Persian War, the hurdler, by Persian Gulf out of the Chanteur II mare, Warning, born 1964. The story of his brave and arduous life and more pictures are at TVG Community.
So, where were we? On the 21st, Netanyahu and Barak said General Dempsey was "serving Iranian interests" by having the chutzpah to disagree with them. On the 22nd, the IAEA announced that the current round of talks with Iran over weapons inspection had failed after their team was barred from inspecting the military plant at Parchin, where Iranians are suspected of working on trigger explosives for the nuclear weapon. On the 24th, US intelligence repeated what it has been saying since 2007, that there is as yet no evidence that Iran has decided to build one.
There's lots more, but I am more and more of the opinion that what is mainly happening is elections—Iran's first of all (this week!), Israel's likely next, (they don't have to come till 2013, but Netanyahu knows his chances of winning are more likely to get worse than [jump] better over the coming months), and of course ours in November. The rest seems a lot like theater, except when Ayatollah Khamenei says that building nuclear weapons is a sin, or permits the foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, to say it for him, as happened Tuesday in Geneva. It is my firm belief that the Supreme Leader is not kidding, indeed that his faith does not permit him to kid when he has laid down a fatwah on the subject. (Islamophobes claim that the doctrine of taqiyya which allows Muslims to conceal their faith in a hostile environment also allows them to lie with impunity, but then the same kind of people used to say the same kind of thing about the Jesuits and their "mental reservations", and I'm pretty sure the Jesuits never built any nuclear weapons.)
At EmptyWheel, Jim White finds (from an interview on what used to be Russia Today) that the Iranian government did not, or says it did not, bar IAEA inspectors from the Parchin site where Iranians are suspected of working on trigger explosives for the bomb; it's just that the guys they sent weren't actually inspectors, said ambassador Ali Asqar Soltaniye, but legal, political, and technical experts. Proper inspectors would be an entirely different matter, although they would still have to meet some preconditions. (Though he would, as far as that goes, have let this team visit someplace else...)
In the same post, White threw some cold water on the current Israeli sloganeering about the "zone of immunity", the theory that if Iran is not attacked soon enough its alleged nuclear weapons program will become "immune" to attack altogether (reraised in today's Times in an op-ed by former Israeli intelligence chief Amos Yadlin).
I personally react very childishly to these slogans, the "ticking time bomb" and the "blood on their hands" and the "partner for peace" and so on, which are meant not as argument but as substitutes for argument, kind of the way Olestra is a substitute for fat, giving you the right emotional response and mouth feel but unable to proceed in any normal way through your body.
Anyhow the point is that Iran will never be immune, because if they are really building a nuclear weapon then a crucial part of it will be deep underground at the Fordo facility near Qom, and that's not immune and won't be. Which corroborates my own increasing feeling that the Israeli war talk is largely bluster (Christy1947 at Kos called it "Netanyahu woofing"), and really likely to remain so.
Meanwhile, North Korea has announced its deal on nuclear testing. They are suspending all weapons testing and uranium enrichment activities, and allowing inspectors at the Yongbyon complex, and the US is sending food—20,000 tons of nutritional supplements per month, a process with inspectors of its own to make sure it goes to the deserving hungry. It is not the deal but the setup for serious negotiations, and it is really good news, no mockery.
Except I'd like to note that Kim Jong-un clearly enjoys looking at things, in a way his late father, with an artist's sad awareness that the composition would not come out quite right, at least toward the end, did not; as the Tumblr shows:
Now that the Dow has closed above 13,000 for the first time since May 2008, I wonder if the Times is going to redo their famous chart showing the stock market difference between Democratic and Republican presidents from October 2008:
Given that it's already up 56% since Barack Obama took office three months after that, it might even lead a person to suspect that the Times has a liberal bias and is waiting till October 2012 to do it. If things carry on as they have been doing, that's going to be pretty graphic, as they say.
But speaking of liberal biases, I now have a new idea on the foundational difference between Democrats and Republicans that is directly related to this news. Like so many others who have grown to feel that the liberal-conservative classification doesn't apply any more, I have been talking for quite a while now in terms of a conservative party that we have to vote for and a crazy party that explains why we have to vote for the conservative party, but I'm not really satisfied with that either.
Partly because it's still fun to vote for Democrats, because they're still so truly forward-looking in so many little ways, whether we're talking about same-sex marriage or [jump] undocumented immigrant veterans or the possibility of sending everybody in the country to college. (While Rick Santorum [people, people, click that link! the special Santorum definition is down to page 2 of the Google results!]) openly says that going to college is bad for people, evidently turning them into so many wicked Voltaires who will favor Free Love and scoff at the Holy Father.) Or SUPERTRAINS, as Atrios would say.
The Democratic Party isn't conservative (except on and off in the good way, in regard to retaining our Bill of Rights and our planet and such) so much as they are not opposed to people who have too much power—they have a kind of tenderness for elites whose interests, we feel, are not ours. And not just because they're the ones who foot the campaign bills, although that is surely an element; it's power people of a particular type, not so easy to define, including not just movie stars and personal injury lawyers but even for-real financiers. Which ones? That's what I want to speculate about.
My first incredibly simple-minded thought was this: Democratic presidents are good for the stock market, and what's the opposite of stocks? Bonds! Are Republican presidents good for the bond market?
Well, to make a short story not too much longer, Dr. Google was onto this as fast, frankly, as if I'd asked her for a cassoulet recipe. The answer is, you bet, pal, and then some. Up popped a web page from 2008, from the Liscio Report, roughly contemporaneous with the notorious Times chart, with everything I had dreamed of, including lots of those reader-friendly graphs.
Here's the one for presidents and stocks, with a breakdown somewhat more ambiguous than the one from the Times, and a commentary still more so:
The blue years have an edge on stock returns, with the S&P 500 rising an average of 4.7% a year in real terms (price only, excluding dividends, deflated by the CPI) under Democratic administrations, compared with 2.9% under Republicans. (Starting the clock in 1949 raises the Dem average to 6.9%.) Still, there are some red bars towards the top of the heap and blue bars toward the bottom.
Strangely, there’s not all that tight a link between stock market performance and profit growth. In fact, the rankings of the two measures show a correlation coefficient of 0.43. Sometimes stocks march to their own drummer.
And then for the bond market the evidence is just about overwhelming:
Unlike the stock market, there’s a clear partisan pattern to bond returns: Republicans are a lot more bond-friendly. Real total returns—price plus coupon, deflated by the CPI—averaged +4.2% a year under Republicans, vs. –2.1% under Democrats. And, as the graph shows, the average is a pretty faithful representation of the relative performance of individual administrations.
Recall that Clinton came into office with plans for a stimulus program, that were shelved under pressure from what he called “a bunch of ******* bond traders.” This should be kept in mind when evaluating the bond market’s prospects should Obama win in November. It may be that the world has changed to the point where the old Democratic pattern won’t hold this time.
And how did the Obama predictions work out? According to The Money Architects, writing in March 2011,
Government bond yields are now at 60-year lows, [money manager Ben] Inker said at a presentation March 25. The last time bond yields were this low was the 1940s and they generated returns worse than cash for 40 years.
The results are far clearer than any kind of blather about liberals and conservatives could possibly be. Democrats like equity, Republicans like debt (owning it, that is, not so much owing it); Democrats are stockmen, Republicans are bondsmen. Your basic money guy is so hedged in both directions that he doesn't even know how he rolls, but it's not about him, it's about principles so deep that they are not wholly conscious: Democrats like to profit from success, Republicans like to suck the remaining blood out of failures.
The trickle-down theory actually works when Democrats are in charge—it's a rising tide that's meant to lift all boats; when Republicans are running things it's a wave from our neighborhood to theirs. No, Democrats are not socialists—they're plutocrats, just like you've been saying, but they're plutocrats who can live with socialism, if that's what it takes!
Pretty early on in wedding planning....ok who am I kidding, pretty early on in our relationship, I had thought about who I wanted in my bridal party. And honestly...the decision wasn't too difficult. While there are plenty more ladies that I love and who I would love to have stand up next to me, we didn't feel like having a bridal party of 14. So I chose my fabulous 4...and the rest of my awesome friends will still be there, having a wonderful time and dancing the night away!
First up is my maid-of-honor. Again...this wasn't much of a decision. Abby is my cousin...and though we are 3 years apart, we have always been incredibly close. No one can make me laugh more than her. And I'm seriously looking forward to her MOH speech...which I'm betting will include the story of us backing my parents car into a tree, when we were like 6 and 3. Oops.
The accomplishment of her eyes being open in this photo is one that I hope continues for our wedding day!
