Terrorism We Can Believe In? - 3

Warmonger Holy Fear Machine

On June 11, 2009 Dredd Blog began this series (Terrorism We Can Believe In?).

It is a venture into available information which shows that rogue elements in the American government, through propaganda, have made an industry of convincing the American people to embrace "Worst Case Thinking" so fear will spread in the populace.

We followed up with another post in this series, Terrorism We Can Believe In? - 2, on May 23, 2013.

Today we review what that vast and well funded fear industry is doing to instill fear in order to make it advantageous to their goal of peddling war and destruction even as it causes the impoverishment of the middle class and the poor of the entire nation.

The intellectual dishonesty which the rogue government propagandists used was, and still is, to make the public afraid of terrorists and terrorism.

Their intellectual dishonesty has gotten worse but the public is not buying it, and the propagandists now look silly:

U.S. Representative Peter King, a Republican member of the House intelligence committee, said he’s worried that the terrorist group that killed at least 59 people in a Nairobi shopping mall will attack in the U.S.

The Somalia-based al-Shabaab Islamist militant group is one of the only al-Qaeda affiliates that has actively recruited in the U.S., King said today on ABC’s “This Week.” The group has trained at least 40 or 50 Somali-Americans, he said.

(Bloomberg). In today's post we will show that warmongering fear-mongers like Peter King on the "intelligence" committee still use the see-through, plastic-propaganda tactics of terrorists.

In today's post we will see that Americans are more likely to be killed or harmed by multitudes of dangers far greater than any danger posed by terrorists.

First off, let's take a look at a scientific study of neoCon right-wing fear mongering, conducted by John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart, which looked into the cost-benefit ratios of that fear mongering on the economy:

The cumulative increase in expenditures on US domestic homeland security over the decade since 9/11 exceeds one trillion dollars. It is clearly time to examine these massive expenditures applying risk assessment and cost-benefit approaches that have been standard for decades. Thus far, officials do not seem to have done so and have engaged in various forms of probability neglect by focusing on worst case scenarios; adding, rather than multiplying, the probabilities; assessing relative, rather than absolute, risk; and inflating terrorist capacities and the importance of potential terrorist targets. We find that enhanced expenditures have been excessive: to be deemed cost-effective in analyses that substantially bias the consideration toward the opposite conclusion, they would have to deter, prevent, foil, or protect against 1,667 otherwise successful Times-Square type attacks per year, or more than four per day. Although there are emotional and political pressures on the terrorism issue, this does not relieve politicians and bureaucrats of the fundamental responsibility of informing the public of the limited risk that terrorism presents and of seeking to expend funds wisely. Moreover, political concerns may be over-wrought: restrained reaction has often proved to be entirely acceptable politically.

(Terror, Security, and Money, PDF, emphasis added). The neglectful thinking which the perverted propagandists use is based in paranoia:

There's a certain blindness that comes from worst-case thinking. An extension of the precautionary principle, it involves imagining the worst possible outcome and then acting as if it were a certainty. It substitutes imagination for thinking, speculation for risk analysis and fear for reason. It fosters powerlessness and vulnerability and magnifies social paralysis. And it makes us more vulnerable to the effects of terrorism.

(Worst-Case Thinking Makes Us Nuts, Not Safe). Clearly, officials seek to institutionalize a type of social paranoia, which actually is a mental disorder:

It is common to have suspicious thoughts or worries about other people from time to time. These fears are described as paranoid when they are exaggerated and not based in fact. There are three key features of paranoid thoughts:

• you fear that something bad will happen
• you think that others are responsible
• your belief is exaggerated or unfounded.

(Understanding Paranoia, emphasis added). Again, worst-case thinking is a sign of paranoid thinking, which is made plain by the fact that we are more likely to die from being struck by lightning than by a terrorist:

• You are 35,079 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist
• You are 33,842 times more likely to die from cancer than from a terrorist
• obesity is 5,882 to 23,528 times more likely to kill you than a terrorist
• you are 5,882 times more likely to die from medical error than terrorism
• you’re 4,706 times more likely to drink yourself to death than die from terrorism
• you are 1,904 times more likely to die from a car accident than from a terrorist
• your meds are thousands of times more likely to kill you than Al Qaeda
• you’re 2,059 times more likely to kill yourself than die at the hand of a terrorist
• you’re 452 times more likely to die from risky sexual behavior than terrorism
• you’re 353 times more likely to fall to your death ... than die in a terrorist attack
• you are 271 times more likely to die from a workplace accident than terrorism
• you are 187 times more likely to starve to death in America than be killed by terrorism
• you’re about 22 times more likely to die from a brain-eating zombie parasite than a terrorist
• you were more than 9 times more likely to be killed by a law enforcement officer than by a terrorist
• [being] “crushed to death by ... [TV] or furniture” [as likely as] being killed by terrorist
• Americans are 110 times more likely to die from contaminated food than terrorism
• you are more likely to be killed by a toddler than a terrorist
• you [are] four times more likely to be struck by lightning than killed by a terrorist

(More Likely To Be Killed By Lightning Than Terrorists). To show how naked the emperor is without the propaganda clothing, note that we are far, far more likely to die from Oil-Qaeda than al-Qaeda:

More than 100 million people will die ... by 2030 if the world fails to tackle climate change, a report commissioned by 20 governments said on Wednesday.
...
It calculated that five million deaths occur each year from air pollution, hunger and disease as a result of climate change and carbon-intensive economies, and that toll would likely rise to six million a year by 2030 if current patterns of fossil fuel use continue.
...
"A combined climate-carbon crisis is estimated to claim 100 million lives between now and the end of the next decade," the report said.

(Oil-Qaeda - The Indictment, see also IPCC Report #5). Regular readers will remember the Dredd Blog series Etiology of Social Dementia, 9/18/09, through Etiology of Social Dementia - 10, 9/5/13, wherein we isolate significant social dementia to government and business propaganda sources.

Let's shake the paranoia disease by requiring all government officials to tell the truth (The Dredd Philosophy Is The Dread Truth).

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Fifty Ways To Leave Your Lover, by Paul Simon:

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