Sim-O

The Lay Scientist:

“Healing therapist” Russell Jenkins tragically died after a minor injury to his foot became gangrenous when he refused to seek medical attention, an inquest has heard.

As local Portsmouth newspaper The News describes: “Russell Jenkins injured his left foot treading on an electrical plug at his home. The wound later became infected, but the 52-year-old shunned conventional treatment, saying his ‘inner being’ told him not to go to hospital. Instead he tried treating it with honey, an ancient remedy for the treatment of infected wounds.”

Fair play for sticking to his beliefs.

Anyone called the people at the Darwin Awards?

Reposted from Mike Power:

Norml:

Millions of Americans nationwide cast votes Tuesday in favor of marijuana law reform, approving nine out of ten ballot measures seeking to liberalize penalties on cannabis use and possession.

In Massachusetts, 65 percent of voters approved Question 2, which replaces criminal penalties for the possession of up to one ounce of marijuana (punishable by up to six-months in jail and a $500 fine) with a civil fine of no more than $100. More than 1.9 million Massachusetts voters (and all but three cities) backed the measure – a greater total than the number of voters who endorsed President Elect Barack Obama (1.88 million)…

In Michigan, 63 percent of voters approved Proposal 1, which legalizes the physician-supervised use and cultivation of medicinal cannabis by state-authorized patients. More than 3 million voters endorsed the measure, which received approximately 150,000 more votes in Michigan than did Obama. Proposal 1 goes into effect on December 4th, at which time nearly one-quarter of the US population will live in a state that authorizes the legal use of medical cannabis.

The Mail:

Teenage girls who watch a lot of TV shows with a high sexual content are twice as likely to become pregnant, a study said yesterday.
Boys watching similar shows are also much more likely to get a girl pregnant

‘Twice as likely’ and ‘more likely’. Hardly a damning first paragraph, there is it?

The study of more than 2,000 American youngsters between 12 and 17 is the first to directly link programmes such as Friends and Sex And The City to pregnancy.
It warned: ‘One problem is that these and similar programmes glamorise sex while hardly mentioning its downsides, such as pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.’

‘Linked’ not a firm claim of causality? Linked implies that there is something in common with the two things, rather than one is the cause of the other.
I’m no expert on the only two programmes the researchers named (why name only two programmes?), Friends and Sex in the City, although I’ve been forced to sit through enough Friends on it’s endless cycle of repeats to claims of “I haven’t seen this one”. Yes you have you’ve seen them all at least four times. Sorry, I digress.
Where were we? Ah, yes, the programmes. Well, Friends I thought never had an overtly sexual theme or content to it. Yes they went on dates, they even slept with people, but nearly always in a relationship and when it wasn’t there was always some problem or other. Like Rachel getting pregnant by Ross, for instance. I can’t comment on Sex and the City because I do not watch it, and am surprised they managed to drag a full lenght film out of it, but it’s hardly aimed at 12 year olds.

Dr Chandra, a scientist with the RAND Corporation, a respected non-profit research group, said even cartoons with a sexual content can have the same effect.

Ok. Somebody enlighten me. Educate me as to which cartoons on the telly have a sexual content?
What ever you do, don’t mention abortions…too late, here she comes!

Tory MP Nadine Dorries said last night: ‘It would be interesting to see if a similar study in the UK revealed a trend. Information such as this empowers parents when making difficult decisions as to what they do and don’t allow their young daughters to watch.
‘Last year we saw girls as young as 12 aborting. Any information which could help stop even one child aborting her child has to be welcomed.’

Thanx for that excellent renta quote Nadine. But is it all the fault of the girls? Don’t the young boys have any say about whether girls get pregnant or not? How are you going to inform parents of which programmes are going to get you child up the duff, a mail shot every couple of weeks rating new programmes or inform them via the everso informed press?
All sorts of things happened last year so I don’t deny one or two 12 year old girls had abortions, but i) Are twelve year old girls really into Sex and the City? And ii) Unity has talked about abortion rates of under 14s’, to put things in perspective rather than the vague abstract of Nadiness statement, here

For the latest study, published in the American Journal of Paediatrics, researchers interviewed 2,003 youngsters three times between 2001 and 2004, asking about viewing habits, sexual behaviour and pregnancy.
By the last interview 718 said they were sexually active.

35% sexually active.

A separate analysis of programmes determined the frequency and type of sexual content. Researchers focused on 23 programmes popular with teenagers which contained high levels of sexual content – both depictions of sex and dialogue or discussion about it.

Be nice to know what programmes and what constituted ‘high levels of sexual content’.

They named only Friends and Sex and the City, but the shows included dramas, comedies, reality programmes and animations

Damn. But I do notice it says ‘They’, as in the researchers. Why would researchers on release the names of two of the programmes analysed? What else have they not released?

About 25 percent of those who watched the most sexual programmes became pregnant compared with 12 per cent of those who watched the least sexual shows

This paragraph is a bit ambigious. Does it mean 25% of the whole group who watched the most sexual programmes became pregnant? Does it mean 25% of the 35% (8.75% of the whole study group) sexually active teenagers? How many teenagers were watching the most sexual programmes. After all, the most popular programmes aren’t neccersarily the most sexual. How many of the 35% of the sexually active teenagers were girls? Your chances of getting pregnant are seriously reduced if you’re a boy.
That statement above is meaningless.

The study also found that teenagers living in a two-parent household were less likely to get pregnant, while those with behaviour and discipline problems were
more likely.

And a dig at one of the Mails favourite targets, single parents. But these two groups that have been singled out, they are more an less likely to get pregnant than who? Doing what? A girl with two parents watching lots of these progammes could be less likely to get pregnant than a girl in care who doesn’t watch any of them. These statements mean nothing on their own.

So. To sum up: Stop scaring us you bastards!!

The OCD Diet:

This was a bit like being at a finger buffet. The chips were in dire need of some tomato ketchup, but I did burp a little sick into my mouth half way through the meal that was tinged with the taste of tomato soup from this morning, which went some way towards filling that gap. Altogether a not-unpleasant meal (apart from the moment of sick).

Via

I wonder if herbal tobacco is that bad…?

Kelly Osborne:

“I go three, maybe four times a year to get tested for sexually transmitted infections and most of the time I don’t even need to. I just go for peace of mind.”

Most of the time…

Moving swiftley on…

Via

Sign the petition to try to extend UK abortion rights to the women of Northern Ireland.

The complete text of the petition is below.
Via
——————————————

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to extend the 1967 Abortion Act to Northern Ireland, and grant women there the same rights to abortion as women in the rest of the United Kingdom.

More details from petition creator
We believe that the UK Government and the Northern Ireland Assembly should extend the 1967 Abortion Act to Northern Ireland, and grant women there the same rights to abortion as women in the rest of the United Kingdom.

As the law currently stands, no woman in Northern Ireland with an unwanted pregnancy (including women who’ve been raped, victims of incest, diagnosed with fetal abnormality/disability) has the automatic right to abortion.

Consequently, Northern Irish women:

• Pay the emotional and financial costs (up to £2,500) and travel to England or overseas for a private abortion.

• Have babies they have already decided they don’t want.

• Buy illegal and unsafe abortion pills on the internet in desperation.

fpa believes Parliament should change the law to end the discrimination against Northern Ireland women and give them the right to choose.

The Telegraph:

Lady Warnock said: “If you’re demented, you’re wasting people’s lives – your family’s lives – and you’re wasting the resources of the National Health Service.

“I’m absolutely, fully in agreement with the argument that if pain is insufferable, then someone should be given help to die, but I feel there’s a wider argument that if somebody absolutely, desperately wants to die because they’re a burden to their family, or the state, then I think they too should be allowed to die.

“Actually I’ve just written an article called ‘A Duty to Die?’ for a Norwegian periodical. I wrote it really suggesting that there’s nothing wrong with feeling you ought to do so for the sake of others as well as yourself.”

No one should feel they ought to end their life, for the sake of anyone, their family or society as a whole. What a dispicable thing to say.
Feeling you ought to die means that it is not your decision. Someone else is putting the pressure on you to go, because you are inconveniencing them in some way, you’re not wanted, worthless.

Nobody has a duty to die, even in war, it could be argued that you had a duty to fight, but not die. When someone else is telling you, explicitly or otherwise, when to die, a value is put on life and then it just becomes a numbers game. When that’s the case, the accountants win.

I tried to find a good snappy short excerpt from the following article, but couldn’t so I’ve quoted a lot.

The Times:

Women do not put their mental health at risk by having an abortion, according to an authoritative study that will undermine the campaign to tighten the UK’s abortion laws.

A comprehensive review of research by the American Psychological Association (APA), one of the world’s most influential mental health bodies, found no evidence that the majority of abortions cause psychiatric problems.

By challenging a key scientific argument for reform, the findings will hinder the latest effort to make it harder for British women to obtain terminations, which is to be debated by the House of Commons in October.

Anti-abortion MPs have tabled an amendment to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill that would require all women to be counselled about psychiatric risks before they can be cleared to have a termination. They cite research suggesting that mental health issues such as depression and anxiety are more common among women who have had abortions.

The APA report said that the findings of such studies were unreliable because they either failed to distinguish between abortions of wanted and unwanted pregnancies, or they did not consider factors such as poverty and drug use that raise the likelihood both of having an abortion and suffering mental illness.

The APA found “no credible evidence” that single abortions could directly cause mental health problems among adults with unwanted pregnancies. It called for more well-designed studies to investigate the issue.

Even the evidence for adverse psychiatric effects of multiple abortions was equivocal, it found. Higher rates of mental illness among such women could be explained by social factors, such as poverty or drug use that also put them at higher risk of unplanned and unwanted pregnancy
…
Supporters [of mandatory counselling and a ‘cooling off’ period for abortions] pointed to research such as a New Zealand study led by David Ferguson, of Christchurch School of Medicine, which found in 2006 that women who had had abortions had an elevated risk of mental health problems.
…
The Ferguson study was among those whose design was criticised by the APA review, in this case because it did not distinguish between abortions of wanted and unwanted pregnancies.

So, now we have evidence that voluntary abortions do not have any long term psychologically detrimental effects. This I would presume is because the person having the abortion has had a little time time square the decision withthemselves about what they are doing with an unwanted pregnancy, whereas the people who experience miscarriages or have to terminate for medical reasons do so out of choice and losing as it is generally a wanted pregenancy.

Oh, hi Nadine.

Mrs Dorries said: “If this rehashed, inconclusive and dated research is being used to deny women in the UK who seek an abortion the right to counselling, then it’s a fairly desperate act on behalf of the abortion industry and those who wish to deny women the right to make a fully informed decision.”

FFS, Nadine. First of all, there’s a pot here that wants to meet your kettle. %This report isn’t trying to deny women counselling, it is just saying that mandatory counselling isn’t neccessary. I’m sure a doctor isn’t going to deny counselling if it is needed.
It is also pointless making counselling mandatory as those that do not want it will not participate properly and it will just end up a waste of time for the patient and time and money for the health service.

BBC:

Some women in countries where abortion is restricted are using the internet to buy medication enabling them to abort a pregnancy at home, the BBC has learned.

Women in Northern Ireland and over 70 countries with restrictions have used one of the main websites, Women on Web.

This is one of the best examples of why we do not need stricy abortion laws.
Women, if they want/need and abortion will have one. One way or another. By making the criteria and time limit stricter all that is happening is that these women go outside the system to back street abortionists or to these websites where the pills are of unknown provinence*.

But anti-abortion campaigners called the development of such sites “very worrying indeed”.

Yes, it is very worrying. But women are going to get an abortion, would you rather they had one in the proper surroundings, supervised by properly trained people, so that if anything did go wrong it can be dealt with properly, or women ended up bleeding to death or with kidney failure from drugs not being what they should be or other complications that otherwise wouldn’t be a cause for concern?

*That is not a direct comment against Women on Web. I do not know of them in either a good or bad way.