Treat Your Prostate Well

"Men over the age of 75 should no longer be screened for prostate cancer....." is the first sentence of a story in the Aug 5th, 2008 Los Angeles Times. A front page story. Above the fold. It must be important.

Seems a federal panel (uh, yeah, another one of those!) says that the potential psychological and physical harm of seniors learning they have prostate cancer outweighs the benefits of treating it. Some doctors argue against treating prostate cancer in those over 75 because they might die from something else anyway. Think of the many and sundry implications of that mindset!

Anyone can die anytime from any of hundreds of causes, but if a guy gets shot in the leg do you just let him bleed because he might get hit by a car tomorrow?

Other doctors, fortunately, take the opposite view, saying that this is a ploy by HMO lawyers to save their firms' money, and that it's a form of ageism. It'd also be easy to make a case (since it was a "federal panel," that they want to exclude the elderly from treatment to save medicare money.

My view is slightly different. Many doctors, especially the federal ones, look forward to a fully socialized, nationalized medical industry. The realistic ones already realize that under socialized medicine, service to the public will and must deteriorate and ultimately be rationed. "Important people--politicians, and industrialists and businessmen who toe the line with them, will continue to get the best medical care. The rest of us will wait in a line. The only way the line will move forward, is when the dead are pulled out of the line in front of you.

In time, as medicine deteriorates, even medical care for the elites will slide, but the elites don't think that far ahead. It won't occur to an ex-President, for example, that after age 75, or 70, or however bad it gets, that he's just another old man.

Waiting in line.

"Do you know what it takes to perform a brain operation? Do you know the skill it demands, and the years of passionate, merciless, excruciating devotion that go to acquire that skill? That was what I would not place at the disposal of men whose sole qualification to rule me was their capacity to spout the fraudulent generalities that got them elected to the privilege of enforcing their wishes at the point of a gun. I would not let them dictate the purpose for which my years of study had been spent, or the conditions of my work, or my choice of patients, or the amount of my reward. I observed that in all the discussions that preceded the enslavement of medicine, men discussed everything--except the desires of the doctors. Men considered only the 'welfare' of the patients, with no thought for those who were to provide it. That a doctor should have any right, desire or choice in the matter, was regarded as irrelevant selfishness; his is not to choose, they said, only 'to serve.' That a man willing to work under compulsion is too dangerous a brute to entrust with a job in the stockyards--never occurred to those who proposed to help the sick by making life impossible for the healthy. I have often wondered at the smugness with which people assert their right to enslave me, to control my work, to force my will, to violate my conscience, to stifle my mind--yet what is it that they expect to depend on, when they lie on the operating table under my hands? Their moral code has taught them to believe that it is safe to rely on the virtue of their victims. Well, that is the virtue I have withdrawn. Let them discover, in their operating rooms and hospital wards, that it is not safe to place their lives in the hands of a man whose life they have throttled. It is not safe, if he's the sort of man who resents it--and still less safe, if he's the sort who doesn't." --Ayn Rand

People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.

Warm regards,

Col. Hogan
Stalag California

Finally Giving Up On Another Leftist Hoax

I've known it for twenty years, as has anyone who has a brain, and who's paying attention: AIDS in heterosexuals is rare. A story in The Independent, via Drudge, gives us the details. Dr Kevin de Cock, (gentleman that I am, I will resist the temptation to make an insensitive comment here) the head of the WHO's department of HIV/AIDS said that there is no HIV/AIDS epidemic among heterosexuals outside of Africa.

I remember the sense of helplessness and fear most folks felt as we learned of the horrors of AIDS, back in the early 1980's. I was in a committed relationship at the time, and canceled all plans to cheat. As we learned that AIDS could be spread by blood transfusions, I'm sure some folks had serious difficulty with accepting blood from an unknown donor during that period, and we all knew or knew of a few individuals who contracted AIDS in that way. Fortunately, the medical community adjusted very quickly and eliminated that path.

Women had fear for a time that a casual lover might be bisexual and might have the virus from a previous male partner. Men worried that a casual female lover might have had relations with a bisexual man. Remember the old public service announcement on radio and tv: If you have sex with a person, you're having sex with everyone that person has ever had sex with? Remember the full-body condoms illustrated on comedy tv shows?

We were very afraid.

The fact that it very quickly put an end to the Sexual Revolution started by Hizzonner Hugh Hefner pleased the religious zealots so much that for a short time, I thought it might be they who imported the virus. Fer cryin' out loud, I thought Dr Laura was going to have an orgasm over the fact that she could now say, "Dooooon't do it!" and have people take her seriously.

Well, in spite of the millions donated by everyone from Bill Gates to the lowliest leftist schlubs in Berkeley and Hollywood, almost all of which was wasted or misappropriated, we've never had an AIDS epidemic among the heterosexual persuasion. It was a hoax. Much like the algorians' global warming hoax.

