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Charlie Gard’s Death Sentence: The Consequences of Usurping Parental Rights
Charlie Gard’s Death Sentence: The Consequences of Usurping Parental Rights
by John Stonestreet and G. Shane Morris
BreakPoint.org
An incredibly complicated and heartbreaking life-and-death medical case has sparked an international debate: It’s the case of little Charlie Gard.
Charlie suffers from an extremely rare and deadly genetic disorder called Mitochondrial DNA Depletion Syndrome. Mitochondria “are structures within cells that convert the energy from food into a form that cells can use.” Because of his depletion of mitochondrial DNA, Charlie’s muscles and organs are failing. He’s unconscious and cannot breathe on his own. From all reports, he’s in the terminal stages of a disease for which there is no known cure.
Charlie’s parents, Connie Yates and Chris Gard, have raised a million and a half dollars in private donations to take him to America for an experimental treatment. They appear under no illusion that the treatment will work, but they do want to exhaust every possibility.
But doctors at Britain’s Great Ormond Street Hospital have decided that Charlie’s condition is hopeless, and that he should be left to die. Britain’s High Court agreed, and the European Court of Human rights refused to intervene after Charlie’s parents appealed. The doctors now have the legal go-ahead to take Charlie off life support.
Now world reaction has been decidedly on the side of Charlie’s parents. After some initial confusion within the Vatican, the Vatican’s pediatric hospital offered to take care of Charlie, as has at least one American hospital. Even President Trump tweeted over the weekend, “If we can help little #CharlieGard, … we would be delighted to do so.”
As I record this broadcast, these offers have all fallen on deaf ears. The hospital refuses to let Charlie travel or even die at home with his parents. They’ve kept him on life support to give Charlie and his parents just a little more time together.
Those are the facts as I understand them. But now here’s why this case is so important, both for the sake of Charlie and his family, and for our civilization.
First, the government should have no role in dictating when and where a baby should die, and whether his parents can seek additional treatment options. The decision by the British High Court is an appalling overreach, and it sets a very dangerous precedent. In worldview terms, the government is well beyond its sphere of sovereignty, gobbling up authority that rightfully belongs to the family and to the church.
Second Peter clarifies that the civil authorities are ordained by God to reward good and punish evil. Great Ormond Street Hospital and the British and international courts have determined it’s time for little Charlie to die, regardless of how many people around the world want to help him by paying for transportation and additional treatment. They won’t even allow him to die at home. They’ve effectively asserted ownership over this little boy and his life. This is unambiguously wrong.
And the facts don’t support the European Court of Human Rights’ claim that undergoing experimental treatment would expose Charlie to “continued pain, suffering and distress.” As one official at the hospital where he’s being cared for admitted, doctors “don’t know whether he suffers pain.”
And, we should note, the British government is in this position of superseded authority largely because of the breakdown of the family. Courts and officials there are accustomed to playing mom, dad, even sometimes God. And we’re not that far behind here in the United States.
But that doesn’t mean the government has the right to make the kinds of life-and-death decisions that Charlie’s parents and others are called to make, nor is it best equipped to navigate the unique challenges of such a difficult case. When it comes to this little life, by overstepping, hospital officials and judges have handed down a death sentence that isn’t theirs to render.
John Stonestreet, the host of The Point, a daily national radio program, provides thought-provoking commentaries on current events and life issues from a biblical worldview. John holds degrees from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (IL) and Bryan College (TN), and is the co-author of Making Sense of Your World: A Biblical Worldview.
Source: Charlie Gard’s Death Sentence: The Consequences of Usurping Parental Rights
Study Targets Adjusted Climate Data | The Daily Caller
A new study found adjustments made to global surface temperature readings by scientists in recent years “are totally inconsistent with published and credible U.S. and other temperature data.”
“Thus, it is impossible to conclude from the three published GAST data sets that recent years have been the warmest ever – despite current claims of record setting warming,” according to a study published June 27 by two scientists and a veteran statistician.
The peer-reviewed study tried to validate current surface temperature datasets managed by NASA, NOAA and the UK’s Met Office, all of which make adjustments to raw thermometer readings. Skeptics of man-made global warming have criticized the adjustments.
Climate scientists often apply adjustments to surface temperature thermometers to account for “biases” in the data. The new study doesn’t question the adjustments themselves but notes nearly all of them increase the warming trend.
Basically, “cyclical pattern in the earlier reported data has very nearly been ‘adjusted’ out” of temperature readings taken from weather stations, buoys, ships and other sources.
In fact, almost all the surface temperature warming adjustments cool past temperatures and warm more current records, increasing the warming trend, according to the study’s authors.
