Monday, January 11, 2016

The Common Good - 11

NDIA "Danger Research Team Bravo"
I haven't completed the warning system for seaports, so I thought I would focus on a warning system that is up and running.

It is the "NDIA Danger Research Team Bravo'" pictured to the left.

That exemplary team gives the whole nation a very costly warning about the greatest enemy.

The team bravely asserts that the Pentagon should fear this enemy more than any other.

What is surprising is that an enemy kills more Americans than any terrorist organization has ever come even remotely close to:
The leading causes of death, each year, in the U.S. are:
  • Heart disease: 596,577
  • Cancer: 576,691
  • Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 142,943
  • Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 128,932
  • Accidents (unintentional injuries): 126,438
  • Alzheimer's disease: 84,974
  • Diabetes: 73,831
  • Influenza and Pneumonia: 53,826
  • Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 45,591
  • Intentional self-harm (suicide): 39,518
(CDC). That is 1,869,321 per year (over 5,100 a day), so obviously "Obama Ebola" is underperforming since Obola only killed one person in Texas, because "they" are not worthy.
(Obola: Art Thou Dying Properly?). Ok, ok, it is a health issue, so what does that have to do with an enemy the Pentagon should fear most?

We are getting there:
Pentagonia, capitol of Bullshitistan, well aware of the current political climate, has declared who its greatest enemy is, believing it is health care:
The U.S. military keeps searching the horizon for a peer competitor, the challenger that must be taken seriously. Is it China? What about an oil rich and resurgent Russia?

But the threat that is most likely to hobble U.S. military capabilities is not a peer competitor, rather it is health care.
(The Enemy the Pentagon Should Fear Most: Health Care, National Defense Magazine, emphasis added). We have been pointing out this very strange ideology for a while now, using "MOMCOM" symbolism to isolate the militant energy fighting against the middle class and poor in the United States.
(Your Health Is Their Number 1 Enemy?!, emphasis added). These psychopaths think that the American people should not have preventive health care, or any other form of health care for that matter.

Instead, since terrorists are killing almost 20 Americans a year we have to spend trillions every year to stop that carnage.

But we should spend zero on those things that are killing hundreds of thousands or millions of people.

We must do so with, among other things, all our "security agencies," or we could never waste enough money:
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.
...
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.
...
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.
...[Meanwhile, the reality is:]
  • 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
(Terrorism We Can Believe In? - 3). Nevertheless the Ayn Rand worshippers who lead the legislative branch just voted to get rid of affordable health care:
"In a 2005 speech to a group of Rand devotees called the Atlas Society, [House Speaker] Ryan said that Rand was required reading for his office staff and interns. “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand,” he told the group." - (Ayn Rand: Patron Saint of The Plutocracy - 4)

"House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) admitted over the weekend that Republicans had passed a bill to repeal President Barack Obama's health care reform law without offering an alternative." (Crooks and Liars, Jan. 2016)
Team Bravo also says that we must rid ourselves of this healthcare enemy with, among other things, all our "intelligent agencies" ... or we could never waste enough money:
* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space.

* Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.

* Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year - a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.
(The Homeland: Big Brother Plutonomy). It is beyond belief what these psychopaths come up with.

There are many Agnotology generators in the U.S. (Agnotology: The Surge, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17), which incessantly create dementia within our society (Etiology of Social Dementia, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13).

So, somebody has to warn somebody about the real and present dangers (Dr. Hansen Arrested at Obama's House, Why The Military Can't Defend Against The Invasion).

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.



2 comments:

  1. Threat inflation: not just for Dick Cheney anymore...

    I wonder exactly how many people our crumbling infrastructure kills every year? I know about a third of the thirty thousand annual road fatalities are due to poor road conditions.

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  2. After 14 years with HS I find myself wanting to defend or endless analytical work...but WTF...I'm done. I can certainly laugh and cry a bit over all the points you made above. Why do we try to save anyone from anything, anyway? (conditioning, human nature, concern) Eventually we will have a huge amount of war "Events" that will rapidly kill faster than the usual causes.

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