Writer Neil Steinberg and I seem to be on the same wavelength. As it happens we’re also the same age. Over at the Political Mavens site, Neil writes:

Gee, have I really been listening to these goofs celebrate themselves for only 40 years? Because it feels like 400.

Doesn’t the self-regard and self-significance make you want to vomit? OK, 400,000 people gathered for a rock concert and didn’t kill each other — big flippin’ deal. Ten years later, in 1979, 1.2 million people showed up in Grant Park for a mass with Pope John Paul II, and you never hear them claiming it was a rend in the time-space continuum. Even more people are flocking to the lakefront for the Air & Water Show this weekend, and we don’t act like it’s some giant epochal moment — just another summer weekend in Chicago.

You can read the whole thing here.

British columnist Janice Turner says “Yes” to the question above in an op-ed for The Times of London.

As the headline of her piece makes evident, Turner is bristling at criticism of the British National Health Service which has become a part of the debate over health care here: “America has no right to speak ill of our NHS: Free healthcare is the mark of a civilised society . . .”

It’s quite human and understandable that Brits are taking umbrage at Americans speaking ill of their system (especially given that, based on my past viewing of UK TV, feeling superior to Americans is almost a national obsession there). Pride of nation is a pretty universal impulse.

It also shouldn’t be a surprise anyone that the merits and/or deficiencies of the NHS (and the Canadian system) are being highlighted by the partisans in the debate—the changes being proposed will lead us to something very similar sooner or later.

I was fascinated by the author’s assertion that providing tax-payer funded health care for everyone is the “civilised” and “Christian” thing for a nation to do. Ms. Turner, however, is glaringly wrong on several key points.

If you get past the touchy snarkiness of the first two paragraphs you find the (accurate) statement that virtually all political parties and politicians of every stripe in the UK support the NHS system.

The fact is, support for the existing system is a matter of political survival because it is indeed wildly popular with the voters. But then redistributionary programs are always popular with those on the receiving end of the redistribution. That popularity doesn’t tell us much about the merits or the morality of the program. By the way,  I understand that heroin is wildly popular with heroin addicts.

Both heroin and government largess are highly addictive.

Then Ms. Turner starts piling up red herrings and false assumptions. For example, praising the virtue of the British system, she writes:

It shows that decency, fairness and compassion, the national traits we fear died with nobler generations, live on. That America does not have universal health-care, that 47 million of your citizens live in fear of getting ill, appals and, frankly, baffles us.

I’ll set aside the question of what constitutes superior decency, fairness and compassion and just point out that the 47 million figure that she cites here is the one always thrown around by those trying to make the case that the current system is broken. It is a completely bogus figure. (See why here.) Or this:

Nor is is likely that those without insurance live in any greater fear of getting sick than do insured folks–Ms. Turner’s powers of telepathic empathy notwithstanding.

Existing federal and state programs are designed to give the poor and indigent access to a full range of health care (no compassion or decency points for us from Ms. Turner on this, alas.)

The next paragraph gets to the heart of her argument:

The Republican National Committee can condemn the NHS as Orwellian or evil or “socialised”, but what it is, at root, is Christian.

Really? This gets to something that I plan to build a book around someday. Government expressions of “compassion” tend to be mandatory and coercive. Christian charity is by definition, voluntary. If it’s coerced, it’s neither Christian nor charitable.

As an individual Christian, my faith compels me to reach into my wallet and consider widows and orphans and the poor. What my faith does NOT compel me to do is reach into my neighbors wallet and force him to do the same. In fact it forbids it. But this is precisely what the Christian-ization of public policy does.

Then Ms. Turner goes completely off the rails. She writes:

But unlike the lean NHS, there’s a spare tyre of fat on the system and any Briton who has been treated in America can tell you where it lies: around the bellies of physicians grown corpulent on prescribing unnecessary treatment.

This is nonsense on stilts. It also betrays a profound lack of understanding of the real problem with the current system here. Doctors do indeed routinely order tons of unnecessary tests and treatments–not because they’re greedy–but because they’re terrified of being sued.

Yes, the greatest driver of higher costs and inefficiencies in the American health care system–malpractice suits and class action suits–are rooted in the Trial Lawyers Association. And yet, none of the manifold “reform” proposals bouncing around Congress even acknowledge this problem, much less try to address it.

In the next-to-final paragraph, we get a sudden burst of candor:

In Britain the bureaucracy you fight is the hospital, in America it is in the insurance companies. Dealing with the NHS is like wrestling a Leviathan. The system is trying, rigid, oblique: the endless wait to see a doctor if there is no emergency, the senseless way everything stops at weekends, the noise in the wards, the defining mode of grace under pressure.

Then we read: “But the NHS has one thing about it that is perfect — its underlying principle.”

Well, to each his or her own. I’m not a fan of that underlying principle because I believe it infantilizes people. Perhaps the difference of opinion is rooted in our countries respective histories.

Monarchy and feudalism infantilized regular people. It viewed them as, and made them, helpless wards of the governing authority. Unlike Great Britain, the United States has no history of monarchy and no feudal roots. Perhaps that’s why cradle to grave nanny state care is a harder sell here than there.

In any event, if the President and the Democratic leadership in Congress continue to try to move our health care system in the direction of Great Britain’s, then folks over here are going to examine it and point out its weaknesses.

Hopefully Ms. Turner is civilized enough and Christian enough to deal with that.

Some genius decided to try to decipher Joe Cocker’s performance of “A Little Help From My Friends” from the Woodstock movie. Then he created subtitles.

It’s awesome.  Go here.

Forty years ago today, the Woodstock music festival began. Woodstock has been so romanticized by the current ruling elites (media and political) that the reality no longer bears much resemblance to the myth.

A reverent and fawning documentary last night only reminded me of all that was ugly and idiotic about the thing and I couldn’t help but see many parallels to our current situation. You see, the people who attended this thing are now pretty much running our country.

Woodstock Encapsulated

Billed as “Three Days of Peace & Music, Woodstock was envisioned as a ticketed, three-day concert in which about 200,000 people would pay $18 in advance and $24 at the gate. About 186,000 people actually paid good money for a ticket but then about twice that many more crashed the gates and expected to be entertained, fed, and medically treated for drug related mishaps at no cost to themselves.

Based on all the misty, water-color remembering that ex-hippies were doing in that documentary I watched, we’re all supposed to marvel and admire Woodstock for the miracle that 500,000 stoners got together in a pasture for three days without violence breaking out.

They seem to be under the impression that if a half million insurance agents and bankers had been put in that situation it would have devolved into Lord of the Flies within 24 hours.

Of course, squares with jobs and responsibilities and bourgeois hangups about walking in without paying would  have never been in that situation. As the documentary pointed out, neighboring farmers and shopkeepers quickly came to the rescue of the in-way-over-their-heads organizers and brought food, drinking water and equipment in.

The U.S. Army — uniformly despised and reviled by the musicians and their assembled fans — rushed in to offer medical support. Most of the medical needs arose from drug overdoses and “bad trips.” (“We have a report that there’s a problem with the brown acid!”)

40 Years Later

Four decades later, the generation that filled farmer Max Yasgur’s field with peace, love, trash and vomit is largely running our country. Most of them weren’t actually at the event, but they imbibed deeply of the spirit of the times.

You could define the Woodstock generation as those born between 1943 and 1953 (Americans who were age 16 through 26) and who rejected the traditional cultural values of Christianity, capitalism, self-reliance and self-restraint.

Among our current leaders and policy shapers who came out of this brown acid trip are:

Nancy Pelosi; Hillary Clinton; Joe Biden; Charles Schumer; John Kerry; Robert Reich; Al Gore; Maureen Dowd; Paul Krugman; Al Franken; Chris Matthews; etc. etc.

Our New Woodstock

Reduced to it’s purest essence, Woodstock was an invasion by a bunch people operating with an inflated sense of entitlement and moral superiority; indulging their every whim and impulse, becoming a burden to responsible people who had to come to their rescue;and who left a gigantic mess for others to clean up.

And here we are again, only the farm that’s being trashed is the entire country.

Our Kenya girl turns 18 tomorrow (but it’s already tomorrow there so I guess it’s already her birthday.)

