The oncologist who will refuse all medical treatment after 75 (even for cancer)
A bit extreme! I am in my 80th year so this has some relevance for me. I am glad that I don't agree with him. I have just had a very good year.
I did however have a lot of medical support in recent years so I see that he does have a point. The support I had was not very onerous and has left me in very good health but others will be less fortunate than that
“Zeke”, as he is known, is influential in many ways, but his work that starts the most arguments is an essay titled “Why I want to die at 75”. It’s not just that he hopes “to die before I get old”, in the immortal lyrics of the Who. Rather, Emanuel pledges that at 75 he will stop trying to cheat death. He will act as though the breakthroughs made in medicine since the 19th century have never existed, seeking no cure for any encroaching ailments - no chemotherapy, certainly, but also no antibiotics, operations, statins, stents, screening, tests or vaccines. Avoid all contact with doctors, in other words.
He would like to be carried off the old-fashioned way, by nature’s mercifully swift brutality, rather than endure the decade of medically extended multiple illnesses that on average awaits us in the final furlong.
“Doubtless, death is a loss,” Emanuel wrote in that essay, which went viral in the US. “But here is a simple truth that many of us seem to resist: living too long is also a loss. It renders many of us if not disabled then faltering and declining, a state that may not be worse than death, but is nonetheless deprived . . . We are no longer remembered as vibrant and engaged, but as feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic.”
The essay goes on to enumerate the burdens that an over-75 typically places on the world, and how lonely and tired the growing tribe of ninety-somethings are as their lives become constricted to a single chair.
Emanuel’s solution to the problem of dying is not desperate denial, as it is for so many Californian tech bros in search of immortality. Nor is it the legalised euthanasia that is gradually spreading across the western world and that Emanuel actively opposes. Instead, he promises to pioneer a radical, retro survival of the fittest.
Some people write “living wills” to curb resuscitation efforts when already very frail. This takes that to a new extreme. He first set it forth at the relatively sprightly age of 57. On reading it I thought: “All very well to say this when you have a long lease left, but will his resolve to reject medical care falter when his 75th birthday draws closer? Will he find himself thinking, maybe a sneaky little Covid booster won’t hurt?”
Now Emanuel is 65, with ten years before the great doctor goes premedical, and I have a lot of questions. His brothers do too. Emanuel says that they call him on his birthday and ask, “How many more years is it again that I have to put up with you?”
So I tell him I’d rather see how old age pans out then be offered an exit if I felt I couldn’t go on - something akin to what the novelist Martin Amis (now 73) proposed when he talked half-seriously of euthanasia booths, where you would be greeted with a “martini and a medal”. Emanuel hates this. Euthanasia is riddled with moral and practical problems, he tells me, and even where legalised is considered only by a tiny minority. “If you think you’re going to legalise euthanasia, and it’s going to solve end-of-life care, you are deluded,” he says with the force of a putdown at a dinner with Ari and Rahm.
He says that we focus too much on the acute months before death and not on the long years of degradation. While modern medicine has increased lifespan dramatically, it has barely increased healthspan. A study by the Office of National Statistics is typical - it showed that if you were alive in England aged 65 in 2018, you have on average 20 years left to live, but the second decade would be consumed by chronic “illness or disability”. Aged 75, in other words, is where the suffering begins.
And it’s not just me who is deluded, Emanuel says. Every time he talks about his plan, almost everyone’s first reaction is to say that 75 is too young and to super-agers they know - these range from their 90-year-old surfing granny to President Biden (80) and Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to the US president (82), or indeed the oldest practising doctor, the 100-year-old Howard Tucker, who began working as a neurologist in Ohio in 1947 and still treats patients. We secretly believe that we will be these outliers, but “we can’t all be outliers”.
I wonder if he wants a quick illness to decide his end, as it would take bravery to either withstand a long medical treatment or take his own life. “Well, I think it’s bravery to say no to interventions where the majority of people would say yes,” he says. When I ask him the illness he fears most, he doesn’t hesitate: dementia. “There’s no doubt about it.” And after 75 the rates go “boom”, he says - even if we are not demented we lose self-sufficiency. “Living too long places real emotional weights on our progeny,” he wrote in his essay, even though they “won’t admit it”.
He is scornful of the new breed of (mostly male) “immortals” putting so much energy into the dream of living for ever. An Ipsos survey in November found that only a third of Britons want to live to 100, with more men than women wanting to live that long.
Emanuel wants to be clear-eyed about when his own “consumption” exceeds his “contribution”. Here he edges closer to what ethicists call the “duty to die” argument, the harsh utilitarian idea that the non-useful need to sling their hook. For someone as energetic and ambitious as him, passivity is clearly terrifying.
I say that perhaps “contribution” isn’t a good metric. There is value in the simple pleasures of old age. A large study by the esteemed psychologist Daniel Kahneman (now 88) in 2010 found that while happiness and enjoyment tailed off in one’s seventies, “emotional wellbeing” peaked at 82. Emanuel isn’t convinced, saying that people instinctively want to work to “leave the world better”, whether it’s as simple as being fit enough to manage a garden.
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Antisemitism Is Not Going Anywhere
Conspicuous Jewish success will always produce envy. And Israel is a Jewish triumph
More and more reports come out about the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sentiments on campus. There is no place more left-leaning in the United States than modern American college campuses. And there, open antisemitic activity and statements are common. The Left moves effortlessly from anti-Israel to anti-Jewish statements. The Left cannot find a fence that separates anti-Zionist expression from all-out antisemitism. In their eyes, all of Israel’s purported crimes are committed by its Jewish population. Dr. Martin Luther King already said in the 1960s that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. Yet today, Black Lives Matter had to include an anti-Israel screed in their official platform while Black antisemitism is growing and becoming more public.
Arabs and not just Islamists are also first-tier antisemites. My son and I were blown up by a Palestinian Authority policeman who was sent by several irreligious Fatah/Palestinian Authority officers. Whereas my father recognized his non-Jewish neighbors running up to his half-collapsed apartment to take whatever belongings they could get their hands on, the ones who blew us up and killed three Israelis in the process did not know any of their victims whatsoever. The situation was so macabre that when one of the female accomplices who walked the bomber down King George Street in downtown Jerusalem was reminded that she was found covered in blood immediately after the bombing, she insisted that all of the blood on her person was only from Mohammed Hasheikeh, the bomber. Heaven forfend that she would imagine that some of the blood on her clothing came from the 81 Jews wounded in the blast. You can see her demented and evasive comments in the movie, Brides of Allah.
So why do people of such diverse backgrounds and views hold antisemitic or more correctly anti-Jewish views? Some will claim that their hatred or antipathy is based on slights, real or imagined. Many will find Judaism offering a competing religious view and hatred will be out of religious competition. For many on the Left, it is simply one more tenet like white men being bad or men being able to give birth. Menachem Begin famously said that the Poles passed along antisemitism in their mother’s milk. The German high command around 1942 became worried that anti-Jewish motivation in the Wehrmacht might suffer as younger German soldiers had never encountered a Jew before. Jew hatred ranges from academic musings in faculty clubs about Jews having too much power to violent actions taken against predominantly Orthodox Jews, the only Jews that are easily identifiable to those who hate us. Henry Ford was so enamored with the false Protocols of Zion that he had copies made and handed out, certain that the Jews wanted to control the world.
So what can be done? The answer depends. People do not have to like Jews. And those same people have the right to free speech. As such, people have the right to express their dislike of Jews even if they couch it in anti-Israel sloganeering. The proof of the underlying antisemitism in the BDS and other supposedly anti-Zionistic movements is in their utter lack of concern for other places with far worse records of conquest, human rights abuses, and violence toward civilians. Have you ever heard of grassroots BDS Russia or BDS China or BDS Turkey or BDS Iran? Me neither. Somehow the one country that has a lot of Jews in it is the only place where bad things happen to the point where they can be motivated to get out of bed and shout anti-somebody slogans in freezing rain. When Assad murdered Syrians by the thousands, did our brave BDS warriors retool their signs and slogans? Of course not. But again, these antisemites have the right to protest and the right not to buy Israeli products or products from companies that do business in Israel. I hope that they can get by without smartphones, computers, and the like. As to universities and companies, there is no reason they have to tolerate antisemitic behavior, especially if it involves threats of violence or harassment of other students and employees. After Harvard was named the most antisemitic campus of 2022, I wrote President Bacow that antisemitism expressed on campus that leaves Jewish and Israeli students feeling personal threatened should lead to the perpetrators being expelled from the university. The same should be true for companies that truly are worried about antisemitism which has been likened to cancer. We don’t know how to prevent cancers but we are always building better ways to isolate and deal with them. Employees who express antisemitic views on company time or via company channels should get the boot. When Kanye or Ye went on his antisemitic rants, he lost sponsors and with them a lot of money. Former president Trump's meeting with him and a fellow antisemite has probably cost him votes, including mine. President Trump has been a great friend of the Jewish people and the state of Israel, but if he wants to hang out with Jew-haters, then I can take my vote somewhere else.
Antisemitism is not going away. Dealing with it when it goes beyond legally allowed freedom of expression means taking a hard line. If your doctor said that he removed most of cancer but left a bunch of cells behind, you would be terrified and furious. The same is true for antisemitism. It cannot be tolerated and if it means firing hotshot basketball players or dropping A-list actors from future movies, then that will be the price for holding repugnant views and expressing them openly. Too often, society has made do with some half-baked apology or mealy-mouthed statement of “my truth” or “if I hurt someone”. Boycotts can cut both ways. Kyrie Irving wants to dabble in antisemitism: drop your season tickets and don’t buy his merchandise. It’s the only thing he and the NBA understand: money. Students who attend Yale, a school named after a slave owner and seller, want that coveted degree above all else—if they threaten Zionists on campus, give them the boot. They cannot afford financially or personally not to have that diploma nailed to the wall behind their desks. Any antisemitic statements or activities not covered by the first amendment and university/corporate policy should be dealt with swiftly and aggressively. Antisemitism is not going away, but we can make it painful for those who espouse it. And even today, there is still no surgery to remove their anti-Jewish feelings from their hearts.
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Toxic feminism is crushing love
Katerina Janouch writes about Sweden. Hopefully it is better elsewhere
I talk to a male friend who tells me about his latest attempt at a love affair. They are both in their thirties, an age when many people choose to start a family, and my friend is longing to become a father. The woman he met through mutual friends initially seemed level-headed, sensible and honest and is on the same emotional wavelength. But very soon it turns out that my friend had gotten himself into a veritable inferno, where he is just supposed to keep quiet while the woman dictates all the terms, and if he protests, he is told that he is an evil man who should be ashamed of his lack of respect. I wonder now what our society will evolve into if women behave like spoiled brats based on some kind of confused radical feminist credo?
My dear friend is just one example of men testifying lately that it seems to be more the rule than the exception that women go completely off the rails, blaming their emotional breakdowns on the fact that it is obviously the men’s fault, while at the same time making impossible demands on how men should behave for a relationship to even be feasible. Being kind, understanding and able to talk about feelings doesn’t go very far. Even the man who conforms and does exactly as the woman says can have a hell of a time. Why?
Well, because suddenly he may have accidentally adapted too much, and doesn’t understand that the woman needs a little “chewing resistance”. In his desire to please, he becomes a servile doormat, and these galoshes don’t fit when she whimsically decides she wants an independent hunk. The woman becomes like a child in a sandbox, unable to choose between a red or a blue spade, and breaks down in a hysterical fit that results in her hitting the person who tries to comfort her. The emotionally disturbed radical feminists seriously believe that they have the right to behave as badly as they want and yet never have to encounter a patrol. They rule, demand, whine, are mean and impossible, moody and unpredictable. They are unstable and believe that even women’s violence against men is men’s fault. They are happy to vent their hatred against the entire male sex while screaming at the top of their lungs if they themselves receive the slightest criticism. It’s safe to say that avid social media use hardly does them any favours when the slightest outburst gains hundreds of ‘likes’ and unctuous cheers, even if the conflict may be based on some unreasonable behaviour she herself has engaged in, and then subsequently received a backlash for.
Not only that. A year later she may find out that the sex that took place actually happened without her willing consent, and that therefore the man can be charged with some kind of negligent rape. Later on in the trial, she alone is listened to, because she “felt” something, and as long as it is a woman who feels, the feelings are absolutely true. The man has no voice at all, and although he presents undeniable facts pointing to reciprocity, he is treated like a pariah, and the verdict is in the woman’s favour. I wonder what man would want to expose himself to such risks? Many don’t. They have stopped dating. They are resentful, disillusioned and resigned, and actually start to dislike women.
The behavior can be likened to the left’s strange psychotic break we see now after the [Swedish general] election. After the socialists have destroyed all of Sweden, they now demand that the succeeding government clean up the mess in a few short months. A feminine, emotion-based behavior, where they also got a bunch of bitches, who usually bring a penis substitute with them when traveling by train. All logic and common sense is gone; what remains is a red-hot, hysterical, frothing-at-the-mouth Left, with whom it is impossible to have a normal discussion. Everything is everyone else’s fault, they themselves are victims, and despite their behavior leading to a veritable societal collapse, they refuse to take responsibility. Responsibility, by the way — they can’t even spell it. They are like toddlers who lack all forms of logic and consistent thinking. It actually scares the hell out of you, when you think about it and realise that these are grown-up people behaving in this way. No wonder Sweden has gone off the rails, having these types of individuals in important decision-making positions and in positions of strategic authority.
As my old dad used to ask me: “Katerina, Sweden used to be a country governed by wise people? what happened?” Well, Dad, bitchy women and ‘batik witches’ and a completely derailed feminism came into being, I reply. A wave of emotion-soaking snowflakes installed themselves, and the traditional males checked out. Because the truth is, as long as real men ruled Sweden, most things worked. We had a good economy, a good (virtually fossil-free and environmentally friendly) energy supply, health care, schools and elder-care that worked, and a strong military defence.
Then the men were manoeuvred away by the mad furies of the Left, and everything went to hell.
Yes, a somewhat simplistic account of history, but broadly speaking this is exactly what happened. And women have become worse off in many ways. Rapes are at an all-time high, women hold down two jobs, and they’re not happy with the herring-milk men* who barely dare to touch them — for fear that the caresses won’t turn out to be consensual.
What we have now is severe polarisation and a full-scale war between women and men, with both sexes the losers. But perhaps the biggest losers are the women themselves. Because the world is still a pretty harsh and cruel place, and loneliness is hard, no matter who feels lonely. Traditionally masculine qualities are not learned overnight by women, just because our emotions tell us that this should be the case from a “non-normative” perspective. Life usually becomes more difficult, as it is filled with hatred and constant conflict.
I wonder who benefits from this pointless gender war? The women certainly don’t. Neither do the children, who are fed the message that dad is some sort of superfluous figure, who is really just mean and stupid. Not infrequently there is no father, only a sperm donor.
I think about what it might be like when the hysterical, radical feminists grow up and have children of their own. Some of them are so immature that they have never left that sandbox. They are self-absorbed, and will get a severe shock when they realise that the child must be put first. A man they can mess around with, sure, but a little baby won’t buy their nonsense. The baby screams, needs to be fed and will need to be nurtured to become an independent individual. The man they’ve thrown on the trash heap in the deluded belief that all of TINDER is teeming with better, hotter, and more insightful vegan dudes, who they can get together with instead. And when they realize that no one wants them, full-scale panic erupts. Toxic feminism sours, and what’s left? Pure gender hell, which nobody actually wants.
Is this really what feminists wanted? I find it hard to believe.
https://gatesofvienna.net/2023/01/toxic-feminism/#more-55016
***********************************************************Pacific islander workers set to be joined in Australia by families in 2023-24
Pacific islanders are generally not a great problem to anyone so this is a pretty good idea. Melanesians are a particularly desirable group. I grew up with them around (mostly TIs) and rather liked them.
Polynesians can be more of a problem. Maori are Polynesians and they have a high crime rate. Polynesians such as Tongans and Samoans are however generally very religious so that has a beneficial influence. The crime rate in Tonga is a small fraction of the crime rates in African populations. See here
The Australian government has committed to enabling Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) scheme workers on one- to four-year placements to bring their families to Australia.
In a statement, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said family accompaniment was "expected to commence with up to 200 families of PALM scheme workers in 2023-24".
"The location of families will depend on the interest from PALM scheme workers and employers participating in the initial phase. This may include several regions across Australia," it said.
But there is a lot to sort out before the first families arrive — Pacific Islands Council of South Australia chief executive Tukini Tavui says there are about 800 long-term PALM workers in the state alone.
He said accommodation was a hot topic during the national stakeholder consultations that ended in November. "As you would imagine, there's a lot of challenges, a lot of restrictions in that space," Mr Tavui said. "So that would obviously be a deciding factor in terms of where [the government] would start a pilot.
"And then, obviously, the family support — how do the secondary [visas work] in terms of health and education?"
The families will not have access to Medicare, meaning employers will need to organise health insurance.
Mr Tavui says Naracoorte near the border of Victoria in the south, where many long-term PALM workers are employed, could be a good place to host the first families.
"Somewhere like Naracoorte looks like it has the capacity, but accommodation would be a challenge," Mr Tavui said.
"That might be the case in a lot of our regional areas, particularly in SA."
Teys Australia employs 137 Pacific workers in Naracoorte and another 1,500 along the east coast of Australia.
The company said in a statement that it was "actively considering how it might support families from the Pacific to settle permanently in Australia".
Alongside affordable housing, schooling and health care, Teys listed welfare support, including community and church groups, as key considerations for the government.
Naracoorte-Lucindale Mayor Patrick Ross said the town would be "totally lost" without its migrant workers.
He said it would be "incredibly difficult" to house the families of workers in any region and that council was looking at strategies.
Mr Ross said schools would welcome new students with "open arms".
Mr Tavui said people had been enquiring about family accompaniment visas since early 2021. "There's clearly more than 60 per cent of workers who are here, with families back home, who'd be interested," he said. "[It] obviously comes with quite a lot of excitement."
Mr Tavui said families would likely be allowed to stay for as long as the term of an applicant's employment.
"I think, from the last conversation, there's definitely an intention to allow a family to stay in the country for the same duration as the primary visa holder, whilst obviously looking at some of the challenges around that in terms of whether the work runs out," he said.
DFAT said consultations about detailed policy design would take place in the first quarter of 2023.
"The Australian government is listening to the views of Pacific and Timor-Leste governments and other key stakeholders to shape the implementation of this policy," it said.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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