Grove City Makes Top Ten
Grove City College Grove City, Pennsylvania Grove City College is a Christian college located north of Pittsburgh with 2,300 students. It offers fifty majors and has no graduate programs. Its mission states: “while many points of view are examined, the College unapologetically advocates preservation of America’s religious, political, and economic heritage of individual freedom and responsibility.”
As a liberal arts institution, its mission also states: “rejecting relativism and secularism, [Grove City College] fosters intellectual, moral, spiritual, and social development consistent with a commitment to Christian truth, morals, and freedom.” The atmosphere created at Grove City College through its policies encourages “the spiritual, moral, intellectual, and character development” of its students and staff.Many faculty members at Grove City share a commitment to conservative scholarship in various fields. For example, Dr. Paul Kengor (political science) recently wrote a best-selling book entitled God and Ronald Reagan and is an expert in the American presidency. He is also a popular speaker at Young America’s Foundation conferences. Dr. Tracy Miller (economics) is an expert on international economics who has written on the subject. Renowned economist and columnist Dr. Walter Williams is a new member of the Board of Trustees. In addition, Grove City boasts a strong department of religion and a new major in entrepreneurship. Given legal and financial independence from the federal government, Grove City College’s tuition fees are surprisingly low. Annual tuition is half the national average, thanks to the college’s generous scholarship and loan programs. During the 2002-2003 academic year, almost $3.5 million went to scholarships. As a result, Grove City is ranked the #1 best value among comprehensive colleges in the northeast United States by U.S. News & World Report. For more information, contact Grove City at:
Grove City College Admissions 100 Campus Drive Grove City, Pennsylvania 16127 (724) 458-2100 http://www.gcc.edu/
Alms for the Poor?
See kids, this is what happens if you drop out of graduate school!
Yes, that is indeed the blogger in all her infamy, digging in the trash. My sincerest thanks to Ben Wetmore for uploading this invaluable image to the information superhighway!
The Coming Threat to Europe -- Caught on Camera
The 20th Century threat to Europe & mankind
The current threat to Europe
The coming threat to Europe (center of picture, man offering hand with dorky hat)
Do all politicians read from the same playbook?
The gravy train starts here (Evening Standard Magazine: 06/08/2003) Daniel Hannan, MEP
Bad news from Brussels. The Euro MPs really are raking it in at our expense, says Daniel Hannan, and he should know — he’s one of them. Welcome to the land of champagne and gravy. It is a myth that we MEPs fiddle our expenses. We don’t need to. All our allowances are handed over unconditionally, without any need for invoices or receipts. There is, as it were, nothing to fiddle.
‘Ah, so you’re one of those, are you?’ people say. ‘We know all about you lot: gravy train, first-class travel, champagne lifestyle.’ But they are missing the point. An MFP who travels Ryanair from Stansted and sleeps in the specially provided bed in his office is arguably behaving more shabbily than one who flies business class. Let me explain.
Whenever you travel from your constituency to Brussels or Strasbourg, you are reimbursed on the basis of the most expensive fare plus a ‘kilometrage’ allowance — regardless of how you
actually make the journey. If you travel full fare, you end up a couple of hundred pounds ahead. But if you are prepared to take the cheapest possible route, you can easily make £700 to £800 a week — tax-free, since it counts as expenses rather than income. And the longer the distance, the greater the profit: someone flying from, say, Naples or Riga could end up trousering well over £1,000 per trip. One lucky Euro MP lives in the Canary Islands.
Then there is the daily attendance allowance: €262 (around £173) per day, Monday to Friday. In theory, this is to pay for meals and accommodation. But the clever thing to do is to buy an apartment, and then sub-let a room to your researcher. With luck, this will cover your mortgage, allowing you to take home nearly £1,000 a week in clear profit — tax-free, again. Forget about paying for your meals, by the way. Whenever you’re hungry, just stretch out your arm and hail a passing lobbyist.
You don’t actually have to turn up at any meetings to qualify for your attendance allowance, lust before the European election, an Austrian MEP called Hans-Peter Martin revealed that several of his socialist colleagues had been signing the register and then immediately flying home. He quickly became the most hated man in Brussels. A British Labour MEP, Gordon Adam, knocked him down as he tried to film people signing in — to, it must be said, general applause.
It’s the same deal when it comes to your staff allowance, now nearly £9,000 a month. This awesome sum is quite enough to employ a genuine secretary, as well as a researcher and possibly a stagiaire, while still having a good fifty or sixty grand left over for the missus, provided you describe her as your second secretary. I wish I could tell you that this practice was confined to wily Continentals but, as far as I have been able to establish, a clear majority of British MEPs employ immediate members of their families. In fact, we’re rather famous for it. ‘What is it about you English?’ a French colleague once asked. ‘You employ your wives, and you sleep with your staff.’
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I suspect it’s the shock of being catapulted into a glamorous world. We are trailed in the corridors by pretty interns; our speeches, however banal, are translated into 20 languages; we have a special passport to whisk us through airports without queueing; lobbyists fight for the right to feed us. The better Brussels restaurants, La Maison du Cygne overlooking the Grand Place, and Comme Chez Soi, which is counted among the best in the world, treat Eurocrats and lobbyists as their core custom. Crocodile in Strasbourg receives so much indirect subsidy from the European Parliament that it really deserves its own paragraph in the EU budget. The champagne receptions in the parliament’s salons seem a long way away from our previous lives as polytechnic lecturers. Add in the temptation of bcing away from home all week and it is perhaps not surprising that some MEPs begin to tire of the wives they acquired at an earlier stage in their social evolution.
Let me say at once that many MEPs behave impeccably; and that their wives often work harder than any secretary, organising diaries on Sunday afternoons, fielding telephone calls while waiting at the school gates. But the point is that they don’t need to. No one ever checks. The system is based on sums of money being handed over for you to spend as you please. For example, we get just over £2,300 a month in the aptly named ‘general expenses’ allowance. In theory, this is to cover costs connected with our parliamentary work, such as office rent, postage and petrol. In practice, it is never audited, and many MEPs have it paid directly into their current accounts.
No one ever asks you to supply receipts. In fact, virtually the only way to get found out is to alienate your staff. A few years ago, a Labour MEP called Glyn Ford made the mistake of falling out with his secretary. It then emerged that he was spending his Euro allowances on, among other things, gardening and laundry bills. The parliamentary authorities mounted an investigation which, without exactly contradicting the secretary, nonetheless cleared Mr Ford. I suspect the ‘investigation’ went something along these lines. ‘Ah, hello, Glyn, fees office here. So sorry about this beastly business in the press. Look, we have to ask this: have you done anything to be ashamed of?’ ‘No fear!’ ‘Good man. Thanks for being so honest.’
The truth is that the European Parliament operates a tacit double standard. If you are a goody-goody federalist, you can get away with a great deal. But woe betide you if you are a Eurosceptic. During the last session, two UKIP MEPs, Nigel Farage and Jeffrey Titford, published accounts showing that they had contributed several thousand pounds from their excess allowances to Euro-sceptic causes. The parliament instantly demanded that they repay the money. When I asked the authorities why they were acting in this case but in no others, I was told that it was because they had admitted in writing to running an excess —rather than, it was implied, quietly pocketing it.
By writing this article, I am more or less guaranteeing that I will be accused of some infraction or other. So why am I doing it? It certainly won’t make me any friends. The last time I touched on this subject publicly, I was sent to Coventry — or ‘sent to Limoges’, as amused French MEPs called it. A German colleague, with whom I had previously been rather friendly, sent me the following e-mail: ‘Dear Daniel Hannan, I can only assume that you were drunk before writing about your colleagues in this way.’ A fellow Conservative, a peer of the realm no less, swayed sweatily towards me at a drinks reception. ‘Hannan, you’re a c**, a c***, a –er, a c***,’’ he bellowed. ‘A c***’, he added, just to ram home his point.
Nonetheless, I want you to contemplate the reality of the Brussels system. Under the proposed constitution, we would hand substantial new powers to the EU. Before doing so, it is surely sensible to look at how it is exercising the powers it already has. MEPs seem unable to tackle the gargantuan fraud in the EU spending programmes. They have repeatedly refused even to put their own house in order. Yet it is now proposed that these same people be put in charge of our legal system, our borders, our taxes and our policing. My masters, are you mad?
It is not even as though MEPs have simply failed to get around to hosing out their stable On the contrary, every year the budget contains an amendment linking allowances to actual costs incurred; and every year it is voted down. It is true that the parliament indicated last year that it would reform the expenses regime, but only in return for a substantial pay rise. Give us more over the counter, MEPs effectively said, and we’ll be prepared to take less under it.
An elaborate game is played whenever a clean-up is suggested. MEPs declare themselves in favour until the last minute, then find a technical reason to vote against. Sometimes, they miscalculate. During the last session, there was a proposal to extend the free health insurance enjoyed by all Members to ex-MEPs, too. Across the chamber, you could see people looking intently at the declared positions of the main parties. They were trying to work out whether the proposal was sure to get majority backing, thus enabling them, personally, to vote ‘no’ without actually stopping it. Hilariously, too many of them made the same calculation, and the proposal fell by a handful of votes. I have never seen the hemicycle so glum.
Not that they need worry. The idea is almost certain to come back and, sooner or later, it will be approved. For all the earnest rhetoric, you can be sure that the income of Eurocrats will move only in one direction. That’s enough gravy: bring on the champagne!
My dream job!
Sen. Murkowski asks entire staff to quit, reapply
The Associated Press ANCHORAGE--Staffers who want to continue working for U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski in Washington, D.C. must resign and reapply for their jobs.
The Alaska Republican, who was appointed to the seat, said being elected for the first time gives her a six-year opportunity to assemble the best team she can find. Some of her current staff won't be rehired, she said.
The decision to start fresh with her staff doesn't mean some of the same faces won't be back, Murkowski said. But Justin Stiefel, who resigned as her chief of staff in February to become her campaign manager, will not be returning to his old job, Murkowski said.
"Justin is looking for other opportunities either here in Alaska or in Washington," she said.
Murkowski, a former state representative, was appointed in late 2002 by her father, then-U.S. Sen. Frank Murkowski, when he was elected governor. "I was talking to you folks about what I was going to do as majority leader of the Alaska House," Murkowski told reporters Wednesday in Anchorage. "To go from that to where I have in the past two years, it was a huge learning curve."
After her appointment, Murkowski took over her father's Senate office and took on most of his staff.
"I didn't have the opportunity that I would have liked to develop my team," she said. "Instead, I was in a situation as a brand-spanking-new senator. I needed to learn the ropes of what was going on in Washington so that I could be effective for my constituents."
She'll have the luxury now of creating her own team, but the surroundings won't be so nice. Offices are assigned by seniority, and father Frank had a couple decades of it.
Murkowski said she expects to move into much smaller digs.
"What is the use of living if it be not to strive for noble causes and to make this muddled world a better place for those who will live in it after we are gone."
Vaclav Klaus in London
On October 20 President Klaus, of the Czech Republic, addressed the Bruges Group at the House of Commons. Below are a few extracts from the speech:
In 1989 the slogan was: 'Back to Europe'. I was practically the only one then, and have tried for 15 years since, analytically, to explain the difference between going back to Europe and being part of the European Union; it is very difficult to explain.
The Czech Republic needed more time to enjoy its independence. When I go to Brussels I seem to see Comecon. Everyone there behaves as if the real European issue is the acquiring of more states, more commissioners etc., but these are of secondary importance.
They are not addressing the topics of: loss of cultural dynamism, national values, loss of leadership, and shift to collective responsibility (or irresponsibility) and undermining national identity. I do not think the recent enlargement regrettably will bring about an important change. These countries are already infected by the same virus.
The lack of democratic institutions will become more apparent than before. Majority voting will dominate decision-making, and independence will be prevented. The unpleasant trade-off between participating countries and decision-making will be felt more and more. The soon to be signed Constitution has far reaching effects for individual welfare and nation-states. The new Constitution has nothing to do with resolving the real problems of Europe.
The authors have started with the dubious assumption that it was collectivist in the past and should be again. They believe that Legislation from above is needed because larger markets require more regulation, and the more remote government is from the citizens the better it is. Books could be written about these assumptions but I do not share these ideas. We need unregulated markets. We need New Europe with economic freedom, small and not expanding government; A Europe without pseudo-moralising political correctness... But I am afraid we are very far from all this. (I stupidly forgot my camera and didn't take notes!)
Socialism Kills
Most people think Britain didn't have a health service before the NHS. In fact, it was the envy of the world. So why did we throw it away for a system that kills its own patients? 
Daily Mail 22 November 2004 The welfare state is a political sacred cow - but an important new book claims that Britain would have been better off if it had never been created. Here, in our second extract, author James Bartholomew argues that the NHS is a disaster that, far from improving health care, has wrecked it... Many people today seem to think that healthcare hardly existed before the NHS arrived in 1948 - except for a few hospitals that treated the rich, perhaps.
But if this is true, why were the British hospitals at the forefront of developing new drugs like penicillin?
The reality is that British medical care prior to the NHS was far more impressive than most of us realise. All the great London teaching hospitals were founded before the NHS - indeed, St Bart's, one of the most famous, dated back to the start of the 12th century, when Augustinian friars began caring for the sick at their priory.
Many hospitals were founded in the 18th and 19th centuries, when benefactors who included contemporary celebrities such as the compose Handel and Joshua Reynolds, the artist. They were regarded with envy around the world.
By the start of the 20th century there was a vast network of hospitals across the country, treating the rich and poor alike and making breakthroughs that are still saving countless lives today.
The difference is that back then the system wasn't run by an army of state bureaucrats or paid for by massive, centralised taxation. It was largely paid based on charity.
The development of penicillin was supervised by Sir Howard Florey and his team at the Dunn School in Oxford, where the crucial, most expensive stage in their work was funded by the charitable Rockefeller Foundation.
The building in which they worked was funded by charity (from a bequest by Sir William Dunn, a wealthy Scottish philanthropist) as was St Mary's Hospital in Paddington, London, where penicillin had been first noticed 13 years previously by Sir Alexander Fleming.
Fleming was able to make that breakthrough only because St Mary's existed and gave him the opportunity to do his research. Like countless other charitable or 'voluntary' hospitals, it relied for its survival on donations, legacies, fees and fund-raising drives.
The great and good contributed, but so did the ordinary people - through Sunday collections in church and Saturday collections in workplaces.
Those who could afford it paid for their treatment, often by subscribing to regular hospital care plans, but those who could not afford it were treated, too. This is what being a charitable hospital meant.
Indeed, inconceivable as it may seem today, it was normal for consultants to work for a large proportion of each day without charge, to ensure than the needy didn't miss out.
Frederick Nattrass qualified in 1914 and, after the war, began working at the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle upon Tyne. He eventually became a consultant neurologist there.
His daughter, Anne Whittingham, remembers his routine: 'He went to work at the hospital in the morning - all for free, because it was a charity. Then, to get an income, he took private patients at our home in the afternoon.
'This wasn't unusual. All his friends did it. All consultants did.'
There were also hospitals run by local authorities, in which local people took considerable civic pride, but by 1936 the voluntary hospitals took 60 per cent of patients requiring acute care.
It wasn't a perfect system - none is - but it worked. There were surely some poor people who received inferior treatment or none, but the vast majority got the care they needed - in many cases from the top specialists of the time.
So what did Clement Attlee and his colleagues in the Labour Party do in 1948? They threw it all away.
Attlee appointed Aneurin Bevas as Minister of Health. Bevan was a brilliant, neo-communist firebrand and set about creating the most state-controlled medical service outside the Iron Curtain. Eight centuries of development of British medicine was junked for an ideological socialist dream. Bevan pushed aside the passionate objections of the medical professional with all the ruthlessness of a man whose thinking was rooted in Marxism.
Looking back, what's astonishing is how little evidence he produced to discredit the old system. The Labour Pary pamphlet that recommended a 'National Service for Health' in 1943 could find little to criticise.
There was mention of only one waiting list, for 'rheumatic diseases', adn even this was confined to a footnote. There was no suggestion that waiting lists were a problem in any other specialty.
There was not a word against the quality of care, and no claims that people were dying or incapacitated because they couldn't obtain treatment. Far from being condemned, the charity hospitals were praised for having 'rendered great service'.
So why change everything? Because, the pamphlet said, a good medical service had to be 'planned as a whole'.
The old system was 'unplanned' and 'a medley of public and voluntary institutions'. Never mind how effective it was - it offended the socialist principle of central control. It had to go.
Of course, Bevan, Atlee and the rest meant well. They intended no harm. But harm is what they did. They produced a monolithic system that was grotesquely rigid, wasteful and inefficient.
