Wednesday, April 16, 2014


Britain's "overseas-trained" doctors at work again

They generate 4 times as many complaints as British-origin  doctors.  From the surnames one can deduce that the deceased was in the care of a Nigerian, an Arab, a Bangladeshi and a Chinese.  Another triumph of multiculturalism


Dr Yahya Al-Abed, a fifth-year trainee, had only been at the hospital for three weeks

A pregnant woman with appendicitis died after a bungling trainee surgeon mistakenly removed one of her healthy ovaries, a tribunal heard today.

Maria De Jesus, 32, underwent the botched operation at Queen's Hospital, Romford, Essex, after she was admitted with abdominal pains in October 2011.

She died 19 days later after suffering a miscarriage. Inexperienced medic Dr Yahya Al-Abed admitted he made a number of errors during the procedure, including removing her right ovary instead of her appendix.

Senior surgical consultant, Dr Babatunde Coker [a Nigerian], is accused of failing in his role by not attending theatre to carry out the surgery himself or supervising the registrar. Mrs De Jesus, who was 21-weeks pregnant, was discharged ten days after the October 23 operation, but returned to the Romford hospital on November 7, still in serious pain.

The mother-of-three gave birth to a still-born boy and died on the operating table on November 10 following a second operation to remove her appendix, the tribunal heard.

Both doctors are facing fitness to practise proceedings at the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service in Manchester, where they could face being struck off.

The General Medical Council, represented by Peter Horgan, say the doctors' treatment of Mrs De Jesus, who is referred to as Patient A at the hearing, amounted to misconduct.

Opening the case today Mr Horgan told the panel Mrs De Jesus was admitted to hospital with severe abdominal pain on October 21, 2011, and was diagnosed with appendicitis two days later.

Trainee surgeon Christopher Liao, who had been working at the hospital for less than three weeks, decided she needed her appendix removed and Mr Coker agreed.

The consultant was told Mr Al-Abed, a fifth-year trainee, who had also only been at the hospital for three weeks, was performing emergency operations and she was added to his list.

There were a number of other staff present in the theatre on Sunday October 23, including a young doctor 'keen to get some experience', Osman Chaudhary.

Mr Chaudhary was allowed to make the first incision, but when complications arose Mr Al-Abed took over. 'Patient A had begun to bleed quite heavily. Something was not right,' Mr Horgan said.

'In the midst of this, Mr Al-Abed removed what he clearly believed to be the appendix. He thought he found it, removed it and gave to a nurse what later turned out to be Patient A's ovary.'

A colleague later reported that the medic 'appeared reluctant to call for help' and Mr Coker was never called. He had been in the coffee room while the operation took place and received no information it was underway.

'He had lunch, then went home and didn't become aware until Monday,' said Mr Horgan. 'Thereafter Patient A remained in hospital until she was discharged on October 31. She returned to hospital and was readmitted on November 7 suffering abdominal pains.

'On November 9 it was discovered by another doctor that in fact the histology report showed an ovary had been removed and not the appendix.

'Tragically on November 11 Patient A gave birth to a still-born male baby.' Mrs De Jesus was again consented to go under the knife and this time her appendix was removed by Mr Liao.

'But sadly later that afternoon Patient A died whilst on the operating table,' Mr Horgan said.' The post-mortem concluded she had died of multiple organ failure brought on by septicemia, the panel heard.

'The GMC's case against Mr Coker centres on his responsibilities and actions on October 23,' Mr Horgan added.

'This was a potentially complicated operation as it was to be performed on a pregnant woman.'

Dr Coker, represented by Neil Sheldon, admits to failing to appropriately undertake his role in not attending or supervising the operation, but denies several other similar charges on the basis that that his admission 'renders them redundant'.

'The GMC's case against Mr Al-Abed centres on his responsibility and actions before, during and immediately after the operation on October 23,' said Mr Horgan. 'In short it is alleged that Mr Al-Abed performed the surgery as he did and acted outside the limits of his competence.'

Dr Al-Abed, represented by David Morris has admitted to the majority of the charges, leaving two outstanding factual matters. If the panel, chaired by Carrie Ryan-Palmer, find any of the facts admitted or found proved amount to misconduct the medics could face sanctions ranging from conditions to erasure from the medical register.

