"This case is about a doctor who killed babies and endangered women," the thing begins. After reading the first eight pages--according to Adobe Reader, that is, not the numbers on the pages--I'm already horrified.
And then I read page nine. Yeesh. And there's this damning bit of text on page ten:
Only in one class of cases did Gosnell exercise any real care with these dangerous sedatives. On those rare occasions when the patient was a white woman from the suburbs, Gosnell insisted that he be consulted at every step. When an employee asked him why, he said it was “the way of the world.”In other words, Gosnell knew that if his butcher shop killed a white woman, there for an illegal late-term abortion, he'd end up in the soup. But the various black women? No one cares about them, so it's fine? (Is Gosnell a "self-hating black"?)
Elizabeth Scalia has written several pieces on this story, but the linked one includes the following, which I think is chock-full of important questions a truly unbiased press would be asking:
* Nail salons and Tattoo shops are inspected twice year; Gosnell’s practice had not been inspected in 17 years. Why were inspections suspended? Is it common for abortion clinics to be bypassed? Does that not encourage unsafe, unsanitary conditions to flourish?Nearly all these questions can be answered by saying, "Because the abortion lobby wanted it that way." The problem is, that makes the supporters of abortion-as-contraception look like murderous lunatics.
* Would Gosnell have severed baby feet and kept them like trophies if he had any fear of surprise inspections? Could regular inspections have saved women’s lives? Did political pressure from abortion advocates precipitate end of inspections, limited regulations?
...
* Did ERs treating women with infections, perforated uteruses and colons, or uterine abscesses due to filth and unrecovered fetal remains not report Gosnell to the Health Department and the Medical Licensing Board? In the Grand Jury report, one of Gosnell’s untrained workers, Marcella Stanley Choung, says she filed a complaint with the Department of State, but the department “never acted on it”. Why not?
* Poor, minority women were anesthetized by untrained 15 year-olds, and frequently delivered their late-term (often living) babies into toilets, with no doctor present. At trial testimony we hear, “white women got more and better treatment”. How does this speak to the treatment of underprivileged women. Could this sort of treatment every be ignored if it touched monied white women? If there is a “war on women” isn’t this a trench worth fighting in?
...
* Is the Gosnell story a moment the president can lead us through?
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* Why are [abortion advocates] angry about laws meant to better-regulate abortion clinics?
* Why was Gosnell holding on to all those fetal remains in freezers? Is there a market for fetal tissue that encourages late-term abortion?
The national media has been, more or less, shamed into taking some notice of the story, but you can expect any coverage of it to be spun and minimized in order to keep the most horrifying details silent. The whole thing will be presented as a problem with Kermit Gosnell, not the abortion industry in general; and you can bet your last dollar that none of the major media stories will focus on how rich Kermit Gosnell got from running his abortion mill.
This story is a real problem for supporters of abortion-as-contraception, because this is what it looks like, especially in the inner city. It looks exactly the same as the so-called "back alley" abortion sites because exactly the same kind of people are running them. The conditions are no different because this is how it is.
There had been no inspections of Gosnell's clinic for seventeen years because if there had been it might have been closed, which would have meant some women might not have had abortions--and the people who support abortion-as-contraception find that intolerable. It's why they oppose cooling-off periods for abortions. It's why they insist that the baby is only a human being if the mother wants it, regardless of viability outside the womb. It's why they don't care about women dying in slaughterhouses like Gosnell's: the abortions must continue unabated, so no butcher shops must close for any reason.
...so it's not surprising that, by and large, leftists are huge abortion proponents. It's not surprising that they lie about hoping that abortion is rare. It's not surprising because leftism is a bloody ideology, and its successes are built on a mountain of human skulls.
* * *
This just made my jaw drop. Karl Denninger writes about an article in Forbes which discusses the prevalence of pedophiles in state government, getting--of course--a pass from law enforcement etc in those self-same state governments.
There is a national crisis of federal employees engaged in the child porn industry and a related epidemic at the state level. I’ve documented two states, Vermont and Maine, that appear to be running state protected child trafficking rings with evidence of cops, judges, lawyers, clergy and government employees covering for each other. This kind of racketeering creates powerful, and extremely profitable, pedophile rings.So, there you have it. If you're a pedo, just get yourself to Maine or Vermont, become a cop or something similar, and you're in like flint.
If you're a suburban mom who just dropped off some film at Walmart to get pictures of "baby's first bath" developed, you're a dangerous pedophile and you're gonna get no-knocked very soon by a SWAT team armed with automatic weapons. Your kids will be taken from you and you'll spend a long time in jail.
If you're a judge in Maine or Vermont who likes to diddle little boys and you know the right people, no one's even going to say anything to you. And an irate father who attempts violence on you because you raped his kid? That guy goes to jail...if he's lucky enough to live that long.
Hooray for "rule of law"! It sure works in modern America!
*sigh*
* * *
Really going to lighten up now, because this shit's seriously depressing.
Vista never seemed slow to me. Of course, I bought a new computer with Vista already installed on it, and that computer is a dual-core Pentium D running at 3 GHz. After bumping the memory, it ran fine.
No, all the problems I had with Vista came from none of my f-ing software works. That was fixed a few months after Vista's release, though, and I haven't had much trouble in that regard since then.
"Would you rather have the Windows 8 bizarro world interface or the Vista rolling whorehouse pimpmobile interface?" Asks the post. I don't think of Vista's interface as anything of the sort. Of course, the first thing I did was set my start menu to "classic", because it works. The default start menu for XP and later versions of Windows has this deal where it shows you only the stuff you access the most often, and you must click something to see all the stuff you've got installed. I hate having to take an extra step to see everything.
Vista Premium has some neat bells and whistles, but they're not worth the extra money.
One thing I'm amazed by: a quick search on Pricewatch.com shows that Vista is still selling for full price. It's now two generations obsolete, since Win 7 and Win 8 have been released, but you can't get it for less than $80.
I'm still thinking that I'd like to upgrade my desktop to 64-bit Vista and increase the memory to the machine's maximum (8 GB); that would go a long way towards maximizing the thing's performance--but by the time you add up the OS and the memory, you're approaching "new machine" territory. Pity I can't pay a few bucks just to upgrade my OS to 64 bit, but that would mean that I wouldn't have to buy an entirely new license from Microsoft.
PC distributors get a price break from Microsoft on what they pay for OS licenses, but the retail price is a hefty chunk of median machines. A new machine with a Core i5 processor and 4 GB of RAM runs around $530 (Gateway) and if a new Win 8 license is over $100 at retail, well--
I say "median" because low-end machines are flirting with the $300 price point. You do not get a lot of processor for that money, but in all probability it's enough to do 90% of what people do with computers these days. Just remember: I spent $136 on building El-Hazard, and it will do everything a typical office worker would need to do. And it runs Vista splendidly.
El-Hazard would have cost around $170 if I'd needed a hard drive and picked my cheapest option. That would have been perhaps a 160 GB drive in 2.5" form factor, and that would have worked just fine for a typical office computer.
If I could just get a f-ing video card that would work in the thing, I could play WoW on it. Yeah.
Vista ran "okay" on Jurai, which is a P3 running at 1 GHz with 1 GB of RAM, but I never really tried to do much with it. It shipped with WinME and I never had any serious trouble with that OS, so I never felt the need to upgrade it. Everything I wanted to do, I could do without trouble.
When I think about what upgrade I'd most like to do to this machine, I inevitably conclude that all I really want is to get a bigger monitor. This one's 22" diagonally, and I think something about 27" would be splendid. I could use a 27" LCD TV, in fact, and connect via the HDMI port; that's how most video cards connect, now, and DVI is virtually an afterthought. (My video card has a dongle for converting DVI to HDMI, so that's not an issue.)
I ran WoW to the blab slab once that way and it looked gorgeous. I could almost--almost--see moving the 'slab into the computer room, mounting it over my desk, and using it as my monitor...but that's a bit much for word processing, really. I'd have to move my chair back a fair piece from the desk to do anything, even playing WoW.
Overkill. And to make it truly usable I'd have to do far too much futzing around with software settings, anyway. Frustrating, nitpicky fiddly stuff--so that's out.
* * *
I'm making a to-do list:
* Get MGB back on the road, fix the problems, and sold. ASAP, to take advantage of summer weather.It's quite an ambitious list, isn't it? All it takes is money (except for "clean the garage") which means it's all down to GET A JOB, MORON. Well, I'm trying; problem is there ain't much out there that doesn't involve "Do you want fries with that?" and every time I've applied for something unskilled lately I've been rejected out of hand. *sigh*
* Get Fiero put back together and back on the road.
* Get the dirt bike back together and street legal. (I have nearly all the parts I need to do this.)
* Remove all the useless shit from the garage and clean it so Mrs. Fungus can store her car inside when the MGB is sold.
* Convert my parts washer to use a solvent that works.
* Implement my air conditioner-door idea so I can work in the garage even when it's stifling hot outside.
* New chain for road bike; also, check the valve clearance, get a tune-up, and sync the carbs.
* * *
Culver's has brought back the pub burger. Guess where I'm going for dinner?