Here are a few pictures she’s sent along recently:

From the Assyrian International News Agency:

In a dramatic session before the revolutionary court this past weekend, documented by Elam Ministries, Maryam Rustampoor (27) and Marzieh Amirizadeh (30) were told to recant their faith in Christ. Though great pressure was put on them, both women have refused to give in. Maryam and Marzieh were originally arrested on March 5, 2009 and have suffered greatly while in prison, suffering ill health, solitary confinement and interrogations for many hours while blindfolded. In a dramatic court room, the deputy prosecutor, Mr. Haddad, questioned Maryam and Marzieh about their faith and told them that they had to recant in both verbal and written form. They responded, “We will not deny our faith.”

hat tip: Ted

Blogger Doc Zero has a short piece over at Hot Air today that attempts to explain to bewildered Washington progressives who all these strange people are who keep showing up in large numbers to give their congressman an earful about the Dems socialized medicine boondoggle. After all, what kind of crazy people are against “free” health care?

An excerpt:

We don’t like having to fight desperate battles to save our freedom and future from socialist politicians every ten or twenty years. We don’t like having our time wasted with trillion-dollar statist fantasies, when our government is already trillions of dollars in the red. We’re tired of checking the papers each day, to see which group of us has been targeted as enemies of the State. We’re growing impatient waiting for the Democrats to come up with ideas that don’t require their supporters to hate someone. We’ve had our fill of “progressives” who act as if we’re living in 1909, and none of their diseased policies have ever been tried before.

Read the whole, brilliant thing here.

I missed her arrival. Daughter #3 was two-and-a-half weeks early and I was 800 miles away in Minneapolis, house hunting, when she insisted on making her entrance. Or exit, I guess I should say.

From the beginning, the child never has been much for waiting.

In the Summer of ’93, we knew we were going to be moving from Oklahoma City to Minneapolis as soon as our house sold. I had flown up to look for us a house, confident that our third blessing would not be arriving for at least two weeks. After all, her older sisters had come right on schedule.

Around 2:00, on my first full day there, I got a call from my great-with-child bride. It sort of, maybe felt like she was in labor. Possibly. But not for sure.

What to do? It was vital that we find a house and we didn’t have the money for another trip. I was self-employed and without insurance so we were paying for this baby as we had paid for the others–that is, with cash. We agreed to wait a while and see if this was a false alarm.

Around 5:00 p.m., another call. It’s the real thing. I checked the airlines for a flight that would get me back to Oklahoma City that night. There was none.

A few hours later I sat in my hotel room with the phone to my ear. On the other end, my sister-in-law was holding a receiver up beside my wife’s beet-red face. Her mom was there, too. The old advertising slogan for the phone company told us that long distance was “the next best thing to being there.” Well, that may be true. But it’s a very distant second.

That was 16 years ago today. I was there by late morning the following day.

What a blessing to our family this final addition turned out to be. The entertainment value alone has been well worth the price of admission.

Mrs. Blather and I have always referred to her as “the baby.” Though it’s getting harder every year to make that euphemism make sense. “The baby” can drive now. And she looks like this:

My genetic imprint is evident in some way in each one of our girls, but especially in this one. Not in looks so much–she’s an even mix of Holland and her mother’s side. But in temperament and tendency, there is much of me in this one–God help her.

I have no sons, and that is fine with me. Being the father of daughters has been the finest and richest thing I’ve ever known. But as a Dad, there is indeed something inside that aches to know that someone you’ve poured your life and heart into wants to be like you.  When all the short people in your house are girls, it’s easy to wonder if that is ever the case. But I don’t wonder . . .

That’s her foot. That’s my footprint. And I’m a contented man.

Liberal Yankee-Land is being invaded and slowly subverted . . . by evangelicalism. So reports the Christian Science Monitor:

Evangelicals March North

Hallelujah religion is a-rising in Yankee country. As liberal congregations die in a secularizing region, conservative churches with roots outside New England are replacing them with a passionate brand of faith that emphasizes saving souls – even in a land where many think there’s nothing to be saved from.

(hat tip: Instapundit)

Female Offspring Unit #2 is settled in Nairobi with a sweet family headed by a local pastor there. She hit the ground running and has been too busy to even think about being homesick.

The apartment complex in which her host family lives is modern and, by her eyewitness report, “very cute.” But there is just one wrinkle.

Kenya is in the throes of a desperate drought. As a result, the apartment only gets water every third day. On the days in which they have water, they draw and store enough for three days drinking and cooking. This means she gets two short showers per week in that hot, dusty environment.

It’s been two years since the country got any decent rain, and some experts predict that up to 10% of Kenya’s rural population could die in the next year if they don’t get a break.

Keep her, the ministry, and the believers of that nation in your prayers.