Paramilitaries, Theirs and Ours

The New York Times has an article that reveals the horrors Iranian detainees swept up in the aftermath of the massive protests over voter fraud several weeks ago underwent. Eyewitness accounts of atrocities perpetrated by military and paramilitary groups like the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij that are outside the structure of civilian law enforcement are now leaking out:

Some prisoners say they watched fellow detainees being beaten to death by guards in overcrowded, stinking holding pens. Others say they had their fingernails ripped off or were forced to lick filthy toilet bowls.

The accounts of prison abuse in Iran's postelection crackdown - relayed by relatives and on opposition Web sites - have set off growing outrage among Iranians, including some prominent conservatives. More bruised corpses have been returned to families in recent days, and some hospital officials have told human rights workers that they have seen evidence that well over 100 protesters have died since the vote.

On Tuesday, the government released 140 prisoners in one of several conciliatory gestures aimed at deflecting further criticism. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad issued a letter urging the head of the judiciary to show "Islamic mercy" to the detainees.

I'm glad Mr. Ahmadinejad is concerned about the welfare of the detainees, but I thought the fact that their murders numbered only in the hundreds was already a sign of "Islamic mercy."

Anyway, more details of the abuses - which make Abu Ghraib look like a Sandals resort - can be found at the link.

One of the especially disturbing revelations about the events in Iran is the role played by the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij. Why is this particularly disturbing? Because one of the things President Obama wants to do once he has passed the legislation that is currently before us - health care reform and cap and trade - is to establish a civilian security force that will rival the military in its training and funding. In other words, he envisions a paramilitary force at the government's disposal pretty much like the Iranian mullahs have at theirs:

I wonder if he plans on calling it the Basij. I guess we'll see.

RLC

Can't be Bothered

It seems like the only people in favor of the Democrats' plan for health care reform are people who haven't read the bill.

During a speech at a National Press Club luncheon, House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.), who has apparently decided himself not to read it, questioned the point of being expected to do so. He said:

"I love these [House] members, they get up and say, 'Read the bill.' What good is reading the bill if it's a thousand pages and you don't have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?"

Well, the point, of course, is that you're getting paid by the taxpayers to read it Mr. Conyers, and if you don't have time to do it then it is criminally reckless of you to vote for it. Indeed, anyone who does vote for such a revolutionary piece of legislation without having read it should be subject to impeachment for malfeasance.

Many of those who have read the 1000 page monstrosity tell us that it's a looming disaster. It will, according to many analysts, end private insurance, putting tens of thousands of people out of work. It will take medical decisions away from you and your doctor and place them in the hands of some anonymous bureaucrat in Washington. It will cause procedures like colonoscopies to be rationed so that rather than getting screened every three years screenings could be extended to, say, every six years, thereby increasing your risk of colon cancer. It will increase waiting times for procedures like MRIs and CAT scans from days to months. It will deny certain procedures like joint or heart valve replacements to people who are judged too old, too feeble, or too heavy. The bright, clean clinics and hospitals that make our stays reasonably pleasant today will likely be deemed superfluous and too costly to maintain. And all of these blessings will cost us trillions of dollars over the next two decades.

Before you and your colleagues kill the best medical care system on the planet, Mr. Conyers, please at least have the decency to learn what you're voting for.

RLC

Gangster Government

Rep. Michelle Bachman calls our attention in this video to the economic brutality and corruption involved in the closing of GM car dealerships across the land:

If you're politically connected, you can survive. If not, tough luck. If the Democrats behave this way with the people who own and work for car dealerships, how will they behave when government health care is the only game in town? How much bribery do you think there'll be as people seek to curry favor with congressmen in order to get moved up on the waiting list for a procedure? How much bribery will there be if cap and trade is passed and government bureaucrats control how much carbon a business can use and emit? When government runs things the opportunities for corruption will be massive.

If we want a model of what life will be like if the Democrats get their legislation passed, we might look toward the old Soviet Union. How's that for hope and change?

RLC

Disparate Impact

Shelby Steele, author of White Guilt and Affirmative Action Baby, has a column in the WaPo that I commend to anyone interested in the conversation about race in this country. As he does in his books Steele argues that affirmative action is not so much about helping blacks, it's more about relieving largely white institutions from the burden of guilt for past racial injustice. It's a way of gaining for themselves a kind of racial absolution. Steele writes, for instance, that:

It is important to remember that the original goal of affirmative action was to achieve two redemptions simultaneously. As society gave a preference to its former victims in employment and education, it hoped to redeem both those victims and itself. When America -- the world's oldest and most unequivocal democracy -- finally acknowledged in the 1960s its heartless betrayal of democracy where blacks were concerned, the loss of moral authority was profound. In their monochrome whiteness, the institutions of this society -- universities, government agencies, corporations -- became emblems of the very evil America had just acknowledged.

Affirmative action has always been more about the restoration of legitimacy to American institutions than the uplift of blacks and other minorities. For 30 years after its inception, no one even bothered to measure its effectiveness in minority progress. Advocates of racial preferences tried to prove that these policies actually helped minorities only after 1996, when California's Proposition 209 banned racial preferences in all state institutions, scaring supporters across the country.

But the research following from this scare has .... has completely failed to show that affirmative action ever closes the academic gap between minorities and whites. And failing in this, affirmative action also fails to help blacks achieve true equality with whites -- the ultimate measure of which is parity in skills and individual competence. Without this underlying parity there can never be true equality in employment, income levels, rates of home ownership, educational achievement and the rest.

In order to account for the elusive competitive parity latent racism and discrimination are assumed to be lurking insidiously in the nooks and crannies of society, always working to keep blacks from getting ahead. The proof that these malefactors are still in play is the occurrence of "disparate impact," an indicator not of black failure but of an indelible white racism.

We are headed now, it seems, into a legal thicket created by the incompatibility of two notions of equality: "disparate impact" and "equal protection under the law." The former is a legalism evolved from judicial interpretations of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act; the latter is a constitutional guarantee. Disparate impact lets you presume that an entire class of people has been discriminated against if it has been disproportionately affected by some policy. If no blacks do well enough on a firefighters promotion exam to win advancement while many whites do (Ricci v. DeStefano), then this constitutes discrimination against blacks.

Disparate impact and racial preferences represent the law and policymaking of a guilty America, an America lacking the moral authority to live by the rigors of the Constitution's "equal protection" -- a guarantee that sees victims as individuals and requires hard evidence to prove discrimination. They are "white guilt" legalisms created after the '60s as fast tracks to moral authority. They apologize for presumed white wrongdoing and offer recompense to minorities before any actual discrimination has been documented. Yet these legalisms are much with us now. And it will no doubt take the courts a generation or more to disentangle all this apology from the law.

We blacks know oppression well, but today it is our inexperience with freedom that holds us back almost as relentlessly as oppression once did. Out of this inexperience, for example, we miss the fact that racial preferences and disparate impact can only help us -- even if they were effective -- with a problem we no longer have. The problem that black firefighters had in New Haven was not discrimination; it was the fact that not a single black did well enough on the exam to gain promotion.

Today's "black" problem is underdevelopment, not discrimination. Success in modernity will demand profound cultural changes -- changes in child-rearing, a restoration of marriage and family, a focus on academic rigor, a greater appreciation of entrepreneurialism and an embrace of individual development as the best road to group development.

I'd like to post Steele's complete column, but I refer you instead to the link. There's much more there that's worth considering.

RLC

Stunted Development

According to Strategy Page, as North Korea moves toward chaos with the imminent succession crisis looming when Kim Jong Il dies, South Korea and China are increasingly concerned about the primitiveness of the refugees that are making it out of that prison state:

South Koreans are growing increasingly anxious at the difficulties North Korean refugees are having in adapting to life in a prosperous democracy. There are over 17,000 refugees in South Korea now, and the children do not do well at school. Few get into a university. The adults do poorly in establishing prosperous careers. These refugees are among the most enterprising North Koreans, because of the planning they had to do, and risks they had to take, to get out of the country. But these people are obsessed with basic survival, not personal improvement and advancement, as in South Korea, and the rest of the world.