Please don't take this to mean that I'm anti-homosexual in any way. Among male homosexuals, there was an epidemic. I lost a friend, a neighbor and two other friends lost partners to the disease in the 1980's. Whether those two other friends are still alive, I don't know. I lost track of them when I left San Diego in 1992.

Back to The Independent story, Dr de Cock will not admit that the heterosexual AIDS epidemic was a hoax, and cites the high AIDS rate in sub-Sahara Africa. Pardon me, but the largest parts of those countries are awash in prehistoric savagery and have rulers who think nothing of committing genocidal murder sprees when they wake up in a bad mood. Awake and aware folks in those countries should simply leave--even if they have to walk.

The whole point is, there is no heterosexual AIDS epidemic. There never was much of a heterosexual AIDS problem. It was a hoax developed by AIDS activists so that mainstream Americans would donate money to scammers who want to enrich themselves and keep Americans in a state of fear so that freedom-limiting legislation can be enacted.

It worked for a while.

A fool and his money.......

Warm regards,

Col. Hogan
Stalag California

Teddy's Dilemma

Much as I'm (snif) upset about Senator Kennedy's illness, and wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy (wait! he is one of America's worst enemies), I just have to ask.......

To which of the countries that offer universal health care will Senator Kennedy go for care and therapy in his current health crisis?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Warm regards,

Col. Hogan
Stalag California

In Defense of a Dirty Lab

Friday, as a part of my job description, I was sent to a class on CPR. It was fine, I've been through the class before, and it's good to know. The class included the Heimlich Maneuver and the use of the Automated External Defibrillator. Since many of us work in areas of contaminated water and other liquids, we also had a discussion of ways to keep oneself from absorbing contaminants--followed by a solicitation for hazmat training.

Well, it's all information that I might find useful in my line of work--just last year, we were digging an access pit and dug into an area that had been saturated with petroleum at some time in the past. The soil from the entire area had to be separated, tested, placed into containers and shipped to a facility to be "cleaned." It ended up being over 500 tons of soil.

But, I digress.

As bull sessions do, this one wandered into the area of the cleanliness or filthiness of the objects and people with whom we come into contact. There were the usual anecdotes about filthy restaurants and people who don't wash their hands after using the facilities. It even got down to keeping one's paper towel in his hand for use in opening the bathroom door.

Ever the contrarian, I reminded everyone that in the not so distant past, individuals routinely shared drinking cups (the common metal cup kept near the hand pump), passed coke bottles from one friend to another (no backwash, please!), used porta-potties with no washing facilities in the area (not to mention outdoor toilets built over holes in the ground), helped bleeding accident victims without latex gloves--I even remember when dentists and doctors didn't wear latex gloves and protective glasses when working on people they didn't even know(!).

Somehow we survived.

Now, obviously surgeons have to use extreme measures for cleanliness in the operating theater, to avoid causing infections in the patient, but now they do it to protect themselves, as well. And obviously, I don't want to see medical people contracting illnesses--they should use whatever technology is available to them both for themselves and for their patients--but twentieth and nineteenth century doctors survived by means of good hygiene and whatever other things they did to avoid contamination.

The point is not to disparage current hygiene methods, but to remember that one does occasionally have to (shudder) touch people and things with one's bare skin. We shake hands. We use public drinking fountains. We open doors and press buttons in elevators. We kiss aunts 'pon the cheek and even (ugh!) on the lips. We kiss our dates, our girl/boy friends and our husbands/wives.

Points were made that we don't really know how clean was the restaurant in which we just dined. Were the dishes really washed and sanitized? Were the chefs and other food handlers healthy and washed? Was the food as high in quality as we'd expect? Was that "A" placard in the window earned, or was it bought?

Our immune systems are wonderful, and indispensable. It's strengthened by exposure to minor amounts of toxins and pathogens. Whenever we get sick, our bodies fight the illness. After we get well, our blood has antibodies against that disease, and we don't get it again.

My argument went this way: If one were capable of living a sanitary life, he might be able to avoid diseases for however long he might live. What kind of life would it be? One couldn't handle, touch or be near any object that hadn't previously been sanitized. One could only breathe scrubbed air. One couldn't touch, be near or breathe air exhaled by another individual.

I find it far more desirable to be among people--filthy beasts as they might be--by shaking hands, chatting face to face, riding in planes, trains and automobiles, sharing elevators and occasionally even using public drinking fountains, swimming pools and bathrooms. It's the stuff of which a great life is made.

I'll have to trust that my immune system will handle it.

Every year I get a head cold and every five years or so I get a flu. Those nasty bastards I call friends and acquaintances must have really taxed my immune system!

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

Warm regards,

Col. Hogan
Stalag California

To The Free Clinic.....March!

According to an AP story shown on Yahoo.com news, John Edwards, the man Rush Limbaugh calls "the Breck Girl," and Laura Ingraham calls "the Silky Pony," and I call one of several interchangeable "Rotten Fascist Bastards" is proposing a socialized medicine system in which everyone is required to go see the doctor for "preventative maintenance."

Edwards' plan claims it will cover preventive, chronic and long-term health care, including dental and vision coverage for all Americans. Showing either his utter contempt for the intelligence of Americas or his own poor knowledge of both economics and human nature, Edwards claims the plan will cost "up to $120 billion a year" which he will cover by ending President Bush's tax cuts to people who make more than $200,000 per year.

Edwards' plan is also unConstitutional. No where in the document can one find authorization for the federal government to be involved in the health care of individuals in any way.

I'm imagining, and this will unquestionably be the case should this program be enacted, Edwards' Bureau of Health" police marching manacled groups of people, rousted from their homes at all hours of the day and night, to wait in long lines of others who are really sick, or have hangnails or sniffles. I'm imagining people with serious conditions, waiting in long queues to be seen by specialists--the queue only moving when someone nearer the door dies.

I'm imagining tens of thousands of competent doctors retiring early or taking less responsible jobs to get away from the bureaucracy--leaving largely doctors of lesser ability and experience to fill the gaps.

“I quit when medicine was placed under State control, some years ago,” said Dr. Hendricks. “Do you know what it takes to perform a brain operation? Do you know the kind of skill it demands, and the years of passionate, merciless, excruciating devotion that go to acquire that skill?
That was what I would not place at the disposal of men whose sole qualification to rule me was their capacity to spout the fraudulent generalities that got them elected to the privilege of enforcing their wishes at the point of a gun. I would not let them dictate the purpose for which my years of study had been spent, or the conditions of my work, or of my patients, or the amount of my reward. I observed that in all the discussions that preceded the enslavement of medicine, men discussed everything—except the desires of the doctors.
Men considered only the ‘welfare of the patients with no thought for those who were to provide it. That a doctor should have any right, desire or choice in the matter was regarded as irrelevant selfishness; his is not to chose, they said, only ‘to serve.’ That a man who’s willing to work under compulsion is too dangerous a brute to entrust with a job in the stockyards—never occurred to those who proposed to help the sick by making life impossible for the healthy. I have often wondered at the smugness with which people assert their right to enslave me, to control my work, to force my will, to violate my consciousness, to stifle my mind—yet what is it that they expect to depend on when they lie on an operating table under my hands?
Their moral code has taught them to believe that it is safe to rely on the virtue of their victims. Well, that is the virtue I have withdrawn. Let them discover the kind of doctors that their system will now produce. Let them discover, in their operating rooms and hospital wards, that it is not safe to place their lives in the hands of a man whose life they have throttled. It is not safe, if he is the sort of a man who resents it—and still less safe, if he is the sort who doesn’t.”

--excerpt from the novel, Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

Rand's novel is a dramatization, but it's both logically and empirically true that individuals will either quit work, or continue working at a less-than-optimum level, if his conditions of work are not suitable. This is only part of what we will face if Williams' program, or that most of the posturing fascists running for the office of President have their way in this area.

They've killed Freedom! Those bastards!

Warm regards,

Col. Hogan
Stalag California

....But I Don't Get Colds!

Friday, I went for a forty minute walk instead of eating lunch. This is new, part of yet another attempt to lose some weight and get myself into better shape. I usually go to a nearby diner for a sandwich.

'Twas no big deal, I'm a pretty good walker (though I've let myself get horribly out of shape), and can walk for hours with an occasional five-minute sit-down. After the walk, I had a 16-oz drink of milk and whey powder. It was the first time I'd tried whey powder.

It was very good tasting, and filled me up satisfactorily.

At noon, as I finished drinking the whey, I felt fine. At one PM, I had irritated eyes, very sensitive to bright light, very irritated nasal passages and a runny nose. I was sneezing pretty often.

I finished the day at the lab, went home, taking care of some business along the way, and went to bed kind of early after an evening of web browsing and a little tv. During this period, the symptoms would diminish at times, then come back.

I slept fairly well, waking up a couple of times for short periods. I slept in until about ten AM and got up feeling pretty good.

As the day wore on, the symptoms came back. Because of the way I felt, I napped in the afternoon. I felt pretty dragged out most of the afternoon and evening, and again went to bed fairly early.

I woke up Sunday morning feeling fine.

At no time did I have any symptoms other than those mentioned. It was the wierdest thing.

I rarely get colds but when I do, they usually last two or three days with a sore throat, coughing, etc, and they gradually taper off with a stuffy head, lots of nose blowing and fatigue.

This was a wierd illness. I thought of an allergic reaction or hay fever, but I've never had these things. I spit on allergies. Ptui! I laugh at hay fever. Ar, ar!

Well, I needed some kind of excuse for not having written here for a few days. There it is.

Remember, VOTE FOR NO INCUMBENT!

Warm regards,

Col. Hogan
Stalag California

An End to Epidemics

Boy, am I relieved! We'll never have to worry about epidemics again! Epidemics are a thing of the past!

Not so fast. The reason we'll never have another epidemic isn't that there'll never be one, it's that they've been renamed. The news media, ever looking for new ways to scare the crap out of The Great Unwashed, has decided that the specter of an epidemic is no longer very scary. Why? We have a flu epidemic just about every year, and it usually ends up that 40 or 50% of us get what amounts to a really bad cold.

How to increase the State of Fear? Read the minds of the Executive Producers of the news at CBS, NBC and ABC. "We'll start calling them pandemics! Nobody knows what a pandemic is, and we'll make it sound like the Black Plague was a walk in the park by comparison. Government schools no longer tell their students about dictionaries, so we can make a pandemic sound really, really bad!"

The word is out. Two or more people who've been in the same county this year get the same illness, It's A Pandemic! We're all going to die!

It's only a matter of time before someone'll call it all GWB's fault.

They've killed Freedom! Those Bastards!

Warm regards,

Col. Hogan
Stalag California

Mes Enfants, We're Being Played!

I don't know if it's others playing our nearly empty-headed politico-parasites or it it's them playing We the People. I suspect it's some of both. I don't mean to imply that the playing is just starting now; it's been going on for a long time. I merely want to draw attention to two current scams, to illustrate by example how it works.

The first possibility is that the US government is being played by foreign actors. The state of fear being what it is, our elected victicrats seem to react to every rumor of another attack by the islamic or communist subhumans (or am I being redundant?). They seem to go into full panic mode and react in just the way the subhumans would like us to--in their fondest dreams: the government finds yet another way to clamp down upon freedom in the United States.

Recent weeks, we've been told that our spooks have uncovered rumors (none dare call it intelligence) that the Osama Bin Llama gang is going to attack New York City's subways soon.

What do the New York MTA trained apes do?

A partial list of what they do not do, that might make some sense is:
Repeal their local laws against self defense.
Recommend training in self defense, use of weapons and citizen's arrest.
Invent ways of mitigating explosive blasts and minimizing damage.
Implement alternatives to subway commuting.

What do they do instead?

What empty-headed authoritarians always do, including:
Station police and military men everywhere, with instructions to search everyone, or certain ones, in a manner inconsistent as possible with the facts of reality.
Make sure everyone is told that their use of public transit is a privilege, not a right.
Arrest anyone who mentions or jokes about any sort of "terrorist" weapon or attack and detain him until he's old.
Set up a foolproof ID that identifies everyone absolutely, except illegal aliens, whose ID starts the day they get the ID.
Develop electronic dossiers on all American travelers (excluding illegal aliens).

Also developing: The bird flu.

You know, we used to have flu epidemics, about once a year. When I was a mite younger, we just pretty much ignored flues unless we got sick, then we took a couple of days off from school and slept a lot. Later, we got vaccinations for it, which may or may not actually help. I got my first flu shot in the Navy. It was followed by the worst case of flu I ever had. I was dog-sick for a week.

I've never had a flu shot since. I refuse 'em. Most years, I don't get sick. The last time I got the flu was five or six years ago. When I have gotten it, I've been pretty uncomfortable for 36 to 48 hours, then it's over. Every five or six years, I can live with that.

Every year the State Science Institute, I mean the Centers for Disease Control (Randian slip, sorry) predicts dire events with the beginning of the "flu season." It even has a season, now. The "season" comes with dire predictions of high body counts among the very young and the very old. Everyone is admonished to go in and get a flu shot. The deaths happen in far smaller numbers than we were warned--whether because of the vaccine or because of the con, I'm never sure. I didn't get the shot and I didn't get sick.

Leads me to wonder why they so dearly want everyone to get the shot. What's in that shot, anyway?

But, I've digressed.

This year's con appears to be the Bird Flu. They openly admit that they don't have enough doses for everyone (there weren't enough doses last year, either. Somehow, we survived). This year, they're trying something new. They're floating trial balloons for military-enforced quarantines.

If the quarantine thing works, it'll establish that the federal government can bottle up any locality in the country, totally limiting movement in and out of the area, based on a trumped up reason ordered up by the President from his pet quacks at CDC.

I wonder if the birds will pay attention to the quarantine.

Remember, VOTE FOR NO INCUMBENT!

Warm regards,

Col. Hogan
Stalag California