137% of its gross domestic product. Despite all the measures that have been taken to aid it, Greece’s debt-to-GDP-ratio is even higher now, at 160%. Ireland was bailed out at 74% of GDP and is now at 80%. Portugal was bailed out at 94% of GDP and is now expected to top 100%. The bailouts have arguably made the European debt crisis worse, not better.

Total U.S. debt, including entitlement liabilities, reached 100% of GDP when Congress increased the debt ceiling in August. Our $15 trillion debt now rivals the size of the entire U.S. economy.

When he first took office, President Obama promised to cut the federal deficit in half by 2013. But instead he’s increased it by more than $4 trillion. Indeed, under his direction, the U.S. government spent about $1 trillion on a Keynesian-style stimulus that failed to create the jobs promised, will spend trillions more creating a European-style health-care entitlement with ObamaCare, and has more Americans on welfare than ever before.

[…]This year the U.S. sent about $67 billion to the IMF, which represents 17.7% of the IMF’s yearly budget—nearly three times more than any other nation. On top of that, taxpayers provided an additional $108 billion credit line to the IMF in 2009.

In 2010, the IMF sent nearly $40 billion in assistance to Greece, which did nothing to prevent the country’s economic collapse in 2011. On Monday, the IMF approved another $2.95 billion worth of bailout funds for the struggling country.

[…]Earlier this year, I offered an amendment to repeal the IMF’s authority to use the additional $108 billion credit line to provide any more bailouts. It was overwhelmingly rejected by the Democrat-controlled Senate. Forty-four senators voted for it; only one was a Democrat.

This has to stop. We have to stop electing people who don’t believe that people are responsible to create their own wealth, instead of stealing it from others – and impoverishing generations yet unborn. The right way to solve economic problems is to create the conditions that incentivize people to create wealth, not to discourage them by confiscating what they earn. There is a problem in Europe right now – huge numbers of benefits are being taken from those who produce (the private sector) and given to those who don’t (the public sector). The first step is to stop the bailouts.

Donald Sensing posted some thoughts from Abraham Lincoln on his blog that seem appropriate for this post.

Excerpt:

If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.

Any society that takes away from those most capable and gives to the least will perish.

Few can be induced to labor exclusively for posterity. Posterity has done nothing for us.

No man is good enough to govern another man without that other man’s consent.

You cannot build character and courage by taking away man’s initiative and independence.

Let every man remember that to violate the law is to trample on the blood of his father, and to tear the charter of his own and his children’s liberty. Let reverence for the laws … become the political religion of the nation.

If ever this free people, if this Government itself is ever utterly demoralized, it will come from this incessant human wriggle and struggle for office, which is but a way to live without work.

We have to distrust each other. It’s our only defense against betrayal.

Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle.

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.

Property is the fruit of labor; property is desirable; is a positive good in the world. That some should be rich shows that others may become rich and, hence, is just encouragement to industry and enterprise. Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him labor diligently and build one for himself, thus, by example, assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built.

It has ever been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.

I understand that stealing money from working people and their employers and giving it to lazy people is an important goal for Democrat politicians, because it builds up their self-esteem and it makes them feel admired and popular. But it’s not their money. They need to stop. Obama’s desire to “spread the wealth around” is not a moral policy, it’s an immoral policy – because it’s not his wealth. He didn’t produce it.

News

Evaluating common criticisms of American health care

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Here is a must-read article from my friend Matt Palumbo at the American Thinker. It’s extremely high quality. (I removed the links in my excerpt – but he linked all the sources in his post)

Excerpt:

The oft-cited “46 million uninsured” is breathtakingly easy to break down to size.  Keep in mind that there is overlap in the following statistics, as many people listed in them belong to multiple categories.  Around 10 million of the uninsured aren’t even citizens.  Another 8 million are aged 18-24, which is the group least prone to medical problems.  The average salary of a person in this age group is $31,790, so affording health care would not be a problem.  Seventeen million of the uninsured make over $50,000 a year, and within that group, 8 million make over $75,000.  These people are usually referred to as the “voluntarily uninsured.”  Another large group of these 46 million are uninsured in name only, as they are eligible for government programs that they haven’t signed up for.  Estimates on how large this group is vary, the range being from 5.4 million as estimated by the Kaiser Family Foundation to as large as one third of all the uninsured, as estimated by BlueCross BlueShield.  The number of people without care because they cannot afford it is around 6 million — still a large number, but a fraction of 46 million, and no reason to restructure the entire health care system.

Then comes the issue of lifespan.  Of all attempts to discredit the American system, lifespan has been the worst.  Although lifespan gives a good indicator of a nation’s health at a glance, it does have its problems under analysis.  We get a strange paradox when examining two statistics: life expectancy and cancer survival rates.  Estimates vary on how we rank exactly; the World Fact Book showing that we rank as poorly as 50th worldwide.  Even the best estimates in our favor place us far behind most developed nations.  Despite this, the United States excels at cancer survival.  Of the 16 most common cancers, the United States has the highest survival rate for 13 of them.  Overall, the five-year cancer survival rate for men in the States is 66.3%, and 47.3% in Europe.  Women have an advantage too, with a survival rate of 62.9% in the States, and 55.8% in Europe.  So that said, how is it that our system takes better care of us, and doesn’t grant added lifespan to boot?  Quite simply, the lifespan measurement commonly cited doesn’t factor in many variables which shorten lifespan, many of which medical care cannot prevent.  Among these factors are murders, suicides, obesity, and accidents.

He looks at the uninsured number, the infant mortality rate, and other interesting things in the article, showing how the statistics that impugn the US health care system have been misused. There are some good articles linked, like this post from Commentary magazine by Scott Atlas, entitled “The Worst Study Ever?”. Atlas is the same guy who listed out how the US health care system compares to others, which I blogged about before.

You can check out Matt’s blog “The Conscience of a Young Conservative“. Not sure how scalable that blog name is. Because of the “young” part, not because of the conscience or conservative part.