A snapshot of socialized health care in one country this week.

I lived in the United Kingdom just enough to know what Michael Moore has denied -- there are long queues of people waiting for care from the National Health Service. Michael seems to think people waltz right in and are treated immediately.

I tried an experiment with Google news search last night. I typed in just two things. The first was the abbreviation for the National Health Service, NHS, and the word “waiting”. Remember since this is a Google news search it only searches for a specific period of time. These are not old stories but news reports on the current situation.

The first report I want to mention is from the Independent newspaper. What makes this story different is that a senior trauma surgeon is breaking NHS rules to speak out. Physicians, nurses and other employees of the NHS are forbidden to speak to the media. Transparency is not their middle name.

But Martin Bircher talked because he said he couldn’t endure the suffering that patients were being put through. He described, “a system paralysed by red tape and disputes over funding, which is putting thousands of patients waiting for treatment in specialist wards at risk.” The paper says:

Every one of Britain's specialist trauma beds is full, which means some patients can wait up to three weeks after their accident before badly broken bones can be repaired. The delay, says Mr Bircher, can jeopardise recovery. With nothing but praise for frontline staff, he says patients who have been critically injured in road or other accidents have to wait an average of 12 days – often in agonising pain – before they can receive the vital specialist treatment.

These a victims of severe trauma who are being denied treatment not people with earaches or sore throats. But trauma beds are expensive and the way socialist systems provide medical care cheaply is by restricting access to expensive treatment. They don’t want more trauma beds being used because it drives up costs and that destroys the illusion of the efficiency of socialist care.

Trauma care is limited to certain hospitals. Patients needing this care are first treated in a regular hospital and then have to be moved to the trauma units later. But NHS bureaucrats,

...are involved in making the final decision as to whether a patient can be moved. If they have to move them there is often a conflict or reluctance because the new area does not want an extra cost. So after initial admission to a general hospital’s emergency wards, where lives are saved, patients can find themselves waiting up to three weeks before their real recovery process can begin.

Bircher says that the physicians and nurses are doing the best they can “but are hampered by layers of managers whose major concern is the budget rather than patient care.”

The paper reported the case of a young woman, Lucy Lynn-Evans what was riding a scooter when a truck smashed into her and ran her over. Her laptop, in a backpack, saved her life since it took the brunt of the force as the truck rolled over her spine. But her pelvis was smashed to pieces. The local hospital stopped her from dying but only a few hospitals in the country are given the speciality equipment needed to repair her pelvis. She was put on morphine for pain and told it would take three weeks before a bed would open up in one of the hospitals equipped to deal with her problem.

Lucy said the pain was so bad she begged father to take her to the other hospital and dump her on the steps if necessary thinking this might speed up the wait. Other patients were considered more urgent and Lucy kept losing her place to those with more need. When a bed became available the local hospital fund manager had to approve the transfer. He didn’t show up to work until 9:30 that morning and by the time he reached the form for Lucy the bed that was available was gone. Lucy’s mother knew some of the top NHS officials and was able to use her contacts to create a fuss and get Lucy into a bed early. She confessed she felt awful doing this, “I know that in securing a bed for Lucy someone else had to wait longer.” But one reality is that under socialized medicine people with political pull can jump the queue.

Next from Aberdeen comes this report about desperate dental patients seeking help from the NHS. Recently, the Aberdeen Evening Express reported that there are 25,000 people waiting in line for care with NHS Grampian “meaning it could take years before a NHS dentist is available.”

One local patient was having trouble getting seen for a filling. He signed up for a low-cost private care program for two check-ups per year. He then discovered that NHS decided to punish him for doing this. They dropped him back to the bottom of the queue telling him that since he paid that this proved he was not in need and thus not urgent.

The Norwich Evening News for July 30th, reports that their local NHS is making an effort to cut the waiting lists. Under a new “Choose and Book” plan patients, with their GP, can actually pick the hospital of their choice for treatment. You would think that normal. But it wasn’t. What is truly revolutionary is that the NHS, to cut down waiting lists is now allowing patients to seek care at private hospitals. The paper reports: “Now a contract between BUPA Hospital and Norfolk Primary Care Trust means thousands of patients will be able to get seen by a specialist in a much quicker time.”

A business manager for the private hospital says, “It means people can be treated closer to home or work.” So to cut their waiting lists the NHS turned to private hospitals to help with the work. Hmm, do you think Michael will mention that?

The Scotsman reports on one hospital that did manage to cut the waiting time to get admitted to hospital. Last year one-fifth of all patients waited more than four hours to be admitted, discharged or transferred at this hospital. The hospital was happy that last week it managed to get it down to 3%. That’s good but does one week make a trend? And this hospital is being praised because it is the exception, or at least was the exception one week.

In another story the Scotsman reports that NHS Lothian was crowing about how they are dealing with cancer patients who are referred for “urgent” treatment by their GP. Please remember this is “urgent” care requirements for cancer patients. That is not something you wait for. Their goal is to have 95% of these urgent patents treated within two months. Two months? What would the waiting time be if the case were not deemed urgent?

Of course 5% of those patients will be waiting over two months, if NHS Lothian reaches its goal, which it hasn’t. Last month 12% of the urgent cancer patients had gone more than two months with no treatment. I’m still wondering if two months waiting for “urgent” cancer patients is all that successful. Surely with urgent cancer cases even two weeks is unacceptable.

Another recent report says that there are 2,474 NHS dentists working in Scotland. which is 173 more than last year. And the budget has increased by about another $200 million. Yet the number of patients registered with a dentist has actually declined. It was 49.9% in 2000 and 46.2% currently. It also reported: “In some areas, less than a third of adults were registered with an NHS dentist.” There are around 58.4 dentists per 100,000 Americans or one dentist for every 1,712 people. Each dentist in Scotland, under socialized care, has to treat 2,068 patients. So there are considerably fewer dentists relative to the population. Fewer paid dentists, with long waiting lines, is a way to keeping costs down.

We previously reported on a 108-year-old woman in Deal who was told she would have to wait two years for a hearing aid. So it is somewhat of a relief to report that the waiting period in Scotland is not quite that bad. Patients in Lauriston Place were only waiting up to ten months, in Livingston it was a wait of 35 weeks, in Edinburgh they can wait up to 43 weeks. The NHS target for Scotland is 26 weeks -- that is what they consider the goal that they would like to reach If I couldn’t hear I’m not sure I’d consider a 26 week wait all that lovely. But no worries since they haven’t come close to even this modest a goal.

I also came across a report from Malta, of all places, about NHS care. It reports that more patients from England are flying to Malta for health care. It reports:

Due to lengthy NHS waits and concerns about the high risk of MRSA infections in NHS hospitals, a growing number of Britons are taking advantage of affordable, high-quality private healthcare abroad, combining it with a relaxing holiday. They save thousands of pounds compared with having the treatment done privately in the UK. Already, many British patients travel to Belgium, Hungary and Poland and even further afield to countries such as India and Brazil.

MRSA is a bacterial condition caused by unclean conditions and it seems rather prevalent in NHS hospitals. In 1999 there were 487 deaths from the infection. But in 2003 it had risen to 955 deaths. And a report in the Daily Mail for February 4, 2005 said that “hospital-acquired infections overall strike around 100,000 people each year in England”. They also report that the health care workers union says the number of MRSA related deaths is actually much higher because many death certificates don’t mention MRSA as being a factor even when it is. But not that is old material and my focus is on current stories. But apparently MRSA hasn’t diminished much if the Malta report is correct.

In Ambleside NHS dental patients were in for some bad news. The local dentist is getting on in years and retiring. And he won’t be replaced. He has 3,000 patients registered with him and more on a waiting list who can’t get in. The 3,000 patients will have to try to get on the waiting lists for dentists in other towns.

I will stop with this next story but these are only the first few stories that appeared in my Google search. There are many more. The last one is interesting because it contrasts care under the NHS and care in the United States. The story is about Fraser Brown, the young son of the Prime Minister. Fraser has cystic fibrosis. The first point that I found interesting is that the average life expectancy for a patient with cystic fibrosis in the UK is 31 years, two years less than in the United States. But it also revealed that some US centers have managed to get life expectancy up to 47 years.

And this article compared how this center operates versus the best in the UK:

Successful treatment of cystic fibrosis requires extraordinary commitment, attention to detail and a refusal to accept second best. While the average centre might accept lung function at 75 per cent of normal, at Fairview they are not content with 80 or even 90 per cent. They aim for 100 per cent. They question everything they do and act immediately when standards slip, rather than accepting it as an inevitable by-product of the illness. In Britain, we do not think about medicine in this way - as a daily battle against the forces of sickness and decay in which every centimetre of ground gained deserves celebration, and every centimetre lost explanation.

It tells how the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation in the US has published the success rates of every one of their centers on line for the public to read. Physicians can see who is doing better and perhaps learn why. Patients can pick the center with the best performance. Not so in the UK. In principle there is an agreement to do this, eventually. But “directors are worried the data may be misinterpreted and used to beat ’under-performers.’”

The article suggests that the UK needs to learn how to compare performance between services. It says the Brits need “a healthy dose of American belligerence” to do this. But why do Americans compare between service providers? Because in the US the providers compete and Americans are not normally assigned to a specific provider with no other option.

There are over 600 more stories in the last few weeks. Perhaps not all of them about the National Health service and waiting times. One was about a high school football player who attended a school abbreviated NHS. But many of these stories are. I didn’t cherry pick. I just went down the list and opened up and reported what was said. But I will cheat on one story that I saw which was further down the list. It’s one of those “good for them” stories.

Tony and Greta Dodd are both pensioners. And they have a common problem with old people. Both of them suffer from knee problems. Tony’s knees went first. Then Greta followed suit. Even a short amount of walking puts them in excruciating pain. Tony says: “I’ve been on the NHS waiting list for six months and up to now I’ve heard nothing, not even a proposed date for an operation.”

But Tony and Greta got lucky. No, the NHS didn’t call them with new knees. Better. They won the lottery. And they plan to celebrate by going private and buying new knees for the both of them.

And the great thing is that they won by accident. Like so many people they play the same numbers week after week. But Tony went to the newsagent to purchase a ticket and forget the slip with the numbers on them. Well, with bad knees he wasn’t walking back home. And so he tried from memory. He could only remember the first five numbers correctly and so for the last one he picked a number randomly. In his case it certainly was true: he had more of a chance in winning the lottery than getting the surgery he needed from the NHS.

The reality is that Michael Moore was fudging the facts when he implied that British health care is so wonderful. The daily news stories from the UK indicate a system that is mired in debt, bound up in red tape and constantly denying care to people in order to vainly attempt to lower health care costs. One British columnist, Giles Whittell, of the Times of London even challenges how much cheaper it is than US care.

He pointed out that last year the NHS had a budget of around

...£104 billion. That’s roughly £1,733 per man, woman and child. Multiplied by four for a typical two-child family, then divided by 12, that equates to median monthly family healthcare expenditure of £577, or $1,155 in American money. I can buy some very respectable US health insurance for $1,155 a month. In fact, on a quick and painless stroll through the web site for Kaiser Permanente, a leading nonprofit US healthcare provider, entering my basic family details and the Beverly Hills zipcode, the most expensive family policy I can find that does not depend on contributions from the state or an employer costs $400 less than the sum Gordon Brown currently chooses to spend from my taxes, each month, on the NHS.

I don’t know anyone who says there aren’t problems in the US health care system. It certainly is a bastardized system of conflicting incentives and regulations many of which harm consumers deeply. But there is this blind, utopian vision of the virtues of socialized health care that can only be compared to religious belief not rational policy making. And as this snapshot would clearly indicate one can not produce a “documentary” which deals with British health care, and do the smallest amount of reading, without being aware that these problems are rampant. If the documentary then appears to give the opposite conclusion the only warranted conclusion is that the documentarian is dishonest.

Photos: Our first photo is the fabricator himself. The second photo is an actual queue at an NHS dental service that announced it could take 300 additional patients. Hundreds more turned up than could be accommodated

The 15,000 dead that Michael Moore forgot about.

In 2003 France experienced a heat wave and the result was almost 15,000 deaths. USA Today reported that most the victims “died during the height of the heat wave, which brought suffocating temperatures of up to 104 degrees.”

Not long ago I spent half a year in Phoenix. And Phoenix is a very hot city. That region of the world has been hot long before we started blaming everything on CO2. Just outside Phoenix is a retirement community known as Sun City. It is a town of around 33,000 elderly people. The median age in Sun City is just over 72 years of age. And the average high temperature in Sun City is 106 degrees summer after summer.

So 33,000 elderly people thrive in temperatures higher than those that hit France where 15,000 people died. And according to USA Today many of the victims in France were elderly. What are some of the reasons that elderly people in America flock to a climate that routinely exceeds the temperatures of France’s heat wave without the dire consequences that France experienced?

Like most issues there are numerous causes involved. One is that the elderly in Sun City know that the temperatures will go above 100 degrees every day during the summer. Knowing this means they are prepared.

For instance every home and business in the Phoenix area will have air conditioning. Very few homes and business in Europe have this sort of decadent luxury. On a hot day shopping in Europe is often a horrid experience since the shops are stuffy and temperatures inside often are warmer than outside.

The reality is that Europeans have a much lower standard of living. They don’t like to admit it but it’s true. They have regulated and taxed themselves to such an extent that they live much less comfortably than do their counterparts in the United States. Average income in Europe is below average income in the United States. Then the welfare states in Europe gobble up vast amounts of the income that is earned. So the average European not just earns less but pays more in taxes. And then costs for virtually everything is much higher. I suspect something in Europe has to be cheaper than in the US but I don’t know what it is.

With lower levels of income the average home is much smaller in Europe. People don’t drive as much but walk, ride bicycles or take public transit. Cars are discouraged by the Green fanatics. Of course when heat waves hit that means old people are trying to bicycle to the store. Actually I should say stores.

In the US an older person heads to one grocery market and picks up everything they need. Such large stores go against the European mentality. So there are mostly smaller stores with minimal selections. So this means going from store to store. When it is hot out this extra exertion doesn’t help the elderly.

If the elderly in Sun City had to walk from store to store to store to buy their groceries and ride their bicycles in the 106 degree temperatures, instead of driving, they would probably be dropping dead in massive numbers as well. Luckily for them they don’t live in a town that is as “eco-friendly”.

Germany has a sales tax of about 20%. And energy is especially expensive so they can meet their Kyoto requirements. Of course they don’t meet their Kyoto requirements but they do heavily tax energy. With energy being expensive the result is that people can’t afford to air condition. It’s the same across Europe.

When the heat wave hit France people died because the cost of air conditioning is above what most people can afford. The welfare state reduces living standards and people can’t afford “luxuries” like air conditioning.

So what happened what that socialized health care? Docufraud producer Michael Moore is harping on about the benefits of the French socialized health system. He says: “The French system is the best in the world.” So why the 15,000 deaths there? How did the French system respond?

Much of it didn’t react at all. France has long mandated holiday periods for workers. The French brag about them. They pride themselves as to how little work they do, which is one reason they have chronic high unemployment. And August is the big holiday month when many French workers take the entire month off. That includes physicians, nurses, etc.

Again the news report stated: “The heat wave hit during the August vacation period, when doctors, hospital staff and many others take leave.” Of course France has a union for physicians, since every special interest group must have a union or they get screwed by the other union groups. And the National General Practitioners Union denies that vacations had anything to do with it since only 20% of all physicians were off on holiday. Only 20%! That’s one out of five physicians being gone for an entire month.

Apparently it wasn’t just the physicians and their extended holidays that were the problem. “...[T]he French Parliament released a harshly worded report blaming the deaths on a complex health system, widespread failure among agencies and health services to co-ordinate efforts, and chronically insufficient care for the elderly.” So the health system in France is complex and has “chronically insufficient care for the elderly.”

But this is one of the systems that Moore drools over when he advocates a socialist system for the United States.

It was this excellent health care that explained why 15,000 French old people died from temperatures that in Sun City would be just average. It is the excellent health care that caused the French Parliament to report that their own health system provides “chronically insufficient care for the elderly.” I suspect Mr. Moore will never mention that parliamentary report

Photo: The photo was taken in a French hospital showing elderly victims of the heat wave waiting for care. One fifth of all physicians were on holiday that day.

Postscript. I have added a post script on this matter here.

The Knee-jerk Left went into hysterics and stopped worshiping Michael Moore just long enough to express their dislike of America (actually for some it was raw hatred of a rather bigoted nature). They particularly didn't like my off-hand remark that the average American is more prosperous than the average European. They have rather bizarre views on life in America. So I have laid out my arguments for the off hand remark here.

Michael Moore fictionalizes socialized health care.

Michael Moore produces some of the most popular fictional films around today. Unfortunately he pretends they are based on reality. He prefers that everyone else pretend they are based on reality as well.

Recently he got a bit miffed because Canadian journalists were less than laudatory in discussing his new attack on America's quasi-private health care. Moore’s film promotes Canada, along with communist Cuba, as being his role model for health care. He simply overlooks the massive problems with Cuban health care.

The Canadian journalists knew his hype about the wonders of Canada’s system was a distortion of the facts. One journalist explained: “We Canucks were taking issue with the large liberties Sicko takes with the facts, with its lavish praise for Canada’s government-funded medicare system compared with America’s for-profit alternative.”

Moore implied that Canada provides all the health care people need or want. That is false. Every country, without exception, has to restrict access to health care. Advocates of state care brag that their care costs less than America's semi-private system. But they don’t admit that this is done by simply denying health care in one form or another.

Most countries, Canada included, reduce the demand for health care by forcing people to wait for care. Often people wait right up until they die. When they do die they are taking off the waiting list and politicians call that an improvement.

These systems forbid certain treatments or medicines outright because they cost too much, even when they are precisely what the patient needs and even if the cheaper alternatives don't work as well. Some countries, like Germany, also pay very low wages to the health care professionals. In a sense they move their expenses off the books. Instead of paying market wages to doctors and increasing taxes they reduce the wages of physicians. They indirectly impose high taxes on doctors. Thus they can pretend the health care is “cheaper” than it is in reality.

The New York Times mentioned how Canada’s health care system was a major election issue there. Why was that the case? If the system is as wonderful as Moore pretends what was the problem? According to the Times it was because of growing “waiting lines for care” and because “doctors and nurses [were] becoming sparse.” Every year or so the Canadian politicians make large promises how they will reduce the waiting lines for care. But the lines don't get shorter.

It is important to remember that Canadian health care costs are also kept artificially low because Canadians are forbidden by law to have private health care. One survey of just three American states found an average of around 1,000 Canadians per year seeking treatment, at their own expense in US facilities. Their spending is then listed as US spending and not as Canadian expenditures.

This was a study, that while claiming it was impartial, was constantly worded in a way which tried to down play the problems in Canada. They also cited a survey which showed “only 20” out of 18,000 Canadians sought care in the US. If that is the case that would be about 2,000 per year. This would be equivalent of 20,000 Ameicans per year running to Canada for their operations -- if that happened you can be assured it would widely publicized and Moore would feature it heavily in his film.

Why are 2,000 people a year seeking health care in the US when it’s “free” at home? Remember private health care in Canada is illegal. While it is not a crime to seek that care outside Canada how many people understand the distinction? Would people be reluctant to admit they sought care in the US due to fears, unfounded as they would be, about breaking the law? And this survey only shows how many actually went through the bother of traveling outside their own country to seek health care. It doesn’t show how many would have done so had they the means to do it.

What I run into from apologists for socialized service is that the reason for these problems is a shortage of funding. Now think about that for a second. They are saying that if they spent more money then state care wouldn’t have to be rationed out. And no doubt some of the problems would be solved by spending considerably more.

But so often they start out with an argument that socialized service is preferred because it is cheaper. Then they excuse the problems created by socialized medicine by saying these problems wouldn’t exist if it were more expensive. Doesn’t that undermine their original claim?

Assume they doubled the budget of health care thus making socialized care far more expensive than private care. Would that eradicate the waiting lines? It would not. Demand would continue to expand. People would still want more than they received and they would seek that extra treatment. Once again they would be rationing care. One reality of economics is that if something is free, and valuable, people will want more than exists. One way or another there is always rationing.

The problems of health care rationing and the ban on private care went all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada. In Quebec the province allowed private insurance only for procedures not covered by the socialized system. One elderly man, George Zeliotis, needed a hip replacement. But the socialized system had him wait for over a year. He wanted private treatment which he would pay for out of his own pocket and was told it was illegal. He went to court and the Supreme Court wrote a blistering ruling. They ruled:

“The evidence in this case shows that delays in the public health care system are widespread and that is some serious cases, patients die as a result of waiting lists for public health care.”

“In sum, the prohibition on obtaining private health insurance is not constitutional where the public system fails to deliver reasonable services.”

No wonder Canadian journalists were a bit testy with Mr. Moore and his praise for socialized health care. I’m sure Moore will have an explanation on why he is a better judge on the matter than the Canadian Supreme Court. And the explanation would be about as fictional as most his other work.

Michael Moore and Leonardo DiCaprio release "activist" films.

The Blob is returning. Michael Moore, the dishonest, deceptive extremist from the Left has produced another one of his psuedo-documentary films, this time attacking American health care. No field in America is as regulated, subsidized, controlled, investigated and shackled as health care. So, of course Moore’s solution is more regulation, more subsidies, more control, more investigations and more shackles.

In his previous films Moore used every underhanded dirty trick to distort the facts. He would quote people out of context, he would change the order of statements in order to give them different meanings, he would stage events and then present his staged scene as if it were normal. Moore is to the Left what Ann Coulter is to the Right: dishonest, manipulative, and unreliable. I personally cringed when he produced his Fahrenheit 911 film because I opposed the war in Iraq. I do not want Moore on my side on anything as he has no credibility.

But he does have fans as in the true meaning of the word: fanatics. And they want Moore to lie to them. Moore’s lying began with his first film Roger & Me which chronicled his “unsuccessful” attempt to interview General Motors chairman Roger Smith. That is the basic theme of the film.

The then relatively slim Moore pursues Smith repeatedly desperately seeking to interview him about the effects that downsizing a plant had on Moore’s hometown, Flint, Michigan. Moore made much of his working-class roots in Flint except Moore was not from Flint. He was from Davison, Michigan which was very different. Davison was much wealthier and much whiter than Flint. Well under 1% of the population was African-American and the poverty rate was half the national average. But for the sake of the film it looked better if Moore lied about his actual hometown.

And where the film portrayed Moore as a Quixotesque individual on a lone crusade to bring down the rich and powerful the truth was something different. The reality is that the film of Smith was someone else’s idea and Moore, as the editor of a far Left rag, had been asked to help them raise the funds to do a documentary presenting their complaints against GM. The actually would-be filmmakers turned over all their documentation and material to Moore so he could help them raise funds for their project.

Moore left Michigan to work for the Left-wing Mother Jones magazine. But he was quickly fired from that position. He then filed a law suit against the magazine for millions claiming wrongful dismissal. Rather than fight the claims the magazine took a cheaper alternative and paid Moore a severance pay which he then used to produce the film on Smith. No mention of the originators of the idea or all their material, now in Moore’s possession, was made.

Throughout his first film Moore showed how the city of Flint responded to layoffs at the plant through feeble “projects” to create jobs. And here was Moore’s first use of his deceptive timelines, a tactic he has used repeatedly to distort facts. The projects he ridiculed in Flint may have deserved ridicule but they had nothing to do with the layoffs from GM--nor could they. They were typical stupid government projects that were tried BEFORE the layoffs at the GM plant. They were not, as Moore presented them, responses to the layoffs at all. When questioned about this Moore’s excuse was that they took place in the same decade.

And what about that illusive interview with Smith? We see endless vain attempts by Moore to get his interview and that is how the film ends. Lies. Moore did interview Smith, twice. At a GM stockholders meeting Moore had a lengthy exchange with Smith on issues. And later Moore had a one-on-one filmed interview with Smith as well. Those were inconvenient details that ruined Moore’s story so he simply deleted them.

On the other hand when two Left-wing filmmakers Rick Caine and Debbie Melnyk tried to interview Moore he did his level best to avoid speaking to them the very thing he falsely critized Smith over. Moore’s dishonest tactics were used in every single film he has produced to date. So I see no reason to assume that his new film promoting state control of health care won’t be any different. Moore was correct that Bush lied about Iraq but where does he get off lecturing on honesty when it is a trait he doesn't practice himself?

If the Blob’s new film isn’t bad enough we now have to endure Leonardo DiCaprio making documentaries on the end of the world. His film, The 11th Hour is “on the environmental crisis” and “his message is urgent.” Yawn! Every environmental hysteric’s message is “urgent”. Really, I find them tiresome. They ought to dress up in sack cloth and wear long scraggly hair while marching with signs saying “The End is Nigh.”

DiCaprio admits he knows little about science, or the issues he’s tackling, but that’s okay he says because “it all comes from a good place.” He admits he is using his Hollywood fame to promote a cause but says it allows scientists to “speak freely and openly to tell the truth.” Gee, anyone notice how difficult it is for the doomsayers to get time on television to “speak freely”? In reality it is the skeptics who are rarely afforded the opportunity to question the ideological driven science of the Left.

The hilarious part of all this was that DiCaprio premiered his film in the luxury of the Cannes film festival. How much carbon did he and his entourage emit flying halfway around the world to sit in luxury hotels in order to premier the film. DiCaprio’s coproducer, Nadia Connners explained: “Sure we have these yachts behind us - but even they could run on bio-fuel.”

DiCaprio was asked if he flew by private jet to Cannes and said: “Not this time.” Hmm, apparently other times he does. He quickly, however, lectured the reporter for asking this inconvenient question: “I think there’s a certain danger.... Talking, for example, about how Al Gore flies or how he conducts his life, is just confusing the bigger issue where there is no real doubt about global warming. This isn’t a film about one person but about encouraging our corporations and government to practice ecology in our everyday living standards.” He repeated this defense of "waste" again: "The way he [Gore] travels and the way he lives his life should not be criticized."

Oh, I see, do as I say not as I do. Why do “corporations” produce specific products? Because people buy them. So it is about consumers like DiCaprio in the end since the consumer determines, through his purchases, what will or will not be produced. No corporation is going to produce a product that no one will buy. And since DiCaprio is a millionaire, several times over, his buying habits influence production far more than my own meager spending does. So when he does use a private jet he is encouraging private jets. When he flies executive class he ups carbon emissions. He could go tourist like us plebeians but doesn't. At the Academy Awards he promoted the "green" agenda and viewers were urged on screen to use mass transit, yet DiCaprio and his fellow Green lecturers used limos instead.

DiCaprio's film is a full frontal attack on modern technology in all forms. The left-wing Guardian describes the film as "positing that since the invention of the steam engine man has ceased to live in harmony with the environment and has used Earth as a resource to be ruthlessly exploited."

DiCaprio lives in mansion with a private pool and a private pool (heated?) and his own basketball court. DiCaprio isn’t defending Al Gore as much as trying to deflect criticism for his own hypocrisy. DiCaprio says focusing on his own massive consumption of resources is merely “finding another way to convolute the issue and argue about semantics and things that ultimately don’t matter.” So they “ultimately don’t matter”? Apparently if I consume a resource it matters. If DiCaprio consumes far more of the same resource it doesn’t matter.

But DiCaprio is forthcoming about his goal. He wanted to produce a film that will “get the audience emotionally involved to the point where they would want to take steps to get involved.” Now that is normally called propaganda. If he said “rationally involved” it might be science. But the purpose of the film is not to present science but to create activists. And in that sense he’s rather similar to Michael Moore.

As for consumption consider the treatment DiCaprio gets when he stays in a suite of rooms at the luxurious Plaza Athénée in Paris. First the suite is meticulously cleaned by a team of housekeepers. Then it is inspected by “an electrician, a plumber, a carpenter and a painter... making double sure everything works perfectly and is in pristine condition.” DiCaprio is a “VP4” which is the highest class of VIP and who receives the most expensive, and thus most carbon emitting, treatment, of any guest at a hotel filled with the rich and famous.

At this level of service the guest is treated with kid gloves and pampered. The hotel keeps meticulous records of what the person eats and even how they prefer their sheets on the bed. “In some cases, the entire room has been photographed so that when guests return—even a year later—everything is exactly how they left it.” One staff member explains: “If they left a certain book open to page 240, they will find it on the exact same table open to that very page.”

DiCaprio attacks Americans for not "setting an example" saying "If we don't take any action then how can anyone else be expected to?" But he is quite clear that the "we" is Americans in general but not himself and Mr. Gore. Apparently since they come from "a good place" they are exempt.

If the hypocrisy of Rev. Ted Haggard or Jimmy Swaggart is an issue -- and it is -- then the hypocrisy of the Al Gores and Leonardo DiCaprios of the world ought to be a story as well. Of course they buy “carbon offsets” they answer. So, if you are rich enough you can buy the right to to emit carbon while pushing for state coercion to reduce the living standards of the average person.

Apparently the “VP4” treatment they receive, because they purchase it, gives the wealthy like Moore, Gore and DiCaprio, the perception that there are rules for the masses which they can buy their way out of.

Addendum: My prediction is that we won't see major curbs on carbon emissions as a result of governmental controls. We will only see them when new technologies replace old ones. I also think that we will not see any of the major disasters predicted by the global warming hysterics in spite of no meaningful aciton being taken. Eventually the apocalyptics will move on to another imagined crisis. But no matter the crisis they will have the same solution: more state control.