Reuters

No high-quality study done to date can document that having an abortion causes psychological distress, or a “post-abortion syndrome,” and efforts to show it does occur appear to be politically motivated, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.

No shit.

It’s just the way we show we care. Some people do it with flowers. But we do it by making up fake mental disorders so that we have something to save women from.

“The U.S. Supreme Court, while noting that ‘we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon,’ cited adverse mental health outcomes for women as part of the rationale for limiting late term abortions,” Blum’s team wrote.

So, the Supreme Court agrees that there ain’t no such thing as post-abortion syndrome, but they’re gonna go ahead as if it were real anyway. Aww. Isn’t that sweet? I’ll bet the girls really appreciate the effort too. This is kind of like when your boyfriend bought you a Thighmaster for your birthday assuming that it’s what you really actually wanted. Except instead of a Thighmaster, you’re not allowed to get an abortion.

We must save women from the dragon, or the Mongol hordes, or if no such threat presents itself, we must save women from themselves. But this time:

One suspects the terrorists spent far too much time listening to the BBC World Service.

Let’s hasten to add that by no means should the BBC alone be singled out. When it comes to terrorists and their grievances, nearly all the Western media have provided them with a rich diet on which to feed.

Media Narratives Feed Terrorist Fantasies — Wall Street Journal

It should be noted that The Wall Street Journal takes the position that the BBC is not to be trusted, and that they’re in league with the terrorists. Their proof: Newsweek retracted their Quran flushing story. Well there’s a shocker. Apparently Newsweek is not a first rate news source. Who could have known? Exactly how Newsweek is connected to the BBC is unclear, but the Wall Street Journal assumes that those seemingly diverse evil liberal media scoundrels who are committed to helping the terrorists win are all actually connected behind the scenes by a sinister conspiracy, which the Wall Street Journal calls “a credulous Western media.” All news sources are suspect, except of course for the Wall Street Journal itself who has cleverly managed to evade the many-tentacled arms of the Bavarian Illuminati.

With the exception of F.I.S.A., so far, all his actions reflect what he’s said he was going to do. I don’t know if that’s good news or bad news. I hope it isn’t a pattern, in that we can expect his centrist statements to hold up under duress, but his leftist statements to get dropped and forgotten, but that’s the pattern which is being established. Screw the left on F.I.S.A. Play to the center on the bailout and Hillary in the State Department.

Moar Trainz Plz K Thnx

I say that it’s the most plausible because I just don’t believe that another 9/11-style attack is possible. We fixate on the idea of another airplane getting hijacked, but remember how it actually happened that day. Two planes hit the WTC, a plane hit the Pentagon, and then the fourth plane was headed for the White House. The passengers on the fourth plane had cell phones, and had already been notified about terrorists hijacking other planes. So, as soon as they noticed their own plane getting hijacked, they immediately brought down the plane. All it takes is for the passengers to realize that such a plan exists, and the plan is foiled. This trick only works once. From now on, if any terrorist tries such an attack again, the passengers will immediately recognize what’s going on, and they’ll stop it one way or another. That’s just human nature.

The only other attack we’ve had is the anthrax attack. That kind of attack could happen again. I have no idea how likely it is, but it’s possible, and we’re not taking the most obvious precaution against it. So then, what does this lack of planning say about how worried we truly are about terrorism?

We’re O.K. with luggage checks, background checks, body cavity searches, mysterious government databases, no liquids allowed, and putting Cat Stephens on a blacklist along with anybody whose name sounds too Muslim, but the idea of getting a few shots is laughed off as just crazy.

I don’t recall my grandparents ever complaining about their smallpox vaccinations, even though the smallpox vaccination, just like the anthrax vaccination, could result in temporary giant swelling and was very painful. I think my grandparents were actually pretty happy to have them, probably because they perceived smallpox as a genuine threat.

So, we’re not a people living in fear of terrorists, and I don’t know that we ever were. And I’m troubled by how our corrupt government is being excused away by saying that we were just knocked off-kilter by the terrorist attacks. That’s way too easy of an explanation. The real explanation might be more mundane and more problematic. Perhaps our system of government just isn’t as good as it should be, and perhaps the pencil pushers can get away with anything because nobody is paying any attention. I don’t know if terrorism has anything to do with it at all. And I don’t really believe that simply letting some more time pass after the terrorist attacks is going to solve anything. Our problems lie on a much deeper level, and don’t have such a simple explanation.

Wouldn’t vaccinations against the one biological weapon that the terrorists have actually been able to use against us be a good idea? It would be cheap and easy; and since anthrax isn’t contagious (except in extreme cases) vaccinations wouldn’t need to be mandatory. So the people who are suspicious of inoculations wouldn’t have any room to complain. If we’re really so concerned about terrorism, why haven’t we all been inoculated against anthrax years ago?

If this technology is for real (which remains to be seen) Joe The Plumber won’t want to use it because it was developed via a grant from the U.S. Government, which means it is teh soshalisms.

At a newsstand today I saw the front page of a USA Today. I made a mental note of the headline, which I believe I recall correctly to be, “Terrorist Attack Pierces Heart Of Indian Tourism.” Yes, the USA Today relates the story of mangled human bodies in the context of how it relates to the purchase of goods and services. Never mind that physical hearts were pierced in the attack, causing the people who were using those hearts to pump blood all around their bodies to die on the spot; the metaphorical heart of tourism gets the headline.

I think that’s consumerism. It’s not just when you buy too many meaningless widgets. That’s just called greed or maybe being unselective. But consumerism is when your worldview is centered around the consuming of goods and services, which may probably have greed as an aspect, but they’re not the same thing. Consumerism is a sort of mild reductionism. It’s not a bold claim such as a a formal materialistic reductionism or something like that (no one would ever make such a claim methinks), but it’s when your opinions and concerns seem like you operate under the assumption that the world of financial trade is the only real world.