On this day 15 years ago, the United States experienced the largest terror attack in our history. It is a day that we will long remember. My heart goes out to the families of the victims.
On this day, I would also like for us to remember that Osama bin Laden who orchestrated the attack was of the house of Saud. 16 of the 19 terrorists were from Saudi Arabia. In response to our attack by Saudis, we attacked Iraq in what is now considered to be an enormous blunder of epic proportions.
We still treat Saudi Arabia as a friendly nation in that region. I don’t know why. We still talk about selling arms to Saudi Arabia. I don’t know why. We still buy oil from Saudi Arabia. I don’t know why.
Further, if we assume that every 3,000 lives lost prematurely is “one 9/11” then we have ten 9/11s on our highways every year. We have another ten 9/11s every year as a result of lax gun laws and a nationwide obsession with the damn things (should we consider the NRA a terrorