90 Miles From Tyranny

Wednesday, June 21, 2023

New Zealand ‘Equity Adjustor Score’ Asks Surgeons to Prioritize Non-White Patients

Surgeons in Auckland, New Zealand, are expressing discomfort with a new policy that requires them to consider the ethnicity of their patients as a factor when scheduling surgeries.

Specifically, Maori and Pacific Islander patients are given priority consideration to compensate for historic inequality in access to health care.

Te Whatu Ora – Health New Zealand, a national public health agency established in July 2022 to consolidate numerous regional health boards, introduced an “Equity Adjustor Score” that sets five factors to be considered in surgery priority lists.

The five factors are clinical priority, time already spent on wait lists, if the patient lives in a geographically isolated area, economic deprivation, and ethnicity. The highest scores for ethnicity are given to Maori and Pacific Island (or “Pasifika”) peoples.

A similar concept was introduced in the Wellington region in May 2020. Capital & Coast District Health Board medical officer John Tait insisted it was “unlikely that any other patients will be significantly affected as a result” of the rules prioritizing Maori and Pasifika candidates for surgery.

The NZ Herald said on Monday that several regional boards saw the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic as a “Big Bang opportunity to reset” the unequal healthcare system, as former Auckland board chair Pat Snedden said in May 2020. Various attempts to adjust medical access for ethnicity were introduced without much public fanfare during the pandemic.

After explaining that the ethnic score would be employed to assign slots “within a given clinical priority band” – in other words, with all other considerations of severity being equal, Maori and Pasifika patients would go first – Tait clarified that his health board would “increase planned surgery overall” to “offset” any inconvenience to other ethnicities.

The Equity Adjustor Score for Auckland was devised in February but was not implemented until this week.

Te Whatu Ora’s interim leader for Auckland, Dr. Mike Shepherd, said that Maori and Pasifika patients have a “longer pathway to get on a waiting list in our current system,” so the ethnic scoring is an effort to correct for that delay and put them on a...

Morning Mistress

The 90 Miles Mystery Video: Nyctophilia Edition #1422

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The 90 Miles Mystery Box: Episode #2118

You have come across a mystery box. But what is inside?

It could be literally anything from the serene to the horrific,

from the beautiful to the repugnant,

from the mysterious to the familiar.

If you decide to open it, you could be disappointed,

you could be inspired, you could be appalled.

This is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended.

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Girls With Guns

Emails from the Biden laptop reveal a newly discovered Maltese bank account that coincides with the bribery allegations involving Biden and Burisma, as reported by an FBI source.

Emails from the Biden laptop shed light on Burisma’s opening of a Maltese bank account for Hunter Biden in the spring of 2016. This newly discovered development coincides with the allegations made by an FBI source, suggesting that Mykola Zlochevsky, the founder of Burisma Holdings, allegedly paid a $5 million bribe each to then-Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden.

In 2014, Ukraine initiated criminal cases against Zlochevsky and Burisma, the company where Hunter Biden held a board position and received substantial compensation. Zlochevsky, who faced investigations for money laundering and public corruption, allegedly employed the Vice President's son to leverage his political influence in order to halt the investigations.

According to the FBI whistleblower document, the pay-for-play scheme is outlined, with Zlochevsky purportedly safeguarding 17 audio recordings of conversations with the Bidens as an "insurance policy." Among these recordings are two alleged conversations with then-Vice President Biden himself.

Mykola Zlochevsky, Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, and Viktor Shokin

In 2018, Joe Biden proudly claimed that he pressured Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko into firing Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who was conducting an investigation into the Ukrainian energy company where his son was a board member. Biden accomplished this by leveraging the threat of withholding a $1 billion US loan guarantee during his trip to Kyiv in December 2015.

During a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, Biden infamously declared, "I looked at them and said: I'm leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money." He added, "Well, son of a bitch. He got fired."

Viktor Shokin has stated that at the time of his termination in March 2016, he had formulated "specific plans" to investigate Burisma, which “included interrogations and other crime-investigation procedures into all members of the executive board, including Hunter Biden.”

In May 2016, Burisma executive Vadym Pozharskyi informed Hunter Biden via a series of emails about the opening of a Maltese bank account. Pozharskyi requested the documentation required for the account opening, including a copy of Hunter's passport, a bank reference letter, and a utility bill serving as proof of...

Visage à trois #1509

Three Videos For Your Viewing Pleasure:

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Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #1165

Visage à trois #1508

Three Videos For Your Viewing Pleasure:

Three Additional Bonus Videos:

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #1165

The Pharmacological Path to Soft-Core Totalitarianism

In my recent article on the destruction of medical ethics during the COVID era, I used a term that generated some unanticipated feedback. What exactly did I mean by “soft-core totalitarianism?” Was it a real concept, or just a turn of phrase?

It’s a concept all right, and I believe it aptly describes the sociopolitical – or is it sociopathological? – condition in which we find ourselves in the post-COVID world, both in the United States and throughout the other Western so-called liberal democracies. It certainly seems to describe the direction in which our collective culture is heading.

Let’s define soft-core totalitarianism as a political system, characterized by two features: First, there is centralized, autocratic control of the state by the executive branch of the government and its cronies (the totalitarianism part).
Second, by design, the offenses to civil liberties are applied subtly and gradually enough, the standard of living is kept high enough, and a sufficient menu of seductive distractions are intentionally provided, that most individuals either don’t object, or don’t even notice (the soft-core part).

Soft-core totalitarianism can be readily contrasted with its hard-core counterpart, recent examples of which would be the killing fields of Khmer Rouge-era Cambodia, or the enforced starvation conditions of contemporary North Korea.

As with soft-core pornography, this comparison favorably disposes soft-core totalitarianism to the more pliant and undiscerning among us, who might say, “Well, yes, I suppose it isn’t ideal, but at least it’s not that horrible hard-core stuff!”

Also like soft-core pornography, soft-core totalitarianism is designed to possess a titillating and seductive quality that opposes one’s better moral judgment. To the weak-willed and soft-headed, the statement “You’ll own nothing and be happy” holds a similar appeal to “All the classiest girls, ready to talk about your deepest fantasies, just a phone call away.”

Soft-core totalitarianism was predicted by past seers who tried to warn us about where Western Civilization was headed. The leavening of tyranny with the intentional supply of banal distractions, creature comforts, and legalized drugs pepper their descriptions. They repeatedly describe a kind of semi-anesthetized, semi-tolerable dystopia:

“Films, football, beer, and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.” ~ George Orwell

“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel.” ~ often attributed to Aldous Huxley

And of course, the granddaddy of them all:

“Give them bread and circuses, and they will never revolt.” ~ Juvenal

Ring any bells? If not, consider the following, all of which occurred contemporaneously to the COVID-era lockdowns, school closures, travel restrictions, mask and vaccine mandates and other assorted assaults on our civil rights:

Liquor stores were deemed essential from the beginning and remained open for business throughout the entire duration of the COVID lockdowns.
No fewer than 17 US States legalized recreational marijuana use since the COVID lockdowns began in March 2020.
33 US states have opened legalized sports betting markets since the Supreme Court struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA) in May 2018.
Over $220 billion has been wagered in sportsbooks in the USA since then.
The US Border Patrol seized over 15,000 pounds of fentanyl at the Mexican border in 2022 – three times as much as in 2020.
110,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2022.

Still skeptical? Let me put it another way. I am no Orwell or Huxley (and certainly no Juvenal), but please indulge me, Dear Reader, as I offer you my own soft-core totalitarian dystopian narrative: