Terrified By A Hammer June 7, 2017June 6, 2017 Ah, irony. A flood he describes as having been “of biblical proportions” destroyed the home of Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins, who says God punishes gays with natural disasters. Ah, sex. So fraught. From the Onion: Indiana Becomes Fourth State To Ban Great Sex. And what about innumeracy? Or a sense of proportion? More than 100 Americans committed suicide yesterday, sadly, and nearly as many died in car crashes. At least another 100 overdosed. Thirty or forty were murdered. In all: a couple of commercial jet crashes. Yet that’s not what led the Nightly News. Rather, both NBC and ABC led with a gendarme outside the Cathedral of Notre Dame who had been hit with a hammer by an Algerian who screamed “this is for Syria.” This is not to minimize for a moment the terrorism that — tragically and maddeningly — has cost hundreds of American lives since 9/11. (Spread over those five thousand seven hundred forty-seven days, perhaps one a month.) But really? Note that the gendarme will be fine; that this did not happen in America; and that the same White House that seeks to magnify the terrifying times we live in — where every billion times you leave your house you might confront a terrorist — seeks to cut $900 billion from the health care budget and slash cancer research. Which will cause hundreds of thousands of needless American deaths. . . . “I once asked a guy at [the National Institutes of Health] how much we should spend on preventing a disease that kills 6 per year, and he looked at me like I was crazy,” John Mueller, a foreign policy expert at the Ohio State University and co-author of the book “Chasing Ghosts: The Policing of Terrorism”, told Business Insider in an email. . . . So, yes, of course: we should continue to do every reasonable thing we can to prevent terrorism. But we should also strive to keep things in perspective . . . which is the total opposite of what our petty, petulant, erratic, lying, bullying, narcissistic, vulgar, dangerous, ignorant President strives to do.* *I know that sounds harsh. But do any of those adjectives not objectively apply?