RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/1646/after_latest_damning_report_when_will_britain_admit_the_nhs_has_failed_

“It’s never a good sign when a nation is proud of the very things that cause it to fail. It’s a tragedy when it gets to the point that it’s harmful to that nation’s health.”
British self-delusion about the NHS seems eternal, but at some point the country must come to its senses and seek a new model for health care

The Royal College of Physicians (RCP) is not usually associated with radical right-wing opposition to the National Health Service (NHS), nor should it be. In normal circumstances the question of how a country structures its health care provision would transcend ideology and dogma and focus instead on the purely pragmatic issues of whether the current system is fit for purpose or whether we should consider an alternative.

But this is Britain and the NHS is revered in religious terms.

Be that is it may, the great national delusion that the NHS is “the envy of the world“ keeps on running head on into reports from respected institutions packed with horror stories about its failings.

The RCP has now released just such a report, tellingly entitled: “Hospitals on the edge? The Time for Action“.

The report speaks of patients, especially elderly ones, being trundled around from ward to ward not uncommonly “four or five times during a hospital stay, often with incomplete notes and no formal handover”. It states that patients are 10 percent more likely to die at weekends when too few senior staff are on duty.

In places, care on Saturday and Sunday is so bad that the report felt compelled to quote one hospital doctor as saying, “I am relieved on Monday that nothing catastrophic has happened over the weekend”.

Some of the horror stories are almost too much to bear. Try this for example:

“An elderly, confused patient in her pyjamas was wheeled by a porter from her treatment to the entrance door, and left there. She was waiting for transport but obviously in dire need of care. She wore an incontinence pad that was saturated and the chair was also saturated with urine. She would get up and walk for a bit and then go back to the chair. No one spoke to her or tried to help her. She was just ignored. Was no one responsible for her care?“

In the report’s concluding “10 Priority areas for action” it is surely telling that the first item on the agenda is the following:

“We must make sure patients are at the heart of service design and clinical practice. Hospitals must be a safe place in which all patients are treated with dignity and respect, including those with dementia. All health professionals have a duty to ensure patient needs are met, working together as a team to deliver the best possible care.”

For a health system in one of the richest countries in the world, should this really need stating?

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ Obama’s clean war in Libya, the one that was won by lying to the UN and then dropping bombs and flying away while ragged bands of fighters whittled away what was left of the decrepit Libyan military, doesn’t look so clean anymore. The bloodless victory has seen its first blood shed as those same […]

All Andrew McCarthy’s books are must reads for everyone concerned about the encroachment of Islam, Jihad and Sharia. I am halfway through a pre-publication download. It will be available on October 1 at Amazon….get your kindles and iPads ready. Nobody tells it better. And see the video below….rsk
Spring Fever The Illusion of Islamic Democracy By Andrew C. McCarthy
E-Book Only Encounter Books
Pub Date: September 18, 2012 Pre-Order: Amazon.com I iTunes I BN.com
The first fundamental truth about the “Arab Spring” is that there never was one. The salient fact of the Middle East, the only one, is Islam. The Islam that shapes the Middle East inculcates in Muslims the self-perception that they are members of a civilization implacably hostile to the West. The United States is a competitor to be overcome, not the herald of a culture to be embraced.
Is this self-perception based on objective truth? Does it reflect an accurate construction of Islam? It is over these questions that American officials and Western intellectuals obsess. Yet the questions are irrelevant. This is not a matter of right or wrong, of some posture or policy whose subtle tweaking or outright reversal would change the facts on the ground. This is simply, starkly, the way it is.
Every human heart does not yearn for freedom. In the Islam of the Middle East, “freedom” means something very nearly the opposite of what the concept connotes to Westerners – it is the freedom that lies in total submission to Allah and His law. That law, sharia, is diametrically opposed to core components of freedom as understood in the West – beginning with the very idea that man is free to make law for himself, irrespective of what Allah has ordained. It is thus delusional to believe, as the West’s Arab Spring fable insists, that the region teems with Jamal al-Madisons holding aloft the lamp of liberty. Do such revolutionary reformers exist? Of course they do . . . but in numbers barely enough to weave a fictional cover story. When push came to shove – and worse – the reformers were overwhelmed, swept away by a tide of Islamic supremacism, the dynamic, consequential mass movement that beckons endless winter.
That is the real story of the Arab Spring – that, and the Pandora’s Box that opens when an American administration aligns with that movement, whose stated goal is to destroy America.
SEE THIS VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOwP9rtZvVc
Product Details
Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy by Andrew C McCarthy (Oct 2, 2012)

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-muslim-brotherhood-part-iv-sayyid-qutb

Part I – A Brief History of the Muslim Brotherhood (Can be found by clicking here)

Part II – The Muslim Brotherhood – Haj Amin al-Husseini (Can be found by clicking here)

Part III – The Muslim Brotherhood – Hitler’s Imam

If one wishes to understand the origins, ideology and goals of the modern-day Muslim Brotherhood, one must study the life and works of Egyptian theorist and writer Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966). His writings remain enormously-influential within the Ikhwan and the Pan-Islamic movement generally, and are also vitally-important to any informed understanding of such figures as Osama bin-Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Anwar al-Awlaki and groups such as al-Qaeda. Indeed, Qutb’s name has entered the lexicon of the Muslim world; those who follow his ideology and teachings are referred to as “Qutbists” or simply Qutbi. Despite his importance to Sunni Islam, Qutb is relatively unknown in the non-Islamic world.

Qutb was born in 1906 in the rural village of Musha, Egypt. His father was a well-known political activist and land owner. As a teenager, Sayyid was a quiet and artistic young man; he displayed few if any outward indications of the ideologue he was later to become.

After completing studies in Cairo at Dar al-‘Ulum in 1933, he took a post as a teacher in the Ministry of Public Instruction. During the 1930s, he wrote extensively, trying his hand as a novelist and literary critic. In 1939, he accepted a bureaucratic post in the Ministry of Education, while continuing to write and move within Egyptian artistic and literary circles. In 1948, Qutb traveled to the United States intent upon studying educational administration; during a two-year period abroad, Qutb studied at Woodrow Wilson Teacher’s College in Washington, D.C., at Stanford University in southern California, and at Colorado State College of Education in Greeley, Colorado. He traveled widely elsewhere in the United States during this period.

Upon his return to Egypt in 1950, Qutb resigned his civil service position, joined the Muslim Brotherhood, and quickly emerged as one of its senior leaders. He became the editor-in-chief of the journal of the Muslim Brotherhood, Al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin, and also took an active role in the propaganda section of the organization. Qutb’s sojourn abroad marked a watershed in his life; he returned to Egypt a very different man than the one who had left two years before. He had departed an unassuming and diffident man; he returned a hardened Islamic ideologue and firebrand. What had so changed him?

Shortly after his return to Cairo, Qutb wrote an impassioned article entitled “The America I Have Seen,” which provided an answer. A revealing window into his perceptions and thoughts upon the U.S. and the modern world generally, this work revealed the extent of his transformation. Qutb was fiercely critical of what he viewed as the decadence and moral degradation of Americans. He condemned everything from the individual freedoms of U.S. citizens to their materialism to what he believed to be the wanton and highly-sexualized behavior of American women. He accused his former hosts of having barbaric tastes in music and the arts, and abhorred the “animalistic mixing” of the sexes in churches and other public places. He decried the “spiritual degeneracy” of common Americans, and lamented their enjoyment of “primitive” sports such as boxing and football. His complaints even extended to the quality of the haircuts he received.

http://washingtonexaminer.com/obama-compares-his-campaign-volunteers-to-embassy-staff-killed-in-libya/article/2507830#.UFGu-lGEqSp

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/obama-compares-his-campaign-volunteers-to-embassy-staff-killed-in-libya?f=puball

President Obama told his campaign volunteers in Nevada that he is “really proud” of them after comparing them to the U.S. ambassador and embassy staff murdered in Libya.

“And obviously [our] hearts are broken for the families but I wanted to encourage those folks at the State Dept. that they were making a difference,” Obama told volunteer leaders in Las Vegas, according to the pool report. “The sacrifices that our troops and our diplomats make are obviously very different from the challenges that we face here domestically but like them, you guys are Americans who sense that we can do better than we’re doing….I’m just really proud of you.”

