Private Health Care for Veterans?

This just in: 

More veterans are being allowed to obtain health care at private hospitals and clinics in an effort to improve their treatment following allegations of falsified records and delays in treatment. In a statement issued Saturday, Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki also said VA facilities are enhancing capacity of their clinics so veterans can get care sooner. In cases where officials cannot expand capacity at VA centers, the Department of Veterans Affairs is "increasing the care we acquire in the community through non-VA care," Shinseki said.

(VA Approves More Private Care for Veterans, Associated Press, May 24, 2014.

So . . . government health care doesn't work? But Paul Krugman and Ezra Klein said socialized medicine does work! Were they mistaken???

"If liberals want to toast the Veterans medical system as an example of government-run health care done right, they are going to have to seriously grapple with its tragic failures."

Liberals Touted Veterans Affairs Hospitals as Evidence Government-Run Health Care Works, Philip Klein, Washington Examiner,  May 22, 2014).

Narcissim Run Amok: Thoughts After the Isla Vista Rampage

I'm beginning to develop a theory about the next generation. 

Not having to do with access to guns. That's a separate issue. But having to do with the way this generation (millennials and younger) are being raised, not only without God and faith and and a morality that transcends human wisdom (right/wrong, good/evil), but also being raised as if they're the center of the universe. 

Maybe this next generation should be called the "narcissistic generation." YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, selfies. This is their world. Affirmation is not an option but a necessity. One of my students wrote in a paper this semester that if she doesn't get at least 50 "likes" on a Facebook post she removes the post. 

Even if it turns out this guy Elliot Rodgers had some kind of mental disorder, it doesn't change my thinking. I believe he's an inevitable by-product of the societal trend that fosters self-affirmation. Social media not only perpetuates this trend, it probably spawned it. 

From childhood, millennials have been nurtured on the idea that they're self-important, that everything has to go their way, that they are "winners," that nothing bad should ever happen to them, that they deserve happiness, that the world revolves around them. And when it finally dawns on them that the world does not revolve around them, those that that are already a bit "off" (like this guy apparently was) are already be primed to commit atrocities like this. 

But not, of course, before they get out their I-phones and videotape themselves, up close, in our faces, talking about how they've been wronged. 

Factor in the secularist, anti-Christian, anti-God thinking that now permeates both the schools and public square, and the inevitable result is pretty frightening. What we saw in Isla Vista last night is just a symptom of a greater ill: narcissism run amok.   

Isla Vista Shooting Suspect Left Disturbing Manifesto (Los Angeles Times, May 24, 2014).

Short Poem Written in the Dark at Night

Short Poem Written in the Dark at Night

Full moon

and stars

peek through trees

scribbling patterns of light

on the ground below.

 

Outside my window I hear

cars on the 15

coyotes baying

something rustling

in the leaves

beneath the trees

sirens 

 

A cool breeze

wafts through the screen

scented of flowering jasmine 

and smoke

 

San Diego is on fire again.

Notes: Santa Ana winds arrived early this season. 

The Left is Out of Control

Here is an audio file of a voice message left by a Florida school teacher named Swornia Thomas on a student's home phone. The student's name is Giovanni Rubeo. He is in the fifth grade.

Please note that the "religious book" in question is the Bible. 

Note, too, that Giovanni was reading the Bible during free reading time, which is when students read a book of their own choosing. 

Here's the story on Breitbart. 

And here's a link to the Liberty Institute, which is assisting the Rubeo family in this case.