Next up is my best friend since second grade. Starting with the joys of Mrs. Edgars class...and the antics of Cory Bookman, Karli and I have been best friends since we were little. We were the 2 tomboys who always played soccer with the boys, loved Mt. Dew and Sugar Daddies (the candy, sickos!), and on most weekends could be found at the Duncan Theater. Through high school and college, we stayed close and she is the kind of person I can not see for months and catch right back up. Oh, she comes in close 2nd to Abby for the person who can ALWAYS make me laugh.
My welcome home party from the Czech Republic and still rocking a Mt. Dew!
I met my next bridesmaid on day 1 of college. I had moved into my dorm room, I didn't know anyone, and all the girls on my floor were hanging out and talking. This was when I met Ashley, and we became very close- as did our entire floor (required W2 shoutout!!). Ashley and I became roommates sophomore year, lived in the same apartment Jr. and Sr. year. And I can't wait for her to move to Cle in June!
All dressed up for a work event with our significant others
And finally, my sister-in-law- my brothers wife and mother of the adorable baby I post on here all the time. I think I always knew I would include her in my bridal party...especially when I took time to really think about who I really wanted next to me on that day. Not to mention, who was going to be the one to help me with all the little details and such (partially due to her living closest, partially to the fact that I trust and value her opinion). I think of her as my sister and I knew she was the best person to round out my group!
At a recent wedding (and you can see where my niece gets her red hair)
Anyway- I'm beyond excited about spending quality time with these wonderful women in the next few months with wedding preparation. They happen to be pretty awesome.
Kos exploded around lunchtime yesterday with news from the WikiLeaks dump of internal mails from the global strategies espionage firm/paranoid travel magazine Stratfor, and the revelation that Israel had destroyed all of Iran's putative nuclear weapons facilities sometime late last year. It was wonderful watching how the wisdom of crowds works—by the time I was done with lunch just about the whole mob of us had come to realize that the story was just idle gossip and [jump] that anybody who is paying that firm for their special client subscription reports is what P.T. Barnum referred to in terms of "there's one born every minute."
an initial survey of the e-mails published so far on WikiLeaks's own website reveals not so much a corporate Central Intelligence Agency as a geopolitical version of the comedy “The Office,” complete with lunch theft, ribald interoffice accusations, jokes about interns, and unsubstantiated blather about world politics.
One of their clients, the strategic and tech consulting firm Booz Allen, pays them around $20,000 a year for their subscription.
But their most notable writers, Fred Burton and Scott Stewart—the only staffers with any actual intelligence experience, having worked as special agents in the state department's diplomatic security division—allow you to get a look at much of their writing for free, at sites like:
Their reading list is at a similar level of sophistication; one of their best minds, Marko Papic, gets his hot ideas from reading Forbes Magazine.
As for Fred Burton, he may have a pretty active fantasy life; one of his flights is about a long chat with Penny Pritzker, who supposedly told him in November how disappointed she was with President Obama
over Obama's "weakness and wimpyness" towards China ("Fred, they only understand strength") and Obama's failure to meet with the Dhali Lama. The fundraiser stated he/she [we learn that it is "Mrs. P." later in the exchange] was personally disappointed ("betrayed") for helping Obama get into The White House and does not intend to support Obama next election, absent a drastic turn-around.
(It's that confidential "Fred, they only understand strength," that makes me certain the interview never took place.)
Burton also claims that Pritzker was a major funder of Acorn, which means that he himself must be a pretty avid reader of birther websites like Citizen Wells News, because you can't find that story anywhere else (not that there was every anything wrong with funding Acorn, just that she didn't happen to be doing it, because if she had it would be reported in some respectable venue; and because it isn't what I'd her imagine her style to be, just like it wouldn't be her style to drape her arm around Fred Burton's shoulder and tell him how she likes to deal with the Chinese*).
Dear heroes of the environmental movement—may all your enemies be this inept!
*If Penny Pritzker ever did come face to face with Fred Burton it would undoubtedly be on an occasion where she was paying for his drinks along with those of hundreds of other people, so she would courteously hope he is having a good time and then spot somebody she's desperate to catch up with, at the other end of the room—"So nice to meet you, Frank—is it Frank?"
In a sane world, it would be the New York City United Federation of Teachers local that would be clamoring for the city to release the test score–based teacher ratings to the public, while the Department of Education would be begging to keep them a secret, because it only takes a glance at the numbers to see how stupid and unserious these numbers are, using the scores of tests that have been totally discredited in the first place, leaping all over the map for any individual teacher from year to year, and with incredible error margin spreads of 35 percentage points for the math scores and 53 (!) for English.