Obama, during his talk with the volunteers, described his visit to the State Department today. “I had a chance to go to the State Dept. to comfort some of the friends and co-workers of the the folks who had fallen and I reminded them that as hard as things are sometimes, as difficult as change is that if we’re resolute, if we don’t give up, if we don’t give in, if we don’t become cynical, if we continue to be realistic about how hard change is but also keep in our hearts that sense of idealism and sense of purpose then over time good things happen,” he said.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/apologizing-to-our-enemies

All Presidents are hostages to events. It is, however, the manner in which they respond that shapes their outcome.
By the afternoon of September 11, the Obama administration scrambled to disavow a statement to the assault on the U.S. embassy in Cairo that had been issued by the embassy.

The statement said, “The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims-as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions.”

“Misguided individuals”?

“The statement by Embassy Cairo was not cleared by Washington and does not reflect views of the United States government” an unnamed administration official told Politico.

But the statement did reflect the Obama administration’s views as expressed repeatedly over the years. Indeed, in condemning the killing of the U.S. Ambassador to Libya and his staff, issued on September 12, was repeated in President Obama’s statement. “While the United States rejects efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others, we must all unequivocally oppose the senseless violence that took the lives of these public services.”

The attacks, deliberately timed to coincide with the eleventh anniversary of the worst attack on the U.S. homeland since Pearl Harbor on 9/11, the administration made no effort to connect them. It made no effort to explain to Americans that this nation is at war with Islam, a war made manifest in Afghanistan following 9/11, pursued against the dictator Saddam Hussein, and which the President himself has been personally carrying out with drone attacks on al Qaeda leaders in Yemen and in Pakistan; a war personified in the ten-year effort to find and kill Osama bin Laden.

It was a war declared by Iran when, in 1979, Islamist revolutionaries scaled the walls of the American embassy in Tehran and took our diplomats hostage for 444 days until releasing them the same day Ronald Reagan took the oath of office for his first term in office. He would later order an attack on Moammar Gaddafi, the dictator of Libya after he sponsored terrorist attacks carried out against American targets in Germany and the bombing of an airliner over Great Britain carrying Americans. Gaddafi sued for peace.

If Obama had announced that the proposed funding to Egypt would not be sent, nor similar support for the nascent Libyan government that replaced Gaddafi then, at the very least, a message would have been sent that we will not support governments that stand aside when such attacks occur.

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2012/09/12/americas-top-soldier-calls-on-pastor-to-stop-supporting-badly-produced-movie/
America’s Top Soldier Calls on Obscure Pastor to Stop Supporting Badly Produced Movie

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Martin Dempsey today called Florida Pastor Terry Jones and urged him to withdraw his support for a film that allegedly insults Islam.

“In the brief call, Gen. Dempsey expressed his concerns over the nature of the film, the tensions it will inflame and the violence it will cause,” Dempsey’s spokesman, Colonel Dave Lapan, told Reuters.

“He asked Mr. Jones to consider withdrawing his support for the film.”

The film has been blamed for attacks on US interests in Egypt and Libya, but in fact had nothing to do with either attack, as the top soldier in the US armed forces surely knows by now.

Gen. Dempsey’s call was a PR stunt designed to show the Islamic world that the US government takes jihadist threats more seriously than it takes American citizens’ rights to free speech.

The top soldier in America’s armed forces has deliberately chilled free speech and has violated the oath he took when he entered the armed forces, to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. He has also elevated an obscure, fringe preacher to a powerful position impacting US foreign policy.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is, in other words, an idiot.

http://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/2012/09/13/death-of-ambassador-stevens/?singlepage=true

While the mainstream media was occupying itself Wednesday decrying Mitt Romney’s forthright reaction to the carnage in Cairo and Benghazi, their putative bellwether, the New York Times, ironically was busy exposing the real story [1]. It’s clear now that if there is a disgrace in what happened at the Benghazi consulate, it has nothing at all to do with Romney and everything to do with our State Department, its chief Hilary Clinton, and her boss Barack Obama.

Here’s the NYT:

The wave of unrest set off by the video, posted online in the United States two months ago and dubbed into Arabic for the first time eight days ago, has further underscored the instability of the countries that cast off their longtime dictators in the Arab Spring revolts. It also cast doubt on the adequacy of security preparations at American diplomatic outposts in the volatile region.

Benghazi, awash in guns, has recently witnessed a string of assassinations as well as attacks on international missions, including a bomb said to be planted by another Islamist group that exploded near the United States Consulate there as recently as June. But a Libyan politician who had breakfast with Mr. Stevens at the mission the morning before he was killed described security as sorely inadequate for an American ambassador in such a tumultuous environment, consisting primarily of four video cameras and as few as four Libyan guards.

“This country is still in transition, and everybody knows the extremists are out there,” said Fathi Baja, the Libyan politician.

http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2012/09/12/when-do-we-get-to-attack-obamas-character/?print=1

Barack Obama is not a bad man, just a bad president, Mitt Romney said in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, echoing the self-characterization of the Wizard of Oz. The political pros advise against it, and with well-studied reasons. Responding to a question of this genre at a political conference some months ago, Karl Rove explained that if you attack Obama personally, you make all the people who voted for him feel badly. The way to get people to do what you want, by contrast, is to make people feel good about themselves. Politics is the art of flattering the voters, and that is just what Romney did: he told the voters that they had every right in the world to feel good when they voted for Obama, and they should vote against him now because the best feeling they had about Obama was then they voted for him.

I am not a candidate’s handler, though, and have no aspirations to be one. I don’t dispute Karl Rove’s competence or second-guess Romney’s speech writers. Like most conservatives, I was disgusted by the Obama administration’s apology for a hitherto unnoticed YouTube video. Obama is the first American president who truly dislikes the United States and blames its hegemonic position for most of the world’s troubles.

Almost a year before the 2008 election I characterized then-candidate Obama as a third-world anthropologist profiling us. There’s nothing in American culture with which to compare him, which is what makes him dangerous: he is an invasive pest with no natural enemies. He bears comparison to the carnival mentalist played by Tyrone Power, Jr. in Nightmare Alley, but his motivations are ideological rather than pecuniary.

How is it possible that we elected a president who embraces the Muslim Brotherhood, and who has thrown under the bus not just Israel, but all of America’s Middle Eastern allies? I addressed the issue in an essay published in Asia Times Online on Feb. 26, 2008, reposted below. Its major omission is the role of Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s Senior Counselor and general factotum. Otherwise I stand by the thesis.

* * * * *Obama’s Women Reveal His Secret

“Cherchez la femme,” advised Alexander Dumas in: “When you want to uncover an unspecified secret, look for the woman.” In the case of Barack Obama, we have two: his late mother, the went-native anthropologist Ann Dunham, and his rancorous wife Michelle. Obama’s women reveal his secret: he hates America.

We know less about Senator Obama than about any prospective president in American history. His uplifting rhetoric is empty, as Hillary Clinton helplessly protests. His career bears no trace of his own character, not an article for the Harvard Law Review he edited, or a single piece of legislation. He appears to be an empty vessel filled with the wishful thinking of those around him. But there is a real Barack Obama. No man — least of all one abandoned in infancy by his father — can conceal the imprint of an impassioned mother, or the influence of a brilliant wife.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444017504577647282515841336.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTSecond

“But as events keep reminding us, there is the world outside Mr. Romney’s comfort zone—outside of the subject of the economy and the failures of the Obama administration to alleviate unemployment. In the debates ahead, and what’s left of the campaign, he’ll have to address matters like national security and foreign policy in depth, and do so with a conviction that shows a willingness to take a stand whatever the cost in votes from this group or that. That cost will be all the greater if he does not.”

Four American diplomats, including U.S. Ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, were killed Tuesday (and several others were wounded) in the attacks on U.S. consular offices in Libya and Egypt, all at the hands of the devout mobs wreaking their vengeance over a U.S.- made film that they declared insulting to Mohammed.

At the U.S. embassy in Cairo, where the attackers scaled the walls unimpeded—while Egyptian police stood peacefully by doing nothing—the crowds tore down the American flag and chanted ominous warnings to “Worshippers of the Cross.” In a statement dazzling for its cravenness, the embassy denounced “the continuing effort by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims” and declared that the U.S. rejected “those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others.”

With news of the attacks spreading last night, Mitt Romney issued a statement blasting the obsequious embassy response—no small relief to those supporters of his candidacy who have nearly given up all hope that they could hear a few words from Mr. Romney on national security and foreign policy. Words that would speak for his willingness to take a stand on issues that might cost him with those undecided voters he yearns to win. Issues, that is, other than the ones in the steel-rimmed comfort zone where he and his chief advisers have apparently decided he should remain for the duration. Thanks to such decisions, the Republican presidential candidate managed to avoid all mention of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the achievements of the U.S. military in the course of the convention in Tampa. As did the vice presidential candidate and virtually every speaker.