Sixty years of police state rule up north, plus the 1990s famine, has seriously crippled the initiative and ambition of the northerners. It appears that the North Koreans are much more psychologically damaged, than were the East Germans (and east Europeans in general) after their communist dictatorships collapsed in 1989. This just makes South Korea, and China, even more anxious about a collapse of the North Korean government, while would leave China and South Korea to deal with refugees, and picking up the pieces in general.

Meanwhile, those Norks who can are preparing to flee once the end comes:

Some senior officials are making escape plans, gathering portable wealth and cultivating connections in China that would be useful for a getaway. There is a growing consensus that Kim Jong Il will be gone within three years, and that after that, chaos.

The North Koreans have managed to stunt the development of three generations of their people by forcing them to live in a Marxist paradise. There's a lesson here for the rest of the world: The fewer freedoms a people have the more dehumanized they become.

RLC

No Reform Without Tort Reform

There's a very good column at NRO by Charles Krauthammer on the contradictions in President Obama's health care reform plans. It's these contradictions (some might call them deceptions) that are causing the plans to collapse in Congress and with them, perhaps, Mr. Obama's presidency. As we said last week, if he doesn't get health care he'll probably not get cap and trade or another stimulus bill, and if he doesn't get these he won't be able to accomplish much else over the next three years. He will, in effect, be a lame duck after less than a year in office.

Indeed, after the disastrous week he had last week (staying with the wrong side on Honduras, a weak press conference on health care reform, putting his foot in his mouth on the Gates arrest) it would not be surprising to see his approval ratings drop soon into the low forties.

Anyway, the most important part of Krauthammer's column, in my opinion, was the spotlight he cast on the vast distance between Mr. Obama's claim that his health care reform agenda is not about politics and the absence in any of the Democratic plans of tort reform:

This is not about politics? Then why is it, to take but the most egregious example, that in this grand health-care debate we hear not a word about one of the worst sources of waste in American medicine: the insane cost and arbitrary rewards of our malpractice system?

When a neurosurgeon pays $200,000 a year for malpractice insurance before he even turns on the light in his office or hires his first nurse, who do you think pays? Patients, through higher doctors' fees to cover the insurance.

And with jackpot justice that awards one claimant zillions while others get nothing - and one-third of everything goes to the lawyers - where do you think that money comes from? The insurance companies, who then pass it on to you in higher premiums.

But the greatest waste is the hidden cost of defensive medicine: tests and procedures that doctors order for no good reason other than to protect themselves from lawsuits. Every doctor knows, as I did when I practiced years ago, how much unnecessary medical cost is incurred with an eye not on medicine but on the law.

Tort reform would yield tens of billions in savings. Yet you cannot find it in the Democratic bills. And Obama breathed not a word about it in the full hour of his health-care news conference. Why? No mystery. The Democrats are parasitically dependent on huge donations from trial lawyers.

No plan that does nothing about the cost to health care consumers of malpractice insurance and defensive medicine can really be called "reform." If and when the Democrats address tort reform they should then proceed to clean out the $60 billion in fraud and waste in medicare and medicaid.

Read the rest of Krauthammer's column. It's worth the two minutes it'll take.

RLC

Colombia's War on Drugs

To get a sense of the sort of people our government has chosen to side with in the struggle for control of the Honduran presidency, read the article at Strategy Page on what's going on in Colombia between the Colombian government, the drug lords, and the leftist FARC rebels. Note the role played by Venezuela's president Hugo Chavez and the similarities between ousted Honduran president Manuel Zelaya, Chavez, and Ecuadorean president Rafael Correia. Here's how the report begins:

The first six months of 2009 was a bad time for the drug gangs, and leftist rebels like FARC and ELN. In those six months, security forces launched over 10,000 raids, patrols and other operations against rebels and gangsters. This resulted in 834 battles, leading to the deaths of 307 rebels and their allies. Over 600 FARC camps were found and destroyed, and nearly 1,300 rebel attacks were disrupted. Some 4,000 rebels were disarmed (nearly 40 percent just from FARC). The army lost 75 troops, with another 279 wounded.

