Author: R J Adams

The events in Ferguson, Missouri over the last three months have gripped the media by the throat. The shooting to death of Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson is one of the best known news stories of the period, not just in America, but throughout the world.

Wilson’s account is now common knowledge. Asked by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos if he had any reservations, any sense of guilt or remorse for killing an unarmed man, Wilson was emphatic in his denial. He feared for his own safety, so he shot the man.

Apparently, Wilson was within his rights as a police officer to do just that. Most of the gun nuts in America would agree with him. Wilson said he had no alternative, yet the alternative was obvious. Brown took off and Wilson gave chase on foot. The alternative was to stay in his police car and call for back up. Brown had committed an offense – assaulting a police officer – and could have been picked up at a later time. Instead, Wilson chose to aggravate an already dangerous situation by provoking another one-on-one confrontation with a guy he described as, “a demon”.

Had Wilson not been armed he may well have taken the wiser course, stayed in his car and called for assistance. Brown would later have been arrested, jailed, and the riots, violence, and human suffering of the last three months avoided.

It begs the question: is an individual human life of any consequence in this modern age, or is the once-sacred ‘right to live’ now relinquished at parturition? However much a ‘demon’, when Officer Wilson stopped him, Michael Brown’s only obvious ‘crime’ was walking in the middle of the road. For that, and refusing to kowtow to an officious police officer, he received a swift death sentence.

The sacredness of every individual human life, a once moral bastion of civilized society, is again challenged in an article by two doctors, published in the New York Times this week.

Pamela Hartzband and Jerome Groopman are physicians on the faculty of Harvard Medical School. They’re also somewhat courageous. They’re standing up to corporate health care: insurance companies, drug corporations, and financial institutions rapidly buying up the nation’s health services for the sake of a quick profit.

Their ‘opinion piece’ is worthy of note:

When we are patients, we want our doctors to make recommendations that are in our best interests as individuals. As physicians, we strive to do the same for our patients.

But financial forces largely hidden from the public are beginning to corrupt care and undermine the bond of trust between doctors and patients. Insurers, hospital networks and regulatory groups have put in place both rewards and punishments that can powerfully influence your doctor’s decisions.

Contracts for medical care that incorporate “pay for performance” direct physicians to meet strict metrics for testing and treatment. These metrics are population-based and generic, and do not take into account the individual characteristics and preferences of the patient or differing expert opinions on optimal practice…^[1]

Sparrow Chat has written at some length of the ever-diminishing medical services being offered in many parts of the US as hedge funds and other financial institutions vacuum up family doctor practices, community-run hospitals, and other local health services under the guise of ‘improving conditions’. These improvements seldom materialize, unless classed as credit card readers in hospitals and doctor’s offices, belligerent demands for cash prior to seeing a physician, or the implanting of cheap, badly qualified, doctor-alternatives in the consulting rooms.

Now, it seems, the doctors themselves are under threat:

… doctors are rewarded for keeping their patients’ cholesterol and blood pressure below certain target levels. For some patients, this is good medicine, but for others the benefits may not outweigh the risks. Treatment with drugs such as statins can cause significant side effects, including muscle pain and increased risk of diabetes. Blood-pressure therapy to meet an imposed target may lead to increased falls and fractures in older patients.

Physicians who meet their designated targets are not only rewarded with a bonus from the insurer but are also given high ratings on insurer websites. Physicians who deviate from such metrics are financially penalized through lower payments and are publicly shamed, listed on insurer websites in a lower tier. Further, their patients may be required to pay higher co-payments…

Alarming? Certainly. The article argues that doctors are being placed under a moral dilemma. Should they prescribe the treatment of the insurance or drug company, or take a different course knowing it will prove best for their patient?

However, if you find that alarming, there’s one sentence in a later paragraph that stands out from the rest:

When a patient asks “Is this treatment right for me?” the doctor faces a potential moral dilemma. How should he answer if the response is to his personal detriment? Some health policy experts suggest that there is no moral dilemma. They argue that it is obsolete for the doctor to approach each patient strictly as an individual; medical decisions should be made on the basis of what is best for the population as a whole. [my bold]

No longer are we, the patient, to be considered individual. We are merely a minutiae in the larger herd. Our treatment should not be based on a doctor’s expertise, but, like laboratory mice, we are individually expendable in the great statistical analysis that will eventually determine what may be the best drug to treat a particular condition – ten, twenty, or fifty years down the road.

Is it not our duty, as citizens, to sacrifice ourselves now on the altar of corporate medicine, so others may benefit in years to come? And, even if they don’t, the medical services corporations will have become a lot wealthier in the process.

It seems we are all Michael Browns, after all.

^{[1] “How Medical Care Is Being Corrupted” PAMELA HARTZBAND and JEROME GROOPMAN, NY Times, November 18th 2014}

I was proud to be British. When I was a mere gossoon of five years or so, I remember my father telling me that to be British was to be safe. Wherever I was in the world, if I was in trouble the British government would ensure I was not harmed. If necessary, he said, they’d send a gunboat to rescue me.

As I grew older I learned of the great land across the ocean, America, where citizens could rely on their government to ensure they were safe, wherever in the world they were at the time. I felt proud that my country was allied to the great power of America. To hold either a British or American passport meant security from harm. No foreign power would dare to meddle with an American, or British, citizen.

It may have been something of a fanciful notion, even in the 1950s, but there’s no doubt both governments held more power in the world then than they do today.

That young lad of five years or so, is now a man of sixty-eight. Given the appalling events in the Middle East over the last few months, and the foul slaughter of British and American citizens by the abomination that passes by the name, ISIS, or IS, or ISIL, I can only ask myself, “What happened?”

Following the latest beheading of a US aid worker, British leader David Cameron, told Parliament, “The UK won’t be cowed…”, before retiring to 10 Downing Street for his nightly supper of caviar and chips.

America’s leader, Barack Obama, called this latest cold-bloodied murder, “Evil.” He then collected his clubs and headed back out to the golf course.

Why are we sitting back and letting this group of thugs torture and behead our citizens while we do absolutely nothing about it? Well, not quite nothing. The British Ministry of Defence released a video of a missile strike on an ISIS communications vehicle. If that doesn’t get them on the run…

There can be no doubt that the dire situation in Iraq today is a direct result of the US/UK 2003 invasion of that country. The political vacuum left after the demise of Saddam Hussein allowed ISIS easy entry, and their barbaric actions have fueled both fear, and a misplaced loyalty, among those who purport to support the organization.

Sparrow Chat has never been an advocate of warmongering, but when evil – not satanic, but man-made – threatens to destabilize the world it must be quashed, quickly and efficiently.

The world gradually became aware of that in 1939, when the evil of the Nazi regime erupted over Europe like a poisonous, pyroclastic, cloud. Its eventual defeat resulted in the formation of NATO, a joint military task force designed to prevent such evil beings from gaining power again.

Where is NATO today? America halfheartedly bombs the occasional ISIS convoy; Britain, even more reluctantly, takes out the odd ISIS pick-up truck. Why does no-one mention NATO anymore? Surely, this situation is right for a joint strike force, so Islamic militants can’t point a finger at any one Western power as being the enemy?

Virtually every US political commentator given airtime on the media is quick to state that, “It’s not our fight. We should leave them to sort out their own problems.” Just two weeks ago, Bill Maher’s panel, along with the man himself, was 100% in favor of ‘washing our hands’, like a concert of little Pontius Pilate’s happy to delegate the responsibility to some other authority.

The mess in the Middle East is entirely down to the irresponsible antics of Western powers over the last one hundred years, culminating in the criminal invasion of Iraq in 2003. It is solely our responsibility. We broke it. We must mend it. If we don’t, we may well continue to pay for it for a long, long, time to come.

I’m no longer proud to be British, or American. I’m no longer that gossoon of five years or so. I’ve grown up, and now I see things as they truly are.

“Hi! Have you just arrived from Britain? Really? You’re hoping to stay permanently? Well, let me tell you a bit about the place. Oh, and by the way – welcome to the asylum!

It’s been more than twelve years since I emulated Columbus and stepped onto American soil for the first time. As a Brit who’d traveled around quite a lot I was confident I could handle whatever America would throw at me. It couldn’t be that different from Europe, could it?

Maybe I was less fortunate than that dubiously intrepid explorer who’d preceded me by some five hundred and ten years. After all, he got to go home. I was an immigrant. I got to stay.

It wasn’t just the indignity of being constantly referred to as an ‘alien’, or even the Immigration Department’s female doctor, built like a Russian crane driver and with a face like a bulldozer, who rammed a finger resembling a German sausage up my ass before grabbing my testicles and declaring of one, “You’ve got a varicocele. It’s what we call a bag of worms.”

She’d failed to notice I’d had a vasectomy fifteen years previous, hence the unusual knotting within the scrotal sac. I didn’t bother to enlighten her. I was too busy trying to get my rectum back into some sort of order.

Nor was it the Mantoux TB test that showed up positive. Despite my protestations that – yes, of course it would be positive because I’d been given a BCG vaccination when I was fourteen – I was forced to take large doses of Rifampin that near wrecked my liver and almost put me in the hospital.

Did you get the BCG vaccination at school in Britain? You did!

You’ll find US doctors have no knowledge of BCG vaccinations for TB. It’s almost never used in America. They shrugged off my protestations by stating the BCG was only good for ten or fifteen years, so I must be a tuberculosis carrier. They’d obviously never heard of the BCG studies done on American Indians and Alaskan natives in the 1930s that proved conclusively BCG vaccine efficacy persists for 50 to 60 years.^[1]

It was about this time I began to doubt that everything we Europeans had been taught over the years, concerning this medically and technologically advanced nation, was actually true.

Twelve years on, I’ve had little reason to change my mind. Admittedly, when a blocked artery caused a bad angina attack that sent me to the emergency room, I couldn’t have asked for better treatment. Within three days I was back home and feeling better than ever. One week later, I got the hospital bill, which almost saw me back in there again.

I’ve spoken lots about the abomination that is the US Health Service, so I’ll not bother with further enlightenment. You can read about it on Sparrow Chat. How, or indeed why, Americans put up with it is beyond comprehension. That they do says more for the American mentality than, perhaps, any other aspect of US society.

Except, that is, for their fanatical obsession with firearms. Never mind the thousands who die every year as a result; sod the schoolkids massacred routinely by twelve or fourteen-year-old maniacs armed with Daddy’s AK47 for the fun of slaughtering their classmates, and who cares that any nutter can walk into Wal-Mart or Target and shoot up the place?

There is a positive side to it all. It gives the good folks of America the opportunity to show their love for each other by donating teddy bears, or balloons with holy messages of comfort, or even just a nice bunch of flowers to shove into the school railings. And let’s not forget the candlelight vigils. Oh, you’ll love those candlelight vigils. They just tear your heart out.

Americans will do almost anything to express their grief at such times – anything, that is, except demand their government enact legislation to curb this unnecessary slaughter.

Did I say “Welcome to the asylum”?

If you’ve any remaining doubts that the United States is doing a good impression of the world’s finest institution for the mentally insane, then a steady dose of US media will eventually assuage them. The evening news bulletins may not have an immediate impact on your nervous system. It takes time to realize that what passes as news in the rest of the world rarely makes it onto John Doe’s seventy-eight inch flat screen.

Basically, if it’s not American, it’s not news. For the first six months of American life I confidently expected the evening news would eventually inform me what was happening on Planet Earth. I was doomed to disappointment. For ‘Planet Earth’ read ‘United States of America’. Nowhere else exists, unless the US happens to be fighting a war there.

It doesn’t matter that three hundred Iraqis are massacred in cold blood by ISIS, or a European spacecraft is performing numerous firsts in space that will culminate in it landing on a comet. It likely won’t make the US evening news program. The only ‘Rosetta’ most Americans have heard of is the Mexican illegal-immigrant woman who serves them their Caramel Macchiato down the local Starbucks.^[2]

Perhaps the most maddening trait I’ve encountered in twelve years is the overall arrogance portrayed by the US media towards anything ‘not-America’. Superciliousness oozes from every pore of those whose job it is to sell America to Americans through the internet or television. No matter how disastrous the news of the day; however many kids shot in this week’s school massacre, or the latest corrupt failings of the seat of government in Washington, the broadcast will always end with a segment designed to show the viewers just how wonderful their fellow Americans are. Like, no-one else in the world bakes cookies to raise money for cancer research, helps a blind man cross the street, or donates their spare kidney to save a sibling’s life!

Do you know, over here people live in their cars? I’d never heard of families living in their cars before I came to America. The idea of people still existing in shacks and shooting squirrels for food was a lifestyle associated with third-world countries. Forty-six million Americans live in dire poverty! Surely it could only occur in Africa during a drought?

When I first arrived here I never expected the motorways to be riddled with potholes, or fifty-miles to the gallon diesel cars a non-entity, or electricity to be strung from poles that come crashing down with the first strong gust of wind.

Moving to America was rather like traveling back fifty years in time.

But, hey, don’t worry. You get sorta used to it eventually. And anyway, it’s too late for you to go back now. I just hope you don’t get the female Russian crane driver with the face like a bulldozer for your physical. Just make sure you take plenty of KY jelly with you.

Oh, and did I say, welcome to the asylum?”

^{[1] “Long-term efficacy of BCG vaccine in American Indians and Alaska Natives: A 60-year follow-up study.” PubMed.gov}

^{[2] “Rosetta mission: Can you land on a comet?” BBC, November 5th 2014}