Sim-O

There’s still no word on where the Right to Know campaign is getting it’s funding.

I thought I would add my little voice to the throng of people wanting to find out so I sent them a letter via their ‘contact us’ page…

hello.

Would you mind publishing where your funding comes from, please?

People are asking questions and they think they, quite rightly, have a ‘right to know’, especially as you guys have made such a fuss of where other people get their funding from.

Abortion Rights have made it known where all their funding (and biscuits) come from after you chaps huffed and puffed about it.

Don’t you think it’s fair that you now spill the beans?

Cheers

Sim-O

Ministry of Truth is having a few technical issues at the moment and as a result, a post Unity has published is not showing on his site.

I have found it on Googles’ cache, here, and also mirrored it at my old place because well, you know Unity, it is rather long.

Here is the preamble:

A document obtained yesterday by the Ministry of Truth exposes the full but hitherto hidden agenda behind Nadine Dorries’ ‘Right to know’ campaign, which has recently put forward two abortion-related amendments to the Government’s Health and Social Care Bill.

The document, a Powerpoint presentation produced by Dr Peter Saunders of the Christian Medical Fellowship for the Lawyers Christian Fellowship in 2007, indicates that Dorries’ current campaign and amendments are part of long-term strategy put together by an alliance of prominent anti-abortion organisations with the overall objective of securing the complete prohibition of abortion in the UK on any grounds, including rape, serious foetal abnormality and even serious risk to the life of mother.

Clear and verifiable links exist between Dorries and at least three of the organisations involved in the development of this campaign strategy, one of which – the Lawyers Christian Fellowship – was intimately involved in the running of Dorries’ earlier ’20 reasons for 20 weeks’ campaign.

Another member of this alliance – CARE (Christian Action Research and Education) would, in all likelihood, be the major beneficiary of the first of Dorries’ new amendments, which seeks to prevent established abortion service providers, including the British Pregnancy Advisory Service and Marie Stopes International, from providing pre-abortion counselling, forcing women into the independent sector which has been heavily infiltrated by anti-abortion organisations. CARE has well documented links with a number of other current MPs, to whom it provides bursaries and/or interns, and with the influential Conservative Christian Fellowship, which was co-founded in 1990 by Tim Montgomerie, who is also the co-founded of Iain Duncan Smith’s Centre for Social Justice and the editor of ConservativeHome website.

Go and read the rest, as I say, either here in Googles cache, or here or if MoT is running properly here.

Here we fucking go…

Drunk people should pay for the treatment they receive at accident and emergency units, a patient’s group has said.

Oh, just fuck off with that shit.

Margaret Watt, chair of the [Scotland Patients Association], said she would be raising the issue with Scotland’s health secretary.

Ms Watt said: “Anyone who has been abusing alcohol and can’t stand on their feet and is admitted to hospital at the weekend should pay towards their treatment.

“Staff are used and abused by these people.”

Watt is conflating two issues here: 1) abuse of staff and 2) self-inflicted fucking up.

Staff also get abused by sober people when they’ve been waiting for fucking hours in A&E. People turn up at weekend unable to stand on their own two feet for a whole host of reasons, many because they’re twats and hurt themselves.

What about a drunk person that didn’t mean to get fucking leathered and had their drink spiked? Should they be charged? What about the rock climber that fell off a cliff because the hand hold was not as strong as they thought.

People that abuse staff should have their treatment refused or arrested or both.

Either everyone that ends up breaking their body due to their own stupidity has to pay for the services they receive or no one does.

What’s the difference between someone that’s drunk so much they’re livers packed in before they’ve got to the hospital and the IY enthusiast that stuck a drill through the middle of their hand (that was an interesting experience, I can tell you)?

Absolutely nothing. The means may be different but the end result is the same.

We all pay for the NHS and services it provides through our taxes. If I’ve gotta pay for treatment every time I need it, and pretty much everytime I need is is my own fault, I would opt out of the paying those taxes and spend it on private health care. It is a selfish thing. I’m not paying towards the health service to provide health care to some other fucker, I (happily) pay so it’s there when I need it. I shouldn’t have to pay fucking twice.

The way the Tories are taking it, Ms Watt will get her wish. Along with having to pay for treatments for stuff that isn’t self-inflicted.

The Scottish government said alcohol misuse cost Scotland £3.56bn a year – about £900 for every adult.

When asked about the issue of charging for drunk patients for emergency treatment, Ms Sturgeon said: “Not only does alcohol misuse burden health service and police – and the healthcare costs alone are around £267m annually – but it also leaves families devastated by the death and illness caused by alcohol.

So what if aclohol abuse costs Scotland £900 per adult per year. Charging to use the hospital isn’t going to fucking help. You won’t get peole to stop drinking themselves to oblivion because “ooh, I’d better not. I can’t afford a stomach pump this week.” It’d probably cost more to get payment out of people than the treatment itself.

Traffic accidents leave families devasted. Are you gonna start charging them as well?

Well, if somehow this is introduced, I expect a little leaflet through my door with the scale of charges. Just so I know how much every little accident or drink is going to cost me.

What the fuck is it with this thing about abortion and ‘informed choice’? That women should be told of all the choices about what they can do when they discover they are pregnant and don’t want a baby?

As far as I can tell the options are

1. Abortion.
2. carry the pregnancy through to term and put the baby up for adoption
3. carry the pregnancy through to term and keep the baby.

Have I missed any? No, I didn’t think so. Are there any women anywhere in this land that doesn’t know about these choices or are there women about that think the only way to deal with an unwanted pregnancy is to terminate it, that have never heard of adoption? Who is ‘witholding vital information’ about the alternatives to abortion?

So why is Nadine Dorries going on about choices?

The other thing that Dorries may have a point about is the psychological after effects of having an abortion. No one disputes that having an abortion is a serious matter that needs to be thought through with careful consideration. I don’t know if I would be able to go through with it, and I’m sure many women are the some and wouldn’t know what to do either until placed in the situation.

The problem Dorries has is that she may have apoint that there may be serious mental consequences but, as usual, her sources for her information is erm, bollox.

The ‘plethora of studies Dorries cites to support her case are either not very scientific or do not actualy support her point at all.

Several times The MP for Mid-Beds has used the phrase “multi-million pound abortion industry”. It is nothing of the sort. The largest provider of abortions to the NHS (and it’s only one service they provide) may have an income of £25 million, but it is not all profit, as Dorries implies…

For 2009-10, the standard NHS tariff for abortions ranged from £502 for a medical abortion to £649 for a ‘D&E’ (surgical dilation and extraction). Had BPAS done nothing else that year but carry out medical abortions for the NHS at its standard tariff then, with 93% (51500) of its clients having their treatment paid for by the state, it would have generated an income of £25.85 million from the NHS.

This would be £840,000 more than its actual income for the year. Far from making ‘vast amounts of money’ it seems that BPAS actually provides the NHS with a range of cost effective services at less the NHS’s own internal tariffs.

So on all three counts, choice, evidence of mental health issues and of an abortion industry positively rolling in profits, Dorries is wrong, wrong, wrong.

1. Choice: Women already know what the choices are when it comes to unwanted prgnancy.
2. Mental health: There is no conclusive proof that women that have abortions are more likely to have mental health issues in the future as a result that women that carry through to term.
3. The implication that people are getting filthy rich on the back of all these abortion is a fallacy.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, pretty much sums up the Honorable Member for Mid Bedforshire.

(via Martin Robbins)

Update: For a thorough fisking of Nadines article see Unitys’ post at the Ministry of Truth.

Part of the series: The Great Travel-Sickness Experiment

The Trip: Abingdon to Newcastle-under-Lyme
Time: approx 2.5 hrs
Miles: approx 125

After having a wierd result from my last trip, the results for my latest experimetation with the accupressure bands is pretty straight forward – no travel sickness at all. None. Nothing.

The only other thing to report is that when I first put a band on my right wrist I must’ve got it in the wrong place, but quickly re-adjusted it as I felt a sharp pain, like a trapped nerve, from my thumb to the inside of my elbow. It disappeared just as quickly when the little button was moved slightly. Apart from that, everything went swimmingly.

So kids, be careful, even homeopathic accupuncture can hurt too.

Result: it’s a good result for the accupressure bands, but not such a good result for ‘Big Pharma’ as my lad, on some Traveleze tablets, puked all over the back of the car after about 2 hours into the journey.

Testing to be continued.

Part of the series: The Great Travel-Sickness Experiment

Finally, a month and a half or so after getting my magic wristbands that are supposed to cure me of travel sickness in our Mazda 5, we went on a trip long enough to give them a proper road test.

The trip: Abingdon to Luton
Time: approx 1.25 hrs
Miles: approx 77

After a bit of messing about with the kids I got the wristbands on after about a mile and a half after we set off. I was already starting to feel a little icky by then and this time felt I didn’t have any problems finding the described place to put them, three finger widths up from the first crease of your wrist, in between the two tendons, unlike the last time I put them on when I couldn’t find two tendons.

The travel sickness feeling didn’t disappear all of a sudden, as I expected it wouldn’t, but slowly morphed into other sensations. By about half way through the journey I realised that I wasn’t feeling sick in the usual way, but urge to nod off was quite strong. It was easy enough to keep my eyes open when looking at road signs or looking at stuff the kids were pointing out, but when there was a lull the natural thing to do was put my head back and close my eyes. There was another sensation as well.

This second sensation started a bit earlier than when I realised I wasn’t actually feeling nauseous and it was while I was thinking about this second sensation that made me notice my steadied guts.

You know when you’re upside down, hanging upside down by your legs from a climbing frame or when you’re laid on the sofa with you feet on the wall and your head dangling just above the floor? Or even when you not quite upside down, maybe laid head-down on the stairs whilst talking face to face with a 3 year old who’s laid head-up on the stairs? After while you head starts to fill with blood. You can feel pressure inside your skull and your eyesballs start to feel like they’re being squeezed. It’s not really a nice feeling at all. That is the sensation I had, but only the eye-ball squeezing part, which I thought was quite weird and completely unexpected.

I can’t quite fit a link between the eye-ball pressure and the pressure of two little nylon buttons pressing on my wrist but I’ve not experienced that pressure in my eyes without being upside down. How can they be connected? Are there veins connected from wrists directly to ones’ eyes?

So in conclusion, whilst wearing the wristbands the need to doze off remained and the nausea was replaced with pressure in the eyes.

Result: inconclusive. More testing required.

I have a trip up to Stoke soon, so we’ll see what happens then.

Part of the series: The Great Travel-Sickness Experiment

I tried my new wristbands today.

It’s was only a short journey of about 9 miles each way. I only had mild motion sickness, but I think that was due to the short journey rather than the wristbands.

They are quite tight on the wrist and even after only 10-15 minutes of wearing there was quite a mark left around my arms, the sort you get round your leg when your sock are too tight, and I wondered if the mark where the nylon bobble was, was actually going to leave a bruise. After 10 minutes or so the marks had disappeared.

When I put the bands on, they felt very tight, as I mentioned previously, and I thought it would annoy and start to itch and stuff, but they didn’t. I think they could on a long journey, though.

Getting the bands in the correct position may be a struggle and will need a bit of trial and error to get right.
You’re supposed to have the bobble three finger widths up your arm from the first wrist crease, and then in between the the tendons. The distance up from my wrist is fairly obvious, but I can only find one tendon. I don’t know if I’m a freak with just one tendon, although everything seems to work ok, it’s hidden behind other stuff or I just don’t know what I’m looking for, but I could only find one.

I think that may be the biggest stumbling block to getting the bands to work correctly, if they do indeed work, is the positioning of them. They need to be in a certain position and you’re trying to get an untrained person to get them in the right place with a basic diagram and short description.

Well, that’s my initial thoughts on them: comfy enough on short distances, not sure if they’re postioned correctly, but they didn’t work. I am not put off though, in my quest to have my head screwed by a cheap bit of woo I shall carry on and try them on a longer journey. Although when that’ll be, I don’t know yet.

I have never been troubled by travel sickness. Well, I may have puked in the car on the way to Skegness when I was five years old, but if I did i) i can’t remember it and ii) who hasn’t?

I’m fine in aeroplanes, even better when I’ve had a few beers. I’m good in cars, I’m not troubled by trains and when everyone is emptying their guts out the wrong end on a ferry, I’m out on deck laughing as the waves crash over the side of the boat.

That is until we bought our latest car.

That car is a Mazda 5. It’s a great car. It seats more than five people. It goes quite well, has loads of cubby holes for storing stuff, has six gears so cruising at 70mph is at about 2k rpm and the bit the kids love the best: sliding rear doors.

The problem I have with it is that everytime I’m a passenger, in the front or back, I need to puke. Or sleep. Or puke then sleep.

How do I know it’s the car that’s the problem? Well, as I mentioned at the start of this post I have never suffered travel sickness before. I have never suffered it previously on any other form of transport, in any vehicle with any driver. The closest I’ve come to it is a condition of the inner ear called ‘benign paroxysmal positional vertigo‘. This involved getting out of bed and instead of walking down the bed to the end of the room, I walked diagonally across the room and nearly through the window. I felt sick just bending over to put my socks on.

Now. I could resort to travel sickness tablets, which I have been using. They work, too. Presumably they contain the same substance doctors give you before a general anaesthetic to stop you puking whilst unconscious flat out on your back. The trouble with that is that travel sickness pills ain’t cheap and the cost soon adds up. I’m looking for an alternative.

I’m gonna give these babies a go…

(the one on the left is inside out)

The blurb on back of box says…

Using the ancient Chinese principles of acupressure, many people find wearing the bands on both wrists can help control nausea including all forms of motion sickness.

Acupressure is believed to work by restoring the balance of negative (Yin) and positive (Yan) ions in the body as imbalances are believed to affect health.

What do you reckon? Will they work? Yin and Yan? Acupressure? They’ve been known about for centuries. Of course they work.

Don’t they?

Boots, whose own brand product this is but made by Sea-Band, don’t seem quite so sure. No mention of trials or percentages of people that find these work. Using words like ‘believe’ in the blurb, too. Using “many people believe” is the same as “lots of unqualified peoples’ opinion”.

Not being an actual scientist chap I could be wrong, but I didn’t realise that Yin and Yan were ions. I thought that ions were ions. After a quick look at the all-knowing Wikipedia, there is in fact positive and negative ions, but they’re not called Yin and Yan and whether they are positive or negative ions depends on how many electrons they have compared to how many protons.

So, if I follow these directions…

A band must be worn on each wrist with the button placed over the Nei Kuan point.

To find this point place your middle three fingers on the inside of each wrist with the edge of the third finger on the first wrist crease.

The correct point is just under the edge of your index finger and between the two central tendons. Position the button face downwards over the Nei Kuan point.
Can be worn while sleeping.

These elasticated bands with a nylon nobble on them will alter how many electrons my ions have and bring me back to balance and stop my travel sickness in our Mazda 5.

I’m not so sure it’s gonna work. But for a one-time payment of £7.99, I’ll give it a go. I’m willing to have my skeptic head turned inside out with a result that may not be quite what I expect.

I’ll keep you updated.

*if you have any other suggestions, apart from those rubber things that you dangle from the back of the car, then let me know in the comments

For the record:

Fibre content:
Acrylic: 64.2%
Nylon: 24.2%
Elastane: 11.6%

I got a new post up at Mailwatch. Some cunt thinks smoking is good and that smokers do the NHS a favour by dropping down dead prematurely, which obviously all smokers do, except the ones that die a protracted painful death over many years of course.

I didn’t even go into the nightmare that was the comments underneath it.

Yesterday the Guardian revealed the sheer magnitude of the sums of money spent by Lobbyists on both sides in the great healthcare debate in the US:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/01/lobbyists-millions-obama-healthcare-reform

Lobbyists representing the commercial interests of those who are opposed to the introduction of public health insurance have spent a grand total of $380 million on advertising campaigns, lobbying and direct political contributions, whilst those supportive of the bill, such as the Pharmaceutical companies, have stumped up $150 million.

These methods of lobbying have been described as ‘morally suspect’, rather an understatement of the situation, and indeed cast yet another dark cloud over the mechanisms of democracy, and the brand of democracy that the US are attempting to export all over the world.

What this shows us, alongside yet another damnation of the current democratic system, is that the Capitalist system is so wasteful and incapable of satisfying even the most basic of human needs. Anne Kruger, a famous neoliberal and pro-capitalist academic, wrote about ‘rent seeking’ in the 1990’s, arguing that rent-seeking, defined as the quest for access to  ‘super profits’ (profits gained over and above the profits one would expect to receive in a perfectly competitive market), is wasteful to the economy, as Firms compete for these super profits at the expense of investment. Kruegers’ original model was used to criticise certain countries in the Developing world for the non-market policies that they implemented. Supporters of the efficiency of the market would yet again hold up this model, and argue that the public medical insurance scheme proposed by Obama is government intervention is anti-market, which in a sense it is. The $430 million spent by the Firms in competing for the super profits could have been used more productively if it were invested.

So far so good, Ms Krueger, you almost have us convinced that Obamas’ proposed reforms have actually contributed to a reduction in the efficiency of the market. If you are arguing that this sum could have been invested in the  public healthcare system, not made it’s way into the pockets of the already super -rich that inhabit Capital Hill, sorry, Capitol Hill, then that is very admirable of you.

However, this kind of argument is consistently used to hide that basic fact that the market is simply defunct as a system that can fulfill even the most basic of human needs.  Another finding of Kruegers’ model is that the amount that Firms are willing to spend on competing for the super profits will eventually equal the amount of super profits available to them. As the legislation has not been passed yet, and we do not know how much more will be spent, what we can say is that there is at least $380 million in super profits up for grabs.

We can also say that without the proposed legislation, these $380 million worth of profits implicitly coexist,  and rely on the fact that an estimated 46 million of the poorest Americans are excluded from the healthcare system as they are unable to afford either the private medical insurance or the fees.  To put it bluntly, the ‘efficient’ market outcome trades off $380 million in profits against the healthcare needs of the poorest 15% of the US population. This is what ‘efficiency’ means in real terms, and is characteristic of the market outcomes that we see all over the world. It is one of the starkest examples of how the capitalist system places profit above human need.