While working on the new story last night, I finally ground to a halt around page 15 and could not work any farther because of how I was feeling. I was incredibly anxious; on a scale of 1 to 10, this was easily 9, and I'm not entirely sure it wasn't a 10. I finally took a Xanax and began to calm down, and a little while later I went to bed, exhausted.
The melancholy feeling I referred to in #3518 was due to the synthroid, too.
You know how it is when something startles you so badly that you jump and yelp involuntarily, and your heart is pounding and you're breathing heavy for several minutes afterwards? This is like that, but it goes on and on and on and there's no reason for it to be happening. I'm just sitting at my computer, trying to write a blog post, and I feel as if I've just been scared shitless.
Argh.
* * *
Chicago refuses to allow the public to access records related to abortion deaths. That is to say, when the mother of the aborted child dies, not just the child.
Abortion is a dangerous procedure. All surgical procedures carry a certain amount of risk; even something as benign as a tooth extraction has the potential to end your life. The question is always how much risk is present?
Relatively few people die from having a tooth pulled because teeth are peripheral. The typical tooth does not require a great deal of blood to remain alive, but there can be blood clots or infections or a host of other things can go wrong. With modern medicine the risk is minimal, but it's still present.
Contrast that, then, to the situation that exists when a woman has an abortion. The uterus is deep in the pelvis, below and in front of the intestinal sac. Because the child requires a fair amount of oxygen and glucose to survive, there has to be a fairly robust blood supply to the uterus in order to get the blood to the endometrium.
If you damage the blood vessels going to and from the uterus badly enough, a hysterectomy is the only way to keep the woman from bleeding to death. Well, a Planned Parenthood clinic is not equipped for major surgery, so the woman has to be turfed to a hospital.
Abortion-on-demand was supposed to prevent this kind of thing, wasn't it? We were told that "back alley abortions" would kill women and the only way to prevent women from dying from botched abortions was to legalize it.
Simple fact is, you can't guarantee that any invasive medical procedure can be made safe, regardless of its legality. But if this young woman had had her abortion performed at a hospital, rather than a clinic, she would probably be still alive. She'd no longer need contraceptives or abortion services since her uterus would be gone, but you don't need a uterus to remain alive.
And the city of Chicago really doesn't want anyone to know how often this kind of thing happens in its clinics.
* * *
Lower the bar for "boys of color" because you know those n***ers can't help themselves.
Yes, because those "boys of color" are just too stupid to be held to society's standards, we have to make things easier on them. They can't help being disruptive. The crimes they commit aren't their fault. Their low grades are the result of the system, not their own attitudes or those of their culture.
I've got a better idea: stop making school compulsory to age 17. End compulsory education at age 15, after junior high. Let kids who aren't attending school work. Let them learn how hard it is to make money when they have no education. By age 17 the smart ones will be begging to come back to school.
* * *
JayG says Obama's whining that his wife doesn't draw a salary as First Lady. Apparently the vacations, the servants, the staff, the this, the that--none of that is adequate compensation for being First Lady; she deserves a salary, too.
*rolleyes*
* * *
Tuberculosis vaccine cures Type I diabetes, but Big Pharma can't make money on it so it's not going to happen.
Honestly, this doesn't surprise me at all. If you look at all the pills and supplies and machines that go into managing a case of Type I diabetes, it's really not surprising that no one wants to produce a cure for it.
It reminds me of the story my Mom always liked to tell about French doctors and appendicitis. When American doctors proved that removing the appendix was the best way to solve the problem, the French docs were aghast, because such a procedure utterly obviated all the treatment and the lovely money said treatments brought in. (That pesky detail about some people dying? Ah, well, it's a disease, right? People die from diseases all the time.)
...but I bet if you collected $10 from every person in the US who has Type I diabetes, you could fund a startup company to manufacture the vaccine.
* * *
Why is islam so anti-Jew? Turns out it's because the jews spurned Mohammed back when he was trying to get his little death cult started. He needed the legitimacy of Judaism to secure his place in history as a prophet, but the Jews weren't impressed (having already done away with one messiah a few centuries earlier) and so Mohammed lost his shit and started killing as many of them as he could.
And on his deathbed, commanded his followers to do the same. (Wait--I thought Mohammed was carried to heaven by barak. Wasn't he? Or did he die first and then ascend?)
* * *
JayG and Borepatch, in that order:
WikiWep is a project dedicated to the idea of giving people with 3D printers the ability to make guns.
Fully printable, working .22 pistol made from plastic.
Not so very long ago someone posted a picture of an extremely cheap, single-shot gun meant to be dropped over France and other Nazi-occupied areas in Europe during WW2. The idea was for partisans and resistance fighters to get these guns, use them to kill Nazi soldiers, and take the soldiers' weapons. They weren't meant to be serious combat weapons but a means to an end, and that end was arming the resistance with military-grade weapons so they could be more effective against the Nazis.
Right now, in fact, if you have the right tools you can already build your own firearms. The rest is merely a function of how complex a firearm you want to make.
* * *
Let's have a gander at today's Real Life Comics:
Greg and Tony are talking about Tony's plan to terraform Mars. Tony is a evil genius, frequently doing incredible things like making time machines, cloning machines, building an immense underground lair directly beneath Greg's home, etcetera.
In panel #3, Greg exclaims, "Whoa! Now--you're talking about increasing the mass of an entire planet?! Won't that screw up its orbit? ...."
The simple answer is "no". If you drop a five-pound weight and a ten-pound weight, they accelerate towards the ground at the same speed. As long as the added mass has the same orbital velocity as the rest of Mars, Mars will continue along in the same orbit it's always been in, without so much as missing a beat.
The way Tony plans to do it, it'll increase the density of Mars, making it more massive, thus increasing its gravity; and that will change the orbits of its moons, but it won't change the orbit of Mars itself.
However--the massive quakes and "who the hell knows what else" will definitely occur. Mars has not been tectonically active for some time, because of the reasons Tony outlines in the second panel. Jump-starting core convection would be...inconvenient...for anyone who happened to be on the surface of Mars.
* * *
A bit less than two hours until therapy. I can't wait. *sigh*