In its first 50 years, in the name of 'mergers' and modernisation, hundreds of hospitals were simply closed. Many were local hospitals, that - quite contrary to what Labour had promised during the war - people were left further away from their nearest hospital instead of nearer. Tens of thousands of hospitals beds were carted to the dump.
The standards of accessibility of British medicine slumped. From being one of the best countries for medicine among all the advanced countries of the world, we declined and became one of the worst - arguably the very worst. Look at almost any measurement of the quality of medical service and you know find Britain in the bottom half of the table. In one comparison of the proportion of people surviving lung cancer five years after diagnosis, Britain came last, below Estonia. According to the World Health Organisation, British men are also more likely than those in comparable countries to die of coronary heart disease before reaching 75. We suffer 265 deaths per 100,000 people - against 200 in Germany and 171 in Australia. Worrying and depressing figures like this are hardly surprising. Thanks to its rigidities of structure and funding, the NHS lacks everything. It lacks doctors. It lacks nurses. It lacks the latest equipment. Take CT scanners, which help doctors diagnose cancer. Recent figures showed that Japan, despite its relatively low spending on medical services, had 84 of them per million of population. Australia had 20.8, Germany had 17.1, and the United States had 13.2. The average for developed countries was 12. Britain, by contrast, had only 6.1 - fewer than Turkey or the Czech Republic. What equipment we do have is old and sometimes even dangerous. Dr Colin Connolly, a former chief scientist at the Department of Health, found that more than half of the NHS's X-ray machines are past their safe life span. More than half the anesthesia machines need replacing, as do half the machines used for intensive care. About a fifth of the equipment used in cancer care if obsolete, and the majority of operating tables are over 20 years old - more than twice their safe time limit. THe NHS gets the latest drugs and treatments later than other countries and in smaller quantities. Virtually all the most exciting work on new medical breakthroughs - stem cell technology, gene therapy, the search for a cure for heart disease - is being led [by] the Americans. Britain, the country that developed penicillin, is now just a bit player. Notoriously, the endemic shortcomings of NHS treatment are controlled by rationing in the form of waiting lists. And despite all the political propoganda that has been pumped out in recent years, these lists are still of a length unknown in any other advanced country. The result is that the poor get inferior treatment to the rich - who can afford to go private - and are thus more likely to suffer and die. This in a system that is already causing thousands of needless deaths a year. That may sound shocking, but look at the facts. Because the treatment of cancer under the NHS is so far below the average standard in Europe, Professor Karol Sikora, a cancer specialist at London's Hammersmith Hospital, has estimated that 10,000 people a year die prematurely in Britain. Add the number killed by preventable hospital infections, and our atrocious record on infant mortality (we have the worst figures in Europe) and the total instantly rises to around 15,000 deaths a year directly attributable to the NHS under-performing other systems. This leaves out blunders committed by over-stretched staff and poor standards in other specialties such as coronary care. Yet even at this bare minimum, the NHS is killing the equivalent of a Paddington rail disaster every day. None of this should be taken as criticism of the doctors, nurses and other front-line staff, whose enormous dedication and humanity is all the more remarkable given the circumstances they work in. They, too, are victims of a terminally bureaucratic and unwieldy system. Some people will say: 'Ah yes, but it will be all right now. Labour is putting lots of money into it.' Yes, more money is going in. The extra money is raising the amount spent on the NHS in England up to the same proportion of output as that spent on healthcare in Scotland. But do we want Scottish levels of healthcare? Certainly not. The Scottish NHS is no better than the English. It is far below the standards of France or Switzerland. There is simply no escaping the fact that the NHS has been a disaster for Britain. Millions have been treated late, been left undiagnosed, been left on waiting lists, suffered or even died. It has been one of the most catastrophic aspects of the welfare state.
I recall very sharply how, in the autumn of 1939, as I was driving one afternoon across the monotonous prairies of Texas to begin my third year in his post, it came to me like a revelation that...I did not have to go on professing the clichés of liberalism which were becoming meaningless to me. I saw that my opinions had been formed out of a timorous regard for what was supposed to be intellectually respectable, and that I had always been looking over my shoulder to find out what certain others, whose concern with truth I was beginning to believe to be not very intense, were doing or thinking. It is a great experience to wake up at a critical juncture to the fact that one does have a free will, and that giving up the worship of false idols is a quite practicable proceeding.
--Richard M. Weaver
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