One jackass sticks an M80s worth of low-grade explosives in his underpants, and everybody loses their shit about the horrible threat of terrorism. Then the TSA ups the overreaction ante by enacting rules so infuriatingly pointless that even the recently exhumed and reanimated corpse of Niccolò Machiavelli suggested “They may be taking this whole ineffective bureaucracy thing a bit too far”.
Thankfully, someone who isn’t a complete fuckwit decided to crunch the numbers and see what sort of threat terrorism actually poses. The answer is, of course, almost none. Your chances of dying in a terrorist attack are so infinitesimally small, you would need to fly to the moon and back twenty four thousand times before you were likely to see someone blow up their own crotch in the name of Allah.
So here we are, pissing away half a trillion dollars a year on “homeland security”, while the actual risk posed by terrorism practically zero. Meanwhile, when the first guy in 8 years actually does try to sneak a bomb onto a plane, none of the security theater at the airports manages to catch him until after he detonates his skivvies.
Man, those two unnecessary wars may have been expensive, and we may have lost the good faith of the world by torturing and killing people for no particular reason, and sure, we’ve given up most of our constitutional rights for the illusion of security, but at least the system works, right?
For fuck’s sake.
(infographic via Gizmodo, but you can’t blame them for the rant)
Prohibition didn’t work in the 20s, and it’s not working now. We might as well spend $14 billion a year to turn the sky green as try to stop people from doing drugs. It would have about the same effect. (via Digg)
This lovely infographic from Susanna Hertrich’s Reality Checking Device illustrates the nearly-perfect inverse relationship between how dangerous something is, and how big a fuss the media makes about it. Gotta love that “infotainment”. (via Information is Beautiful)
An Important Anniversary
No, that’s not Halloween makeup. That is what smallpox looks like. Most people alive today have never seen this disease, which killed several million people per year in the first half of the 20th century. The reason we’ve never seen it is because starting in 1950, the governments of the world decided that enough was enough, and went on a global crusade to wipe it out. Unlike most global crusades, this one actually worked.
On this day in 1977, the last case of smallpox was diagnosed.
Since then, no person has had to endure the painful, debilitating, and often fatal virus. How was this horrible disease destroyed? Through organic diets, homeopathy, application of magic crystals, and prayer. A vaccine.
Keep that in mind the next time some dingbat celebrity tries to tell you vaccines are the devil and that your children will be healthier if treated with happy thoughts and unicorn farts. We’ve been free of smallpox for 32 years. Hopefully in another 32, we’ll have eliminated more maladies and avoided more pointless suffering. If we do, it will be through science and legitimate medicine, not through nonsense and quackery. (via Discover Magazine)
You think the socialist takeover of healthcare is bad? There are already several “social” services that need to be delivered back into the hands of caring, private corporations. Anything less would be un-American. (via MADATOMS)
What if I told you that the US could save about 15 thousand lives a year, pay for universal health care without raising taxes, and be a lot more mellow? Someone in a position to know the facts has crunched the numbers, and it turns out it’s really easy. Mexico did it just last week. (via Digg)
With all the news stories about birthers, town hall teabaggers, and willfully ignorant lunatics whipped into a frothy rage against affordable healthcare, you might be tempted to think that a sizable portion of the country has suddenly gone batshit bonkers. As it turns out, there’s nothing “sudden” about it. Staunch conservatives have a long and colorful history of being adamantly opposed to every social advancement you care to name.
Before the “black helicopters” of the 1990s, there were right-wingers claiming access to secret documents from the 1920s proving that the entire concept of a “civil rights movement” had been hatched in the Soviet Union; when the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act was introduced, one frequently read in the South that it would “enslave” whites. And back before there were Bolsheviks to blame, paranoids didn’t lack for subversives — anti-Catholic conspiracy theorists even had their own powerful political party in the 1840s and ’50s.
Conservatives opposing positive change despite all reason is nothing new. They’re just a bit more organized an publicized these days. Luckily, if history is any indicator, they are always eventually dragged kicking and screaming into a better, fairer and more humane future. (via Digg)
We already have a “socialized” school system, “socialized” roads and a “socialized” military. Why does a sizable percentage of the population get all bent out of shape about socialized health care? There has to be a better reason than “They’re not smart enough to know any better”, but I’ll be damned if I can think of one. (via Digg)