“Nearly all of the warming they are now showing are in the adjustments,” Meteorologist Joe D’Aleo, a study co-author, told The Daily Caller News Foundation in an interview. “Each dataset pushed down the 1940s warming and pushed up the current warming.”
“You would think that when you make adjustments you’d sometimes get warming and sometimes get cooling. That’s almost never happened,” said D’Aleo, who co-authored the study with statistician James Wallace and Cato Institute climate scientist Craig Idso.
France and Down Syndrome: The French Government Should Learn from Charles DeGaulle
Late last year on BreakPoint, I told you about an extraordinary bit of censorship by the French government.
What was censored was an ad featuring a smiling, happy child with Down syndrome. The ad, entitled “Dear Future Mom,” told potential mothers about the joy and love that these children can and will bring into their lives.
So, why was it banned? Because the French government believes that the ad is “likely to disturb the conscience of women” who had aborted their babies after learning that the child had Down syndrome.
Now I’m going to tell you a story about a Frenchman who saw things very differently: Charles de Gaulle.
You probably weren’t expecting to hear that. To most Americans, de Gaulle was, as one writer put it, “an obnoxious, overly ambitious man who, in the grand French manner, strutted sitting down.”
He may have been some or all of these things, but there was a side of Charles de Gaulle that few people know about, and that side revolved around his love for his daughter, Anne.
Anne was born on New Year’s Day, 1928, the third of Charles and Yvonne de Gaulle’s three children. In De Gaulle’s words, Anne was “un enfant pas comme les autres,” a child not like the other children.
Delingpole: Dilbert Disses Global Warming; Liberal Heads Explode
Scott Adams has gone full-on climate denialist in his latest Dilbert strip, causing liberal heads to explode.
Some of his old fans just aren’t happy at this betrayal of The Cause:
it’s a shame to see this as I used to think he was very funny. The Way of the Weasel was an awesome book.
it could be dementia – that is a thing that happens to peopleOn Scott Adams, his comic strip and thought processes have pretty clearly jumped the shark
The man has become a dangerous idiot.I guess 30-ish years of minor fame and a little bit of pussy took his brain for a ride.
No doubt it is an accident of the pen. But the “climate scientist” in the cartoon bears more than a passing resemblance to Michael Mann, globally renowned inventor of the “Hockey Stick” and winner – or so he used to claim till he got rumbled – of the Nobel Prize.
‘We want change. Not promises!’: Mass anti-corruption rallies hit Russia
On March 26, protests against corruption were held across Russia, the largest of which took place on Moscow’s main central street, Tverskaya. According to the Interior Ministry, around 7,000 to 8,000 people rallied in the capital, although the protest organizers are yet to release their estimates.
The protests were fueled by the government’s failure to respond to the investigation by opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) into Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. It’s claimed he has embezzled a secret empire worth $1.2 billion.
Environmentalists Aren’t Just Wrong. They’re Loathsome And Evil Too
Today is Earth Hour and as usual I shall be lighting a candle – several, actually; plus turning my Rayburn up to eleven; plus turning on all the house lights; plus lighting the patio heaters; plus starting my Landrover and leaving its diesel engine to idle outside in the drive; plus switching on the immersion heater; plus running several hot baths – in tribute to the world’s climate heroes.
I refer, of course, to the tiny, elite fellowship of scientists, economists, politicians, journalists and bloggers who have bravely taken the right side of the climate argument and spoken up for truth, integrity and the scientific method in defiance of the vast and terrifying propaganda behemoth they call the Green Blob.
Many of them were present at the annual Heartland Institute Climate Conference in Washington DC this week. I was sorry not to have been able to make it there myself this year because these people have become my friends. Shared adversity does that for you: everyone from our elder statesman Fred Singer downwards has been brutally vilified, traduced, mocked and monstered by the Servants of the Green Blob over the years – because when the evidence isn’t on your side (as it hasn’t been for a long time where the alarmist cause is concerned), blustering appeals to authority, affectedly high-minded ridicule and below-the-belt cheap shots are pretty much the only weapons left to you.
My sceptical filmmaking friends Phelim McAleer and Anne McElhinney once made a movie exposing the nonsense of the greenies. It was called Not Evil Just Wrong. In my view this was a misnomer. It should have been called: Wrong – And Totally Bloody Evil Too.
There many reasons why the alarmist establishment – the Climate Industrial Complex as Myron Ebell calls it – is so totally loathsomely evil. If I had to list them all this would be longer than War & Peace.
One is that they’re such hypocrites: if you really cared about the environment in the way these fascistic loons claim they do, then you’d be vigorously opposing renewable energy (such as the bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco-crucifixes defacing our landscape and slicing and dicing our avian fauna) and instead going all out for fossil fuels.