“No principal would ever make a decision on this score alone, and we would never invite anyone — parents, reporters, principals, teachers — to draw a conclusion based on this score alone,”
said Shael Polakow-Suransky of the DOE, trying to be reassuring, but why would they make any use of it at all? The numbers are basically arbitrary, and should not play any role in principals' decisions whatever. The fact that they have used them shows, really, what bad faith the mayor and his chancellors have been bringing to the table in this long debate.
Also in a sane world, if the city's police force wants to investigate potential terrorists, instead of infiltrating Muslim student organizations all over New Jersey they could try infiltrating the FBI, because pretty much every terrorist plot they have uncovered over the past x many years has had an FBI informant right in the middle of it—doing practically all of the work, too. There's a pattern there.
The irrepressible Rick Santorum was chatting with folks at James Dobson's American Heartland Forum in Columbia, Miss., February 3, when he got to the subject of slippery slopes and the example of the Netherlands, where, he said, elderly people feel the need to wear bracelets saying "Do not euthanize me" to keep safe from the murderous medics prowling the cities:
Because they have voluntary euthanasia in the Netherlands, but half the people who are euthanized every year — and it’s 10 percent of all deaths for the Netherlands — half of those people are euthanized involuntarily, at hospitals, because they are older and sick. And so elderly people in the Netherlands don’t go to the hospital, they go to another country, because they’re afraid because of budget purposes that they will not come out of that hospital if they go into it with sickness.
You can hear the audience gasping in horror: Those poor old folks! But it's not true, [jump] obviously (the Washington Post's fact checker Glenn Kessler gives it an awesome rating of four Pinocchios, as having no factual foundation of any kind), as well as extremely offensive to our usually phlegmatic Dutch friends.
Santorum was not simply making this stuff up off the top of his head, as you might suppose; his factoids belong to a kind of meme, or myth as I prefer to call it, that has been evolving over the past 20 years. The story of how these imaginary data came to exist is instructive, and includes a very elegant case of retroactionary thinking.
1. The Remmelink Report
In 1990 a Dutch parliamentary committee of inquiry chaired by the former attorney general Jan Remmelink carried out a study of medical practice relating to euthanasia in the Netherlands, to see how the situation had developed since the notorious case of Dr. Geertruida Postma, whose mercy killing of her mother in 1971 earned her a sentence of one week in jail, suspended, from a compassionate judge. The results were published by the principal investigators--R.B. van der Maas, J.J.M. van Delden, and L. Pijnenborg, in several formats in Dutch and English, most conveniently in the article "Euthanasia and other medical decisions concerning the end of life," in The Lancet 338/8761 (September 14, 1991—Ebsco link, you'll need a library account to follow).
What the so-called Remmelink Report reported, then, extrapolating from a close study of an initial sample of 400-odd physicians and 7000 deaths, was that 38% of deaths in the Netherlands in 1990 (54% of "non-acute" deaths) involved end-of-life medical decisions: providing high doses of opioid pain killers in a way that could possibly shorten the patient's life in 17.5% of the cases, withholding a treatment that could possibly prolong life in another 17.5%, and practicing active euthanasia or assisting a patient's suicide in about 2.1%. A further 0.8% of the total did not meet the definition of euthanasia, in that the decision was made without an explicit and persistent request from the patient; mostly on the basis of the patient's previously expressed wish, and otherwise when
the patients were near to death and clearly suffering grievously, yet verbal contact had become impossible. The decision to hasten death was then nearly always taken after consultation with the family, nurses, or one or more colleagues.
When the use of drugs for the alleviation of pain and symptoms (APS) might shorten the patient's life, generally only by a few hours or sometimes days, the physician discussed this with the patient only 40% of the time; most of the rest (73% of the subgroup) were incompetent. In nearly all cases of APS, the physician's primary aim was to alleviate pain, but in 6% of that total it was to shorten the patient's life.
In non-treatment decisions (NTD) the primary aim was "not prolonging the life" of the patient in half the cases, and the amount of "life foregone" was considerably greater: more than a week in a third of the cases, and in a very small number as much as six months. The decision had been discussed with the patient just 30% of the time, and 88% of the rest were incompetent.
2. The Fenigsen Rejoinder Richard Fenigsen, a Polish cardiologist who had been living in the US since his mandatory retirement from a Dutch hospital in 1990, found an alternative way of looking at the data, which he published in his "Physician-assisted death in the Netherlands: Impact on long-term care", Issues in Law & Medicine 11/3 (winter 1995). Exactly what he did is not clear, because he doesn't say, beyond "the figures presented in Tables 1 and 2 are taken or computed from the Report..." (my emphasis), but he seems to have found a way of calculating the percentage of APS cases where the drug was "intended to terminate life"—perhaps the full report of the Remmelink commission gives percentages for when the physician's secondary aim is to shorten the patient's life, in addition to the 6% as above where shortening life was the primary aim.
Extrapolating numbers for the 1990 Dutch death statistics as a whole out of the percentages, he arrived at the following table:
Legend for Chart:
A - Physician-Assisted Suicide B - Active Euthanasia C - Morphine Overdose Intended to Terminate Life D - Total
A B C D
With Patient's Consent 400 2,300 3,159 5,859 Without Patient's Consent -- 1,000 4,941 5,941
Total 400 3,300 8,100 11,800
yielding that figure of 11,800, or 9% of all the deaths that occurred in the Netherlands that year, as the total number of active euthanasia cases—a bit more than half, as you see in column D, being without the patient's consent.
Only it really isn't euthanasia, whether by the official definition of the Dutch government or by the common practice of doctors since time immemorial ("We could keep him alive for a couple more hours, Mevrouw, or we could make him comfortable and happy for the little time he has left"). Fenigsen's real purpose is to create the numbers that will make the audience gasp—that 9%, and the idea that half of the cases of euthanasia are involuntary, and that's why he keeps his own role in the creation a bit of a secret, letting is seem as if they are the raw Remmelink data.
Be that as it may, the numbers found their way into Physician-Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia in the Netherlands: A Report to the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution by Chairman Charles T. Canady, September 1996 (based on testimony by Fenigsen, but footnoting only the Remmelink report as if that was what was being cited), and thence to an anti-euthanasia shop in Wisconsin called the Nightingale Alliance, from whom I suspect Fenigsen is getting some wingnut welfare (you can book him as a speaker through them), where they have taken the standard form of an unsigned page of Fast Facts about end-of-life decisions in the Netherlands (and it's not easy to find, either):
a. About 9% of all deaths were a result of physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia in 1990. (1, 2) b. Dutch doctors practice active euthanasia by lethal injections (96.6% of all deaths actively caused by physicians in 1990). Physician-assisted suicide is very infrequent (no more than 3.4% of all cases in Holland of active termination of life in 1990). (3) c. For patients who die of a lethal overdose of painkillers, the decision to administer the lethal dose of drugs was not discussed with 61% of those receiving it, even though 27% were fully competent. (4) d. The Board of the Royal Dutch Medical Association endorsed euthanasia on newborns and infants with extreme disabilities. (5) e. Well over 10,000 citizens now carry "Do Not Euthanize Me" cards in case they are admitted to a hospital unexpectedly. (6) f. Cases exist where doctors administer assisted suicide for people determined to be "chronically" depressed. (7,8)
The reference numbers are to footnotes you can check out on the link. Again, the Fenigsen material is credited not to him, but to the report from which he cooked it.
Anyway, the Nightingale Fast Facts have circulated—without their footnotes—to Right-to-Life websites all over the country as well as sites for high school term paper plagiarists; I love to think that's where Santorum might have gotten his notions from, but the fact is that they're just floating around the circles he hangs out in and from which he draws such political power as he has.
The Hendin Handout
Fenigsen is also a source for the terrorized old people, which he cites from an article in De Volkskrant, "Ouderen bang voor onvrijwillige euthanasie bij ziekenhuisopname [Elderly Afraid of Involuntary Euthanasia in Case of Admission to a Hospital]", June 9, 1993:
In 1993 the Christian Protestant Association of the Elderly (PCOB) surveyed 2,066 senior citizens and found that many feared involuntary euthanasia in case of admission to a hospital; some older people, out of fear of involuntary euthanasia, delayed their admission to nursing or senior citizens' homes, even when they could no longer care for themselves at their own homes.
Something like this really did happen (here's a story from the Reformatorisch Dagblad, for instance), but I don't know how relevant it is. Anyway the "Don't euthanize me" cards (or bracelets in Santorum's story) aren't there. That seems to go back to the psychiatrist Herbert Hendin, medical director of Suicide Prevention International, who wrote in his 1996 Suicide in America that
the Dutch Patients Association, a group organized by Protestants opposed to both euthanasia and abortion.... receives inquiries from people wanting to know if a particular hospital is "safe".... they distribute a "passport for life" indicating that, in medical emergencies, a patient does not want his or her life terminated without their consent. (From GoogleBooks)
Here he was not exactly wrong: the Nederlandse Patiënten Vereniging is indeed opposed to abortion and euthanasia; their levenswensverklaring is what we call in America a "living will", to be used when a patient is demented or comatose and cannot tell the doctor what she or he wants, but it only comes in the one flavor, advising them that you'd rather be a vegetable than dead; you must also specify whether you are Protestant, Rooms Katholiek, or Joods, and you have to pay. If you subscribe to a different, or no, religion or if you are looking for "do not resuscitate" you must work through a different channel.
Santorum's bracelets, however, have a quite different source. No, Santorum didn't make this up either. We can pinpoint the exact moment when it arrived: September 3, 2004, when Msgr. Elio Sgreccia, vice president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, presented the official Vatican attack on a Dutch proposal to allow children under 12 to request assistance in committing suicide. The reference is not to be found in His Grace's essay published that day in the Osservatore Romano, or in any of its press reports in Italian, French, and German, but is found in all the English ones:
The Vatican official said the Dutch law is rapidly moving away from assisted suicide and towards euthanasia. Many residents of the European nation wear arm bracelets telling doctors not to end their lives prematurely.
The Netherlands is the first nation in the world to allow euthanasia — which prompted millions of the western European country’s residents to wear bracelets asking doctors not to end their lives if they are severely injured.
Such legally sanctioned abuses have created a climate of fear among elderly persons and hospital residents. They wear arm bracelets telling doctors not to end their lives prematurely, or they relocate to nursing homes across the border in Germany where euthanasia is still illegal.
Ever since the Netherlands became the first nation in the world to legalize euthanasia, millions of Dutch residents have begun wearing bracelets informing doctors of their request not to be euthanized in the event of a serious injury.
As well as one in Swedish (presumably they had to share in whatever the English-speakers got):
Nederländerna var det första landet i världen att tillåta eutanasi. Oroliga människor har börjat bära armband med budskapet på att de inte vill att läkarna ska avsluta deras liv ifall de blir allvarlig skadade.
Whether the bracelets were a feature of the press release in English and missing from the other languages, or whether His Grace delivered his remarks in person in several languages to the press but mentioned the bracelets only in the one, it seems clear that there was some kind of campaign to persuade Americans, and only Americans, that these imaginary bracelets really existed, for whatever strange, deep, Jesuitical purpose, with the immediate consequence to us that the idea etched itself into Senator Santorum's heart, or hovers around in the rafters of his mind with the other little factoids, ready to spring out in the form of an "argument" about a slippery slope.
The Triumph of Time, ca. 1480-90, by Jacopo del Sellaio. From Kunst für Alle.
Oh, and a slippery slope that goes uphill; that's the retroaction part. The Remmelink study was repeated in 1995 and 2000; according to the report on the third one (Bregje D. Onwuteaka-Philipsen et al., "Euthanasia and other end-of-life decisions in the Netherlands in 1990, 1995, and 2001," The Lancet 362/9381 (August 3, 2003)), researchers ascertained that
The rate of euthanasia and explicit requests by patients for physicians' assistance in dying in the Netherlands seems to have stabilised, and physicians seem to have become somewhat more restrictive in their use. Euthanasia remains mainly restricted to... patients with cancer, people younger than 80 years, and patients cared for by family physicians, who were already frequently involved in 1990.
But that left the pro-coma forces, I think, in a somewhat peculiar position; they found themselves attacking a law passed in 2001, while their data, the only data Fenigsen had really tried to analyze, came from 1991. So their arguments tended to take on a retroactionary form, as in an "Adventures in Old Age" column in Psychology Today by Ira Rosofsky ("Assisted Suicide? How About A Dutch Treat?"):
In 2002, the Dutch enacted The Termination of Life on Request and Assisted Suicide Act, which formalizes the rules for assisted suicide. It adds the provisions that a second physician reviews the case, and that the patient be at least 12, although parental consent is required for those between 12 and 16....
There are unintended—or maybe not so unintended—consequences of Dutch practice. In 1991, the government published the Remmelink Report on assisted suicide. It found that although about only 1 to 2 percent of deaths are from voluntary assisted suicide, much higher percentages are due-maybe as high as 15 percent—from termination of life sustaining procedures, and there may be a thousand annually who are sped on their way—perhaps with high doses of pain killers—without their consent, impermissible killing.
Yes, as we've seen so often, in the conservative argumentation a law may have consequences ten years before it is enacted!
