Health and safety inspectors are to be given unprecedented access to family homes to ensure that parents are protecting their children from household accidents.

  New guidance drawn up at the request of the Department of Health urges councils and other public sector bodies to “collect data” on properties where children are thought to be at “greatest risk of unintentional injury”.

  Council staff will then be tasked with overseeing the installation of safety devices in homes, including smoke alarms, stair gates, hot water temperature restrictors, oven guards and window and door locks…

  Nice also recommends the creation of a new government database to allow GPs, midwives and other officials who visit homes to log health and safety concerns they spot.

  The guidance aims to “encourage all practitioners who visit families and carers with children and young people aged under 15 to provide home safety advice and, where necessary, conduct a home risk assessment”. It continues: “If possible, they should supply and install home safety equipment.”

  The proposals have been put out to consultation and, if approved, will be implemented next year.

This is what happens in societies that are almost entirely dependent on government.  In Great Britain they have cradle to grave government health care.  Hell, they’ve got a television tax that funds state-owned media. 

If you think this could never happen in America you’re fooling yourself.  Once you abdicate your personal responsibility for things like health to the government the door is open for the government to come in and regulate your life for you.

For your own good.

The quasi-government agency announced this week that it lost $3.8 billion in the most recent fiscal year, which ended September 30th. It also delivered less mail - 26 billion fewer pieces less, a nearly 13 percent drop from the previous year. The bad news follows losses totaling $7.8 billion in 2007 and 2008.

The Postal Service, as it is quick to point out, is legally prohibited from taking tax dollars. But in order to stay afloat, the agency has been actively borrowing from the U.S. Treasury: At last count, according to Postal Service spokeswoman Yvonne Yoerger, it owes the government $10.2 billion.

Federal law dictates that the Postal Service can borrow up to $3 billion per year - but the debt cannot grow beyond $15 billion. That means that while the agency, which had revenues of $68.1 billion last year, could potentially borrow another $3 billion in 2010, it will soon no longer be able to legally borrow billions from the government.

Calling the Post Office a “quasi-government” is entirely misleading.  Post Office policy is set by the federal government.  Post Office employees are federal employees, enrolled in the government worker unions and entitled to all the lavish pay and benefits government workers receive.

The Post Office is perhaps the most visible and obvious manifestation of government inefficiency and incompetence available in America.  The Post Office is getting its clock cleaned by the private sector.

And yet still some people in this country want to put the government in charge of health care.  Unbelievable.

On a related note, I think we should disband the Post Office.  It’s unnecessary.  There are plenty of private sector parcel and letter delivery services available to Americans.  Email and things like e-billing have made letters all but obsolete.  So why not close up the Post Office and stop the bleeding now?

The answer, unfortunately, isn’t that we have to keep the Post Office because we need the Post Office.  The answer is that far too many unionized federal employees would lose their jobs.  And the unions, who have been losing ground in the private sector for decades now, just can’t afford to take that sort of a blow to their membership rolls.

So, much like putting the auto industry on taxpayer life support so that the United Auto Workers can continue to feast on their host body, we’ll keep the USPS alive so that the unionized federal employees can keep their jobs.

Too big to fail.

That being said, any vote to advance this bill is a vote for government health care.  We don’t want this bill.  There’s nothing that can be changed about it that would make it a better bill.  The bill forces us only to buy health care from among government-approved health care plans through a government-run health care exchange.

That’s government health care, and it’s unacceptable.  North Dakotans, contact your Senators using the information below.  Everyone else, call the Congressional switchboard at (202)224-3121.

Dorgan: (202) 224-2043, 250-4618 locally or email him at http://dorgan.senate.gov/contact/contact_form.cfm.

Conrad: (202) 224-2551, 258-4648 locally or http://conrad.senate.gov/webform.html

And now we know why.  If this decision proves too politically inconvenient, Holder’s going under the bus.  And from the sounds of this, it sounds like they’re warming up the buses now:

The University of East Anglia’s Hadley Climatic Research Centre appears to have suffered a security breach earlier today, when an unknown hacker apparently downloaded 1079 e-mails and 72 documents of various types and published them to an anonymous FTP server. These files appear to contain highly sensitive information that, if genuine, could prove extremely embarrassing to the authors of the e-mails involved. Those authors include some of the most celebrated names among proponents of the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). ...

Some of the most embarrassing e-mails are attributed to Philip Jones, the Director of the CRU; Keith Briffa, his assistant; Michael E. Mann of the University of Virginia; Malcolm Hughes at the University of Arizona; and others. One such e-mail makes references to the famous “hockey-stick” graph published by Mann in the journal Nature:

 

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.

The emphasis in the above quote was added.

Mr. Mosher offered this summary of the rest of the e-mails that he had found:

 

And, you get to see somebody with the name of phil jones say that he would rather destroy the CRU data than release it to McIntyre. And lots lots more. including how to obstruct or evade FOIA requests. and guess who funded the collection of cores at Yamal.. and transferred money into a personal account in Russia[.] And you get to see what they really say behind the curtain.. you get to see how they “shape” the news, how they struggled between telling the truth and making policy makers happy. [Y]ou get to see what they say about Idso and pat micheals, you get to read how they want to take us out into a dark alley, it’s stunning all very stunning. You get to watch somebody named phil jones say that John daly’s death is good news.. or words to that effect. I don’t know that its real.. But the CRU code looks real

John Daly (not to be confused with the professional golfer of the same name) is identified in one of the e-mails as a global-warming skeptic who died in January of 2004.

Just to illustrate how influential this research center is, the work that won the IPCC its co-Nobel Prize with Al Gore was laced with work done by the Hadley Climatic Research Centre.

This is major.  Remember that our nation is poised to pass policy, cap and trade, that would significantly impact our economy and our day-to-day lives based on the idea that human activity and production is significantly impacting global climate change.  And yet, the very scientists (I should maybe put quotations marks around “scientists” when referring to these guys now) at the heart of the theories those policies are based on have been caught manipulating their work fraudulently and trying to hid inconvenient data from the public.

Apparently the zip file with the hacked emails, etc. has been taken down from where it was originally posted.  So I’ve decided to host it here for anyone who wishes to download it and read.