At an inquest in Walthamstow, east London, coroner Chinyere Inyama said a lost window of opportunity could have saved Mrs De Jesus. Barking, Havering and Redbridge Hospitals Trust admitted liability for her death apologised to her family. The hearing continues.

SOURCE






The incredible hypocrisy of 21st Century feminism

by Alicia Colon

 My first published column was in a local paper opposing the Equal Rights Amendment for the same reasons that Phyllis Schlafly, a conservative lawyer, campaigned on. As ambiguously written, the ERA, would eliminate the men-only draft requirement, repeal protective laws like sexual assault and eliminate the tendency for mothers to obtain custody over their children in divorce cases.

Ironically, one of the arguments that helped sink the amendment from ratification was the fear that single-sex bathrooms would no longer be permitted. In addition, opponents of the amendment also warned that it would lead to abortion on demand and same-sex marriages. Since these changes are now part of our lives, it is obvious that a constitutional amendment was unnecessary to radically change our lives.

I was a very young woman when the 'sexual revolution' began and at first sniff, I recognized it for the fraud that it was. The women burning their bras and bristling at being called names, like broads or honey, were light-years away from the suffragettes of the early 20th century who deserve the greatest respect for their bravery and principled struggle. I wasn't about to burn my bra in public for anybody and even from my youthful perspective, I knew that aside from the demand for equal pay and open opportunities, the sexual freedom demands seemed to benefit men more than women; no more shotgun weddings because women would now have the right to 'terminate' an inconvenient pregnancy.

As the movement progressed, so did the deceitful public relations campaign turn a legitimate issue of an unfair economic standard into one dominated by malcontented women. Any alleged attack on women in the workplace became a matter for government intervention and legislation by lawmakers who were dependent on feminist lobbyists. Men vs. women became the standard in nearly every aspect of our culture. Remember that famed tennis match between Billy Jean King vs. Bobby Riggs? Pure theater and nonsensical but women (not I) cheered when King won. I had never heard of Bobby Riggs before his hustler challenge to King; he was 55 years old in 1973, the year of the match, called the 'Battle of the Century'-what a joke. Yet the crowing turned into fame for King who eventually came out of the closet when her secretary, Marilyn Barnett, sued her for palimony. Just another male bashing feminist reaping the reward for years of duplicity.

I admire strong women but I did not see these leaders of the '60s revolution as strong at all. Strong women handle adversity on their own without manufacturing slights and offensives as sexist.

Women have been objectifying men as often as they objectified us. The powerful feminist lobby targeted reproduction as an issue that needed to be under their control and that was when I realized that it wasn't really interested in women's rights at all. The denigration of motherhood became the rallying cry of the weak minded puppets of their male compadres. Let's face it- it became so much easier to terminate a pregnancy and end the life of an innocent child then to accept responsibility for a promiscuous lifestyle. Women who chose to be wives and mothers ranked so much lower than the so-called female power brokers in all industries.

Having it all became a possibility because men had been doing it forever, right? It's a myth because men and women are different. What a concept. Apparently, those enlightened feminists of the 21st century still don't get it. They attack the most miniscule elements of our sexuality while ignoring the real war on women around the world because that would be dangerous to their dogmatic liberal ideology. Consider this as an example: According to an article in the liberal blog, Pandragon, the author wants feminism taught in primary school. She writes, "Our children's education is reinforcing the idea that it is natural for women and girls to be decorative, whereas men and boys are the active ones. Do we want them to be learning blind faith in gender stereotypes?"

What ticked her off was her son learning a song called, "Jesus is my superhero," and apparently the only female superhero in the song was Barbie. Well, that would tick me off too since I've always loathed Barbie but the idea of introducing very young children to feminism while ignoring and not condemning what is happening to women in other cultures is the height of hypocrisy. NBC reports on the horrific rise in female mutilation in the U.S. without mentioning that it is a traditional practice in some Islamic countries. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (C.A.I.R.) managed to silence a film, "The Honor Diaries" which exposes the abuses of women around the world despite the fact that the abuse occurs in other religions besides Islam. I doubt noted feminist attorney, Gloria Alred, will ever represent such victims of sharia law.

I met a genuine, legitimate leader of women's rights, Phyllis Chesler, while writing for the New York Sun in 2006. I confess that I was reluctant to take the assignment because I'd always been completely uninterested in anything feminists had to say but the title of her book, "Death of Feminism" intrigued me. I found her to be that rarity- a rational, charming feminist with a sense of humor - and we bonded instantly. I wrote:

"Ms. Chesler is an emerita professor of psychology and women's studies, a psychotherapist who has lectured and organized various human rights campaigns here and abroad. Although women's groups have long heralded her as a founding feminist for her classic book, "Women and Madness," the bloom has apparently been off the rose since she admitted she voted for President Bush.
"Yes, Ms. Chesler has done the unimaginable. Her book calls for a new feminism, one that requires independent - not group - thought, and a single standard of human rights for men and women everywhere on earth.

"In her book, Ms. Chesler exposes the realities of Islamic gender apartheid and tells what happens to real women in the Islamic world who struggle for freedom every day. These women are ignored by the old school of politically correct, leftist feminists. Ms. Chesler herself was, years ago, a young bride who escaped captivity in Kabul, Afghanistan."

She has now written in detail about her experience in her latest book, 'An American Bride in Kabul: A Memoir,' which hopefully will receive the positive attention it deserves from the media. I do not, however, expect the lemmings and lapdogs of the liberal left at N.O.W. to forgive her apostasy or abandon their political correctness to admit that she is courageous in exposing the global war on women.

It has been quoted somewhere that, "the worst enemy of woman is an evil woman." Nevertheless, I have found that the worst enemy of woman may be a self-centered, gullible one.

SOURCE






You sexist/racist/liberal/elitist bastard! How dare you?

While he was dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease, Tony Judt found the breath to educate those who believe they could ameliorate pain with soft words and bans on ‘inappropriate’ language.

“You describe everyone as having the same chances when actually some people have more chances than others. And with this cheating language of equality deep inequality is allowed to happen much more easily.”

Worry about whether you, or more pertinently anyone you wish to boss about, should say ‘person with special needs’ instead of ‘disabled’ or ‘challenged’ instead of ‘mentally handicapped’ and you will enjoy a righteous glow. You will not do anything, however, to provide health care and support to the mentally and physically handicapped, the old or the sick. Indeed, your insistence that you can change the world by changing language, and deal with racism or homophobia merely by not offending the feelings of interest groups, is likely to allow real racism and homophobia to flourish unchallenged, and the sick and disadvantaged to continue to suffer from polite neglect.

An obsession with politeness for its own sake drives the modern woman, who deplores the working class habit of using ‘luv’ or ‘duck’, but ignores the oppression of women from ethnic minorities. A Victorian concern for form rather than substance motivates the modern man, who blushes if he says ‘coloured’ instead of ‘African-American’ but never gives a second’s thought to the hundreds of thousands of blacks needlessly incarcerated in the US prison system.

As the late and much-missed Robert Hughes said, ‘We want to create a sort of linguistic Lourdes, where evil and misfortune are dispelled by a dip in the waters of euphemism’.

You do not have to listen to it for long to believe that the defining features of contemporary debate are:

*   a willingness to take offence at the smallest slight that would make a Prussian aristocrat blink;

 *  a determination to ban and punish speech that breaks taboos;

 *  a resolve to lump disparate individuals into blocs – “the gays,” “the Muslims,” “the Jews” etc – and to treat real and perceived insults to one as group defamations that insult all;

 *  a self-pitying eagerness to cast yourself as a victim;

 *  and an accompanying narcissism, which allows you to tell others just how much you have suffered.

To which you could reply, what’s new? Not so long ago the cult of the House of Windsor was so fervent the BBC banned John Grigg (Lord Altrincham) for saying , truthfully, of the Queen, ‘The personality conveyed by the utterances which are put into her mouth is that of a priggish schoolgirl, captain of the hockey team, a prefect, and a recent candidate for Confirmation’.

In the last years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, no one dared name new railways stations. If the line mangers gave a station a German name, they would insult the Hungarians and Slavs; if they gave it a Hungarian name they would insult the Germans and Slavs, and so on. All societies have their prigs, tribalists and book burners. The fight against them is eternal.