How can we trust global warming scientists asks David Rose | Daily Mail Online
DAVID ROSE: How can we trust global warming scientists if they keep twisting the truth
They were duped – and so were we. That was the conclusion of last week’s damning revelation that world leaders signed the Paris Agreement on climate change under the sway of unverified and questionable data.
A landmark scientific paper –the one that caused a sensation by claiming there has been NO slowdown in global warming since 2000 – was critically flawed. And thanks to the bravery of a whistleblower, we now know that for a fact.
The response has been extraordinary, with The Mail on Sunday’s disclosures reverberating around the world. There have been nearly 150,000 Facebook ‘shares’ since last Sunday, an astonishing number for a technically detailed piece, and extensive coverage in media at home and abroad.
World leaders duped by manipulated global warming data | Daily Mail Online
Data Science,Climate and satellites Consultant John J Bates, who blew the whistle to the Mail on Sunday
Exposed: How world leaders were duped into investing billions over manipulated global warming data
- The Mail on Sunday can reveal a landmark paper exaggerated global warming
- It was rushed through and timed to influence the Paris agreement on climate change
- America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration broke its own rules
- The report claimed the pause in global warming never existed, but it was based on misleading, ‘unverified’ data
A high-level whistleblower has told this newspaper that America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) breached its own rules on scientific integrity when it published the sensational but flawed report, aimed at making the maximum possible impact on world leaders including Barack Obama and David Cameron at the UN climate conference in Paris in 2015.
The report claimed that the ‘pause’ or ‘slowdown’ in global warming in the period since 1998 – revealed by UN scientists in 2013 – never existed, and that world temperatures had been rising faster than scientists expected. Launched by NOAA with a public relations fanfare, it was splashed across the world’s media, and cited repeatedly by politicians and policy makers.
But the whistleblower, Dr John Bates, a top NOAA scientist with an impeccable reputation, has shown The Mail on Sunday irrefutable evidence that the paper was based on misleading, ‘unverified’ data.
Green Energy is a Charter For Crooks And Liars. The Scam Must End Now
DELINGPOLE: Green Energy is a Charter For Crooks And Liars. The Scam Must End Now
When is the rest of the Western world going to catch up with Donald Trump and point out that the green emperor is wearing no clothes?
I ask as a concerned UK taxpayer absolutely sick to death of the vast sums of money that continue to be funnelled into the pockets of crooks, liars, spivs, chancers, con-artists and fantasists in the name of solving the non-existent problem of “climate change.”
Let me give you some examples of what I mean.
Wales’s £18 million tidal energy flop
If there’s one thing everyone who thinks of themselves as reasonable and well-informed knows, tidal power is the thing. How do they know this? Well, because they’re aware that wind and solar power have their flaws but their hearts tell them that renewable energy must be a good thing because it’s clean and it’s free so therefore they’ve decided to pin their hopes on the technology whose crapness hasn’t been tested yet – and that means tidal.
Also they’ll have read thinly-disguised press releases like this article First full-scale tidal generator in Wales unveiled: Deltastream array to power 10,000 homes using ebb and flow of the ocean and gone: “Well they wouldn’t print stuff like that unless it were true, would they?”
End of Microchip Revolution Very Bad News for Wages – Breitbart
Geopolitical Futures’ annual forecast predicts the maturation of the microchip-based productivity cycle means that the economic challenges facing America’s middle- and lower-class “can’t be solved.”
GF’s George Friedman comments that in absolute terms, U.S. productivity saw its first decline in over a decade in 2016. He sees that declining productivity as the beginning of a global shift that means the economic expansion that began 1982, with the expanding use and availability of microchips, is now in an irreversible structural decline.
The U.S. began a cycle of rapid productivity growth starting in the early 1970s, when the microchip entered the consumer and commercial markets. The initial disruption was led by the introduction of a hand-held calculator called the “Bowmar Brain,” as well as the Casio watch. Those were followed in 1975 by MITS Altair 8800 as the first personal computer.
That means the microchip industry’s commercial history is nearing 50 years old — about the same age as Ford was in 1953, after being founded in 1903. According to Friedman: “The automobile was a mature product by then, with some minor innovations still to come, but with the primary focus on styling and marketing.”
Detroit’s “Big Three” in 1953 were at “culturally the high point of automobiles, when new models were accompanied by great excitement.” But the automobile was becoming a commodity. Higher quality and lower cost German and Japanese vehicles surged into the American market over the net two decades. The federal government had to bail out Chrysler as the upper midwest became the “Rust Belt.”
Microchip technology revolutionized industrial, administrative and government functions by increasing productivity across all levels of the economy. But productivity increases were heavily concentrated on an individual basis, not across all workers.
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