Category Archives: Healthcare

UPDATED: RIP, Joan Rivers

Celebrity, Comedy & Humor, Healthcare, Human Accomplishment, Political Correctness

The great Joan Rivers has died. I’ll miss her wit. She had undergone countless facial procedures, and should not have gambled yet again with her good health for no good reason. There is no such thing as minor surgery. If it’s meant to fix a “minor” matter, like the vocal cords, then surgery need not have happened.

Via Fox News:

Rivers went into cardiac arrest on Aug. 28 following a procedure at a clinic. She had been moved out of intensive care yesterday and into a private room.

In a statement, her daughter Melissa said:

It is with great sadness that I announce the death of my mother, Joan Rivers. She passed peacefully at 1:17 p.m. surrounded by family and close friends…”

FromJoan Rivers: Antidote to PC Totalitarianism“:

Already in her 80s, the octogenarian is best-known nowadays for the sartorial send-up “Fashion Police.” The Rivers repartee is so ribald—it’s fair to say she’s the only woman who can get manly men to watch a show about fashion. While her humor has become a tad tame for me—Rivers once even disgorged, albeit with difficulty, praise for the loathsome Lena Dunham of “Girls” fame—she, nevertheless, stands out as the only public persona who flatly refuses to apologize for her signature wit.

Examples: Joan has compared the guest room she occupies at her daughter’s abode to the basement in which the “Cleveland kidnapping victims, Gina DeJesus, Michelle Knight and Amanda Berry, were bound, raped and tortured for years before their escape. ‘Those women in the basement in Cleveland had more room,’ quipped Rivers.

Describing one awful outfit on “Fashion Police,” Rivers ventured that “on the scale of really bad ideas, it falls between marrying Charlie Sheen and using Oscar Pistorius’s bathroom.”

When Madonna accused Lady Gaga of stealing her “music,” Joan wanted to know how you could steal a rash.

And, Ms. Rivers walked in on a football party thrown for her grandson and his rowdy small friends by daughter Melissa. Looking on with disdain at the grubby little boys, Rivers blurted out: “I don’t know how Jerry Sandusky managed to do it.”

All wickedly clever. …

READ how Joan Rivers destroyed CNN’s Fredricka Witless HERE.

UPDATE: A well-written piece, at the Daily Beast, by British journalist Tom Teeman: “Joan Rivers: An Epic, And Epically Funny, Life”:

Anger motivated her. “I don’t know where mine comes from, but thank God it’s there,” she said. “Anger at the stupidity of everything around you. … Rivers denied, as I suggested, she’d been rude to so many people. “I told the truth. I don’t think it’s rude. I haven’t been invited to the White House since the Reagans were there.” … Rivers told me she didn’t know why she was still the outsider …”

We know why.

Joan Rivers Gambles With Good Health

Celebrity, Healthcare

The great Joan Rivers, who has undergone countless facial procedures, should not have gambled yet again with her good health for no good reason. There is no such thing as minor surgery, as far as I’m concerned. If it’s meant to fix a “minor” matter, then surgery doesn’t need to happen. Living trumps looking good.

The 81-year-old was having surgery on her vocal cords at a clinic when she suddenly stopped breathing during a procedure. … She remained in a serious condition in a New York City hospital on Friday, one day after going into cardiac arrest at a doctor’s office during a routine procedure. (MailOnline)

From “Joan Rivers: Antidote to PC Totalitarianism”:

Already in her 80s, the octogenarian is best-known nowadays for the sartorial send-up “Fashion Police.” The Rivers repartee is so ribald—it’s fair to say she’s the only woman who can get manly men to watch a show about fashion. While her humor has become a tad tame for me—Rivers once even disgorged, albeit with difficulty, praise for the loathsome Lena Dunham of “Girls” fame—she, nevertheless, stands out as the only public persona who flatly refuses to apologize for her signature wit.

Examples: Joan has compared the guest room she occupies at her daughter’s abode to the basement in which the “Cleveland kidnapping victims, Gina DeJesus, Michelle Knight and Amanda Berry, were bound, raped and tortured for years before their escape. ‘Those women in the basement in Cleveland had more room,’ quipped Rivers.

Describing one awful outfit on “Fashion Police,” Rivers ventured that “on the scale of really bad ideas, it falls between marrying Charlie Sheen and using Oscar Pistorius’s bathroom.”

When Madonna accused Lady Gaga of stealing her “music,” Joan wanted to know how you could steal a rash.

And, Ms. Rivers walked in on a football party thrown for her grandson and his rowdy small friends by daughter Melissa. Looking on with disdain at the grubby little boys, Rivers blurted out: “I don’t know how Jerry Sandusky managed to do it.”

All wickedly clever. …

MORE.

Free Spaying For Stalinists

Constitution, Feminism, Healthcare, Law, Private Property

“Free Spaying For Stalinists” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

Today we celebrate the proclamation of the Declaration of Independence, on July 4, 1776. Just how little is left, in 2014, of the Declaration’s unalienable rights was demonstrated by the Supreme Court’s ruling, in the case of the Secretary of Health And Human Services versus three faith-based, family owned businesses.

Having found a way to affirm the constitutionality of the unconstitutional Obamacare in the first place, a scurrilous SCOTUS, a branch in a tripartite tyranny, agreed to allow Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp., Hobby Lobby Stores Inc. (arts-and-crafts), and Mardel (Christian books) a miniscule degree of freedom in the use of their property. The individuals who own and control these businesses had objected to paying for what they consider abortifacients. Instead of being compelled to cover 20 FDA-approved methods of contraception favored by their employees, the firms will be permitted to pay for only 16.

The obsequious are celebrating. The owners, the Hahn and Green families, were facing crippling fines of “$475 million per year for Hobby Lobby, $33 million per year for Conestoga, as well as $15 million per year for Mardel.” By dictate of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA), a refusal to pay for employees’ healthcare all together would have resulted in hefty penalties too.

The U.S. government—originally founded to uphold, not calibrate, the people’s leave-me-alone rights to life, liberty and property—had claimed that the free exercise of religion did not apply to for-profit corporations. The legal loadstar followed by government and Court alike is not the unequivocal Constitution—it instructs Congress to make no prohibition on the free exercise of religion—but rather the equivocating Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). …

Read the complete column, “Free Spaying For Stalinists”.

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The Paltrow Of Politics (Minus Looks & Ethics)

Capitalism, Elections, Foreign Policy, Free Markets, Healthcare, Hillary Clinton, Hollywood, Military, Uncategorized, War

“The Paltrow Of Politics (Minus Looks & Ethics)” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

Hillary Rodham Clinton has done some “conscious uncoupling” from reality. The term was disgorged by a celebrity, Gwyneth Paltrow, to announce a separation from her spouse. In the same breath, the actress bemoaned her gilded, glamorous life, and offended America’s military sacred cow by comparing the cyber-attacks she endures to the experience of war.

As heir to a political dynasty founded by a powerful man, Hillary has received millions of dollars to write books. Over the years, she and husband Bill Clinton have made hundreds of millions from both book deals and speaking engagements. Yet in a recent ABC interview, the former “First Housewife” complained about emerging from the White House not only “dead broke, but in debt”: “We had no money when we got there and we struggled to … piece together the resources for mortgages, for houses, for Chelsea’s education. You know, it was not easy.” …

… But on CNN, love is in the air. Viewers have expressed a belief that Hillary would restore the country to the Clinton years of peace and prosperity. Bill Clinton bombed Iraq in 1998, as well as a Sudanese pharmaceutical company that turned out to be the main manufacturer of medicines and vaccinations in Sudan. And he strafed the Serbs in 1999. Stateside, Bill butchered 76 men, women and children in Texas. Alas, so long as Hillary steers clear of another Waco, and confines her murderous sprees to killing far-away people from high above—few boots on the ground—her countrymen will consider her a peace-maker.

While prosperity during the Clinton years was due less to Clinton-economics than to Reaganomics and a Republican Congress not yet completely comatose—in fairness, Bill does grasp something about prosperity. “This is good work,” he famously said about Mitt Romney’s much-maligned work at Bain Capital. Hillary, conversely, has no economic acumen. “There are rich people everywhere, and yet they do not contribute to the growth of their own countries,” she grumbled at the Clinton Global Initiative, in 2012. According to economist George Reisman’s cogent analysis—and contra Mrs. Clinton’s crushing ignorance—“a highly productive and provident one percent provides the standard of living of a largely ignorant and ungrateful ninety-nine percent.” As for Obama’s putsch for a North-Korean style health care: Instead of aborting it, Hillary will guarantee that Obamacare reaches full-term gestation.

Another wily fox called Bill (O’Reilly) has defended Mrs. Clinton’s riches as capitalism’s reward for hard work. Not quite. Hillary has accrued wealth by using the predatory political process to wield power over others. Although she has pudding for brains, Gwyneth Paltrow, on the other hand, has made a living in the honest, productive, non-predatory and salutary ways of the free-market. Paltrow’s affluence, unlike Hillary’s, is a reward for assets she peddles to people who choose to purchase them. …

Read the complete column. “The Paltrow Of Politics (Minus Looks & Ethics)” is now on WND.

Our German readers can now follow this column and other worthy writers in the JUNGE FREIHEIT, a weekly newspaper of excellence.

Editors wishing to feature the “Return to Reason” column in their publications, pixel or paper, please contact Bookings@ilanamercer.com.