One of the many pleasures of reading Richard King’s On Offence is it allows you to sift the old from the new. It appears to be an attack on political correctness. But King, an Australian author, who deserves to be better read here, is from the Left and understands that the great issues of any time are as likely to be fought out within the Left and the Right as between the Left and the Right.

This account he quotes of the failure of identity politics from George Kateb of Princeton University illustrates how hopeless traditional labels are.

"If a person thinks of himself or herself as first a member of a group, that person has defined identity as affiliation, and not as first being oneself. To…welcome docility, is to to endorse the thought that one’s possibilities are exhausted, perhaps from birth, and that one cannot change or be changed."

All true. As I have often observed, the supposed leftists who lump people together as ‘the blacks’ and ‘the Muslims’ go along with a denial of personal choice and individual autonomy they would never accept if others treated them as mere atoms in the homogenous lump of ‘the whites’. The BBC proved my point when it asked in apparent seriousness ‘Who speaks for Muslims?’ It would never ask, ‘Who speaks for whites?’ because it assumes that whites can speak for themselves.

Although they pretend otherwise, today’s right-wingers are just as crude and lachrymose. They subsume their individuality in a nostalgic patriotism, and respond to criticism by claiming that they are the victims of discrimination and prejudice as well. They are also as likely as the post-1968 left to claim that they are fighting ‘the elite’ – although this time the enemy is the ‘liberal’/ ‘cultural Marxist’ elite.

In the Observer recently I noted how British conservatives aped liberals by claiming to be the innocent victims – in their case of a ‘war on the motorist’, a campaign of state persecution against innocent drivers.

‘They did not stop to consider the mewling vacuity of their self-pitying slogan. Conservatives complain about others playing the victim card but, without a blush of shame, talk about ‘the motorist’ as if he were a victim of Bashar al-Assad and imagine a ‘war’ in which the enemy is a child who runs into a street. They follow that dismal reasoning by transferring the generalisations of identity politics to road safety. It never occurs to them that there is no such thing as ‘the motorist’: the man or woman who only drives. Everyone walks. And, unless they’re on the fells, everyone crosses roads.’

Indeed, in the 20th century, the right was more likely than the left to verge towards hysteria. You might think that the, always false, stories about public authorities abolishing Christmas are new. Not so. In the 1920s Henry Ford declared Christmas under attack from diabolically powerful Jews, who stopped images of the infant Christ appearing on Christmas cards. In the 1950s the far-right John Birch Society warned of an ‘assault on Christmas’ carried out by ‘UN fanatics…What they now want to put over on the American people is simply this: Department stores throughout the country are to utilize UN symbols and emblems as Christmas decorations.’

What distinguishes our times is the fanaticism about the power language. Starting on the post-1968 left and moving rightwards ever since, is a belief that slips in language reveal your opponent’s hidden meanings and unquestioned assumptions. The wised-up need only decode, and everyone will see the oppressiveness of the elite. A few weeks ago the middle-class left in Britain hugged itself with delight when the Conservative Party issued an advert which announced that it was ‘Cutting the Bingo Tax & Beer Duty to help hardworking people do more of the things they enjoy.’

Once political tacticians would have said it was mad for an opposition to repeat incessantly that a government was cutting tax. But the British left republished the ad thousands of times. It thought the right had damned itself by saying it wanted to help to help ‘hardworking people do more of the things they enjoy’. You see the Conservatives had said ‘they’ rather than ‘we’, and to the left’s mind that slip of a pronoun revealed a whole worldview. Conservatives were patronising the working class. And by saying ‘they enjoy’ Tories revealed that they were not working class themselves – as if anyone had ever thought Conservative leaders were.

In our world, a word or phrase defines everything about an individual. We have just seen the CEO of a Web company resign because he had once given money to a campaign against gay marriage. Even though his views on gay marriage had nothing to do with his professional duties, he had to go because his enemies insisted that his one belief polluted everything else about him.

The second distinguishing feature of our times is governments’ willingness to use the law against ‘hate speech’. I have rehearsed arguments against the sinister trend to take criminal sanctions beyond prohibitions against incitement to violence many times, and was therefore to delighted to find King supply a new one.