The increasing pressure on drug gangs along the Pacific and Caribbean coasts has led to increased exports of cocaine to Europe and the Middle East, via Africa. Some drug lords, like Daniel Rendon, responded to the increased pressure by offering his gunmen a $1,000 bonus for each policeman or soldier they kill. This sort of thing has happened before in South America, and usually results in more dead gangsters, and the police are less likely to try and capture armed criminals, fearing that the crooks are actually out looking for the bounty money. For Rendon, the bounty offer quickly led to his capture, and the demise of his bounty offer.

Government intel has uncovered a six month effort by FARC to get Russian made, SA-24, portable surface-to-air missiles from Venezuela. FARC has already received Swedish AT4 (bunker buster) portable rocket launchers from Venezuela, and some of these have been captured by the army.

Read the rest of this report at the link and bear in mind that our president and state department are on the same side of the Honduran imbroglio as those like Chavez and Correia who are supporting the rebels and the drug lords.

RLC

Birthers

Just because President Obama is trying to turn the U.S. into a third-world country doesn't mean that he was born in one. National Review Online editors think that we've had enough on the matter of whether Mr. Obama is constitutionally eligible to hold the office he's in, and I agree.

I don't have to see his original birth certificate, if such a document even exists, but it would be nice if we could have a peek at his academic records. I'm perfectly willing to believe Mr. Obama was born in Hawaii, but I'm really curious about whether he ever took a course in economics.

RLC

Myopic Agnosticism

We mentioned the other day Brad Pitt's claim that he was "probably 20 per cent atheist and 80 per cent agnostic. I don't think anyone really knows. You'll either find out or not when you get there, until then there's no point thinking about it." Mr. Pitt is laboring under a misconception that's common in our culture that agnosticism is a completely different epistemic category than atheism.

That's not quite so. Atheism is the lack of belief in a God or gods. It comes in at least two varieties which I prefer to call "hard atheism" and "soft atheism." The hard atheist makes the bold and metaphysically indefensible claim that there is no God or gods. I say this is indefensible because it claims as truth something we can simply not know.

If there is a God presumably that is something that could be known, i.e. if God revealed Himself to us either in this life or the next, but if there is no God no one could ever discover the fact. So hard atheism is philosophically naive.

The soft atheist claims more modestly that God may exist but as yet he has seen insufficient evidence to warrant belief that He does. This is agnosticism, and it's a form of soft atheism because the agnostic lacks a belief in God but is, hypothetically at least, willing to entertain that God may exist.

When Pitt says there's not much point in thinking about whether God exists he's telling us that he lacks a belief in God but doesn't much care one way or the other. This is really a kind of soft atheism, probably very common in our secularized culture, that perhaps we could call short-sighted, or myopic, agnosticism.

RLC

Can't Have Both

Mark Krikorian writes at NRO's The Corner to fill us in on some of the new health care reform proposal's more unsavory provisions. Here's one:

Democrats have stopped even pretending to try to keep illegals from being covered by Obamacare - they rejected an amendment that would have required Obamacare applicants to be screened with the same eligibility-screening database as used for welfare applicants, thus guaranteeing that lots of illegal aliens would receive taxpayer-funded health care. Even legal immigration would be subsidized. Jim Edward's NRO piece exposed a fascinating wrinkle - you can sponsor an immigrant so long as your income is 25% above poverty, but Obamacare would expand Medicaid to those earning 50% above poverty. So, as Jim wrote, "The end result would be that someone poor enough to qualify for Medicaid would be able to sponsor new immigrants to the U.S. What are the chances that these newcomers sponsored by Medicaid recipients would be able to afford health insurance when their sponsors can't?"

Obviously, the Obamacare proposal is an abomination and Congress needs to throw it out and start from scratch. But whatever they come up with, the lesson for immigration is unchanged - in an era when we have massive transfers of taxpayer funds to the poor, whether through Medicaid or food stamps or public-education funding or whatever, you just can't keep importing more and more poor people. The libertarians will say the answer is to abolish all of these taxpayer-funded programs; but even if that's true, until we do abolish them, ongoing mass immigration is simply unjustifiable.

Either shut down illegal immigration or shut down the welfare state. As we're seeing in California you have to do one or the other. If we don't it won't be long before Americans are sneaking across the border to Mexico to try to find work.

RLC

Authenticity

After listening to so many African-American talking heads on cable news offer thoughtless, knee jerk endorsements of Professor Gates' tantrum and the President's foolish decision to inject himself into the matter of Gates' arrest, it's refreshing to listen to these black cops speak in support of officer Crowley:

If liberal America wants to see what race relations could be like in America if we'd just start seeing each other as people and not as identity groups they should watch this video.

RLC

<i>Taken </i> and Torture

I watched the movie Taken starring Liam Neeson the other night and wondered what those who think that torture is absolutely wrong would say about Neeson's character's behavior. Neeson plays a retired CIA operative named Bryan Mills whose daughter is kidnapped in Paris by Albanian sex slave traders.

Mills sets out after his daughter and her kidnappers, leaving mayhem and carnage in his wake, in a pursuit that strains credulity but nevertheless wins the viewer's forgiveness because it's, well, interesting. Along the way Mills resorts to some rather unorthodox means of interrogation and it was here that I wondered about the anti-torture absolutists.

Let us, just for the sake of discussion, imagine that a man's daughter had really been kidnapped and sold into sex slavery, and the man found it necessary, in order to find and rescue her, to use methods which would give Eric Holder and Barack Obama an attack of the vapors. Would the anti-torture absolutist maintain that the man did the wrong thing?

Now if you are such an absolutist, before you answer the question you have to subject yourself to the movie, otherwise you might not appreciate the dilemma Bryan Mills faced. So, have at it. Let me know if you blame Mills for using torture or if you think he was justified, but only if you've seen the movie first.

RLC

Bumper Sticker

Seen in Florida:

"You don't see Obama stickers on cars going to work."

Unfortunately, if we get cap and trade and the Democrat version of health reform, you won't see many cars going to work.

RLC

Throw Granny Off the Train

Betsy McCoughey at the New York Post fills us in on the disturbing views of two of President Obama's close medical advisors. The first is Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, brother of Mr. Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. Here's what Ms. McCoughey tells us about Dr. Emanuel. Read it carefully and think about the kind of world these men would lead us to:

Savings, [Dr. Emanuel] writes, will require changing how doctors think about their patients: Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously, "as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of the cost or effects on others."

Yes, that's what patients want their doctors to do. But Emanuel wants doctors to look beyond the needs of their patients and consider social justice, such as whether the money could be better spent on somebody else.

Many doctors are horrified by this notion; they'll tell you that a doctor's job is to achieve social justice one patient at a time.

Emanuel, however, believes that "communitarianism" should guide decisions on who gets care. He says medical care should be reserved for the non-disabled, not given to those "who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens . . . An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia."

Translation: Don't give much care to a grandmother with Parkinson's or a child with cerebral palsy.

He explicitly defends discrimination against older patients: "Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age. Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years."

The bills being rushed through Congress will be paid for largely by a $500 billion-plus cut in Medicare over 10 years. Knowing how unpopular the cuts will be, the president's budget director, Peter Orszag, urged Congress this week to delegate its own authority over Medicare to a new, presidentially-appointed bureaucracy that wouldn't be accountable to the public.

Since Medicare was founded in 1965, seniors' lives have been transformed by new medical treatments such as angioplasty, bypass surgery and hip and knee replacements. These innovations allow the elderly to lead active lives. But Emanuel criticizes Americans for being too "enamored with technology" and is determined to reduce access to it.

Dr. David Blumenthal, another key Obama adviser, agrees. He recommends slowing medical innovation to control health spending.

Blumenthal has long advocated government health-spending controls, though he concedes they're "associated with longer waits" and "reduced availability of new and expensive treatments and devices." But he calls it "debatable" whether the timely care Americans get is worth the cost. (Ask a cancer patient, and you'll get a different answer. Delay lowers your chances of survival.)

Obama appointed Blumenthal as national coordinator of health-information technology, a job that involves making sure doctors obey electronically delivered guidelines about what care the government deems appropriate and cost effective.

In the April 9 New England Journal of Medicine, Blumenthal predicted that many doctors would resist "embedded clinical decision support" -- a euphemism for computers telling doctors what to do.

Americans need to know what the president's health advisers have in mind for them. Emanuel sees even basic amenities as luxuries and says Americans expect too much: "Hospital rooms in the United States offer more privacy . . . physicians' offices are typically more conveniently located and have parking nearby and more attractive waiting rooms."

Evidently, convenience and comfort are amenities we should not expect in Dr. Emanuel's, and thus Barack Obama's, brave new world. Nor should we expect care for those beyond a certain age, the quality of their lives representing an expense the state shouldn't have to bear.

No one has leveled with the public about these dangerous views. Nor have most people heard about the arm-twisting, Chicago-style tactics being used to force support. In a Nov. 16, 2008, Health Care Watch column, Emanuel explained how business should be done: "Every favor to a constituency should be linked to support for the health-care reform agenda. If the automakers want a bailout, then they and their suppliers have to agree to support and lobby for the administration's health-reform effort."

Do we want a "reform" that empowers people like this to decide for us?

We've noted in the past that modern progressives are kissing cousins to 20th century totalitarian fascists. Drs. Emanuel and Blumenthal do nothing to dispel that notion. That President Obama is quietly surrounding himself with such men - Dr. John Holdren, his science czar, being another like-minded advisor - is not just disturbing, it's frightening.

RLC

Who Are the Uninsured?

The administration and its allies in the health care debate keep reminding us of the urgency of extending health insurance coverage to the 47 million people in this country who don't have it, but who are these people who are uninsured?

It turns out that most of them could be covered under existing plans, and many of the rest are illegal aliens and shouldn't be covered anyway.

Ramirez breaks it down for us:

See here for more data on the uninsured.

RLC

Presidential Prayer

President Obama has admitted something (besides that he's a smoker) certain to win him the enmity of liberals everywhere. After all, it was just such an admission by George Bush that got him clobbered by the secular left, so we can expect that these folks'll be similarly dismayed and scornful of Mr. Obama:

President Barack Obama says he's gone from praying nightly before going to bed to praying all the time because he has a "lot of stuff" on his plate and needs "guidance all the time."

Obama made the comments in an interview to air Thursday on ABC's "Nightline."

Obama says he thinks every president has been humbled by the number of issues they have had to deal with. He says he thinks they are quickly cured of the illusion that one person can solve all those problems.

When George Bush acknowledged his dependence upon prayer he was mercilessly ridiculed by some in the lefty media for thinking he had God's ear and that God might actually give him guidance. Surely, the sense of fairness and objectivity prized by such people will lead them to begin directing the same sort of scoffing and jeering at President Obama any day now.

Why are you laughing?

RLC

Common Sense

Susan Estrich is a liberal Democrat who has managed Democrat campaigns and served as an advisor to President Clinton and other Democrat politicians. She certainly has no political axe to grind so it's interesting that she would write this column, not because it brings a needed dose of common sense to the health care debate but because it makes President Obama seem kind of, well, irresponsible. Here's an excerpt:

The president is "not familiar" with the bill. No one can explain how it will work yet, as Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., told a contentious town meeting. There are various plans, and negotiations are still in the early stages. But whatever it is, we should be for it.

Am I missing something?

We're only talking about our health and our kids' health, the things my mother, may she rest in peace, told me a thousand times are the only things worth caring about. If you have your health, you have everything. And if you don't, what in the world matters more than the best health care in the world, which is found right here?

Not by everybody, mind you, and not cheaply, for anybody. No one's suggesting for a moment that there aren't major problems with both access and cost. But the best health care in the world is still here, and before we take steps that could make things much worse, I'd like to be very certain that they will indeed make things much better.

Read the rest of her essay at the link.

RLC

Minimally Conscious State

Some people have been saying this along, but now there's solid evidence to back it up. Not everyone who is in a coma is completely unaware of what's happening to them. More significantly, some who are diagnosed as comatose are able to feel pain but unable to communicate that fact. New Scientist has the story. Here's part of it:

If there's one thing worse than being in a coma, it's people thinking you are in one when you aren't. Yet a new comparison of methods for detecting consciousness suggests that around 40 per cent of people diagnosed as being in a vegetative state are in fact "minimally conscious".

In the worst case scenario, such misdiagnoses could influence the decision to allow a patient to die, even though they have some vestiges of consciousness. But crucially it may deprive patients of treatments to make them more comfortable, more likely to recover, or to allow them to communicate with family, say researchers.

In a vegetative state (VS), reflexes are intact and the patient can breathe unaided, but there is no awareness. A minimally conscious state (MCS) is a sort of twilight zone, only recently recognised, in which people may feel some physical pain, experience some emotion, and communicate to some extent. However, because consciousness is intermittent and incomplete in MCS, it can be sometimes very difficult to tell the difference between the two.

Of the 44 patients diagnosed as being in a vegetative state by the clinicians, the researchers diagnosed 18, or 41 per cent, as being in a MCS according to the CRS-R.

"We may have become much too comfortable about our ability to detect consciousness," concludes Joseph Giacino who did the study at the JFK Rehabilitation Institute in New Jersey. "I think it's appropriate for there to be some level of alarm about this."

I think that's a considerable understatement. Remember the smug confidence bordering on arrogance of those who argued that Terry Schiavo could be starved and dehydrated to death without experiencing pain? I wonder what they're saying now.

RLC

The Curious Case of Brad Pitt

Hot Air links us to an interview with actor Brad Pitt at BILD.com. Pitt is being interviewed on the occasion of a release of an upcoming movie and seemingly out of the blue he's asked the following:

BILD: Have you found happiness in life?

Brad Pitt (nodding): Hm - yes. I am on the path I want to be on."

BILD: Do you believe in God?

Pitt (smiling): "No, no, no!"

BILD: Is your soul spiritual?

Pitt: "No, no, no! I'm probably 20 per cent atheist and 80 per cent agnostic. I don't think anyone really knows. You'll either find out or not when you get there, until then there's no point thinking about it.

No point thinking about it? What could be more important to think about? I'm reminded of a couple of lines from Samuel Johnson:

"It is astonishing that any man can forbear enquiring seriously whether there is a God; whether God is just; whether this life is the only state of existence. These are the questions every reasonable person ought to consider with an attention suitable to their importance."

I guess when you're a movie star and you've made important films and dated important women you don't need to think about what it all amounts to so much. Blaise Pascal was intrigued by this uncurious approach to life and describes the strangeness of it in this ironical fashion:

"I know not who sent me into the world, nor what the world is, nor what I myself am. I am terribly ignorant of everything...

I see the terrifying immensity of the universe which surrounds me, and find myself limited to one corner of this vast expanse...

All I know is that I must soon die, but what I understand least of all is this very death which I cannot escape. As I know not whence I come, so I know not whither I go. I only know that on leaving this world I fall for ever into nothingness or into the hands of a wrathful God, without knowing to which of these two states I shall be everlastingly consigned. Such is my condition, full of weakness and uncertainty.

From all this I conclude that I ought to spend every day of my life without seeking to know my fate. I might perhaps be able to find a solution to my doubts; but I cannot be bothered to do so, I will not take one step towards its discovery."

It sounds like Pascal is describing Mr. Pitt, but perhaps his cognitive faculties suffered so much damage in Fight Club that his curiosity about things that really matter has atrophied.

RLC

Graceless

The President seems intent on making himself look both small and obtuse in the matter of the arrest of professor Henry Louis Gates of Harvard. His comment was:

"With all the problems facing the nation, it doesn't make sense to arrest a guy in his own home if he's not causing a serious disturbance."

What do the problems facing the nation have to do with the arrest? Should the police stop doing their job just because the nation has problems? If all the problems were resolved would the arrest of professor Gates have then been in order? Was this an intelligent thing for the President to say?

Then White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, questioned about the flap as the president headed for two health care events in Cleveland, stressed that Obama "was not calling the officer stupid." He said Obama felt that "at a certain point the situation got far out of hand."

Well, Mr. Gibbs is splitting rhetorical hairs. The President of the United States said that the police, i.e. officer Crowley, acted stupidly. That's pretty much the same thing as calling him stupid, and it's certainly demeaning for an individual law enforcement official to be personally insulted on a nationally televised press conference by the most powerful man in the world.

Officer Crowley was insulted and President Obama was diminished. What on earth is the President of the United States doing calling a local policeman's actions stupid? Why did he feel that this was something, given all the problems the nation is facing, that he should comment upon at all? I can't imagine George Bush doing anything so graceless.

RLC