I've been arguing the evils of socialized medicine lately and I just had to point out the irony of Britain's national authority on medicine:
The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) is the independent organisation responsible for providing national guidance on the promotion of good health and the prevention and treatment of ill health.
NICE produces guidance in three areas of health:
* public health - guidance on the promotion of good health and the prevention of ill health for those working in the NHS, local authorities and the wider public and voluntary sector
* health technologies - guidance on the use of new and existing medicines, treatments and procedures within the NHS
* clinical practice - guidance on the appropriate treatment and care of people with specific diseases and conditions within the NHS.
The booklet NICE: our guidance sets the standard for good healthcare explains more about NICE and the types of guidance we produce.
NICE guidance is developed using the expertise of the NHS and the wider healthcare community including NHS staff, healthcare professionals, patients and carers, industry and the academic world.
(from
http://www.nice.org.uk/aboutnice/)
As you may be able to tell from my sig, I am a C.S. Lewis fan. I cannot read about Britain and NICE without thinking of
That Hideous Strength:
Of all the tyrannies that shadowed Future Past, perhaps the most frightening is the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments (NICE) from C. S. Lewis's novel That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups (1945). Where other tyrannies were oppressive, murderous, or sadistic, the NICE is different in two ways. First, it doesn't set out to just control men, but to destroy their very souls. And second, Lewis' depiction of the NICE is not of some villainous establishment that is at least impressive in its organisation and efficiency, but rather of what a truly evil enterprise is like in real life: petty, vicious, and filled with power-hungry creatures who hate each other almost as much as they hate those they seek to enslave.
The NICE presents itself to the world, and thinks itself to be, a body of scientists dedicated to reorganising mankind along strictly scientific lines. The members imagine themselves as vanguards of of a new, rational age. In fact, they are nothing but a collection of pseudo-scientists lost in a fog of cant and jargon, who produce nothing more useful than elaborate machines that look terribly impressive, but simply and pointlessly update reports from various committees on a huge board.
Unknown to the rank and file, the plan of the people who run the NICE is to take over the English university town of Edgestow, then England, and then the world by total control of the press, economy, and government to create a police state where criminals are not punished, but consigned to endless "remedial treatment", vivisection is conducted for no reason other than to dull the moral senses by dabbling in obscenities, and people are reduced to mere material for "experiments." Then the NICE can get on to the fun bit of eliminating all the "useless" and "obsolete" peoples and make the world more efficient by the utter conquest of nature. Eventually, they plan to do away with all organic life and leave Earth an airless moon ruled over by disembodied heads kept alive by machinery–men without chests, indeed.
(from
http://davidszondy.com/future/Dystopias/nice.htm)
I can't help but wonder if they were aware of this...