Words can of course hurt more than blows, he says. But that does not mean that psychic wounds are the same as real wounds. If I deliver a blow, the broken bones can be seen; the damage measured. If I incite violence, the court can again measure the consequences. The same applies if I steal money. But if I deliver insults, one target may be delighted to have provoked me, another may not care what I say, a third may be offended. In other words, governments are asking the law to assess the psychological states of insulted parties, and introducing a vast element of subjectivity into a legal process where it has no place.

The best case against our snarling willingness to ban was put by Tom Paine 200-years ago, when he emphasised how censorship demeans the censor as much as the censored. In the introduction to his Age of Reason, whose freethinking scandalised Christian America, he said in words worth learning by heart.

‘TO MY FELLOW-CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA:

I PUT the following work under your protection. It contains my opinions upon Religion. You will do me the justice to remember, that I have always strenuously supported the Right of every Man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.’

SOURCE





No Oprah, I’ve Never Owned A Slave…

I’m a fifty-year-old white male who has served my country.  Am I supposed to feel guilty?  I’ve never considered myself a racist.  I have many Black, Asian, and Hispanic friends.  I’ve served alongside these people in the military and consider them colleagues and patriots.  However, I can’t help but think Am I one of the people Oprah wants to die before racism no longer exists in America?  How much money does Oprah have again?  The generation that built the Jim Crow South has mostly passed away.  The generation laced with white guilt is thriving.

The constant stream of race baiting, and the use of race as a weapon in the leftist media, is getting old.  I’m not stupid; I realize there are always going to be a small contingent of white supremacists in America, just as there are with any racial group in this country.  However, it is the extreme left as a group that is racist and is fomenting racial division every day in the media, and in our schools and universities.  The white racists are safely ensconced in their trailer parks; they are not in positions of power.  White people today as a group are not trying to hold blacks and other minorities back.  In fact, it’s quite the opposite: they would like nothing more than to see other races working and living beside them united in success and building a better America.  Speaking as a white male, it seems that blacks and minorities want to bring down whites, not build the country up together.  Racism can work both ways.

Here is the simple truth of America.  You don’t get ahead and build up the country by blaming others for your problems and trying to bring them down.  You build yourself up, and your neighbor, by keeping your head down and working hard.  I heard Al Sharpton the other day complain that Rand Paul was talking about civil rights.  One race does not have a monopoly on that term or the concept.  All you have to do is turn on MSNBC to hear how everything is the white man’s fault.  When are we going to see the left and minority communities face up to the fact that most of their current predicament is of their own creation?  Their refusal to embrace self reliance and responsibility is the root cause of the success gap between blacks and whites in America.  There it is; I said it.  And it needs to be repeated over and over again.

I hear the left talk about reparations for slavery.  Guess what?  There have been trillions of dollars transferred to minorities in America over the last several decades of the war on poverty and the Great Society.  Reparations have already been paid.  This liberal cause and experiment has been a devastating failure and caused the breakdown of minority families and destroyed communities.  There are more people in so-called “poverty” than when the programs were started, food stamps and Obama phones notwithstanding.  And what about the almost seven-hundred thousand mostly white men who died during the Civil War to end slavery?  We have a black president for God’s sake!  The problem is he has never missed a chance to foment racial division in America (nor has his attorney general.)  Obama has not been the uniter that he campaigned on and promised he would become.  On the contrary, he has been a divider; and his administration’s policies continue to be.

How on earth can you explain the fact that the first person arrested for the “knockout game” was white?  How else can you explain the refusal to prosecute the New Black Panther case of voter intimidation?  What about the refusal to enforce immigration law?  The cry of racism has been turned into a club to beat the opposition when it points out the obscene failures and destructive agenda of liberal policy.

And here’s another newsflash.  Today, a white country boy from the South faces more discrimination in New York City than a black woman feels in Atlanta, GA.  We are all born with obstacles we have to overcome.  I for one have felt guilty long enough.  The left needs to look elsewhere for racists.  Maybe they should look in the mirror.  Hopefully, our next president will be a leader who can truly unite the disparate races in this country under a common cause of maintaining and improving our way of life.

Because at the end of the day, the simple truth is there is no white person alive today who has ever owned a slave.

SOURCE

*************************

Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here

***************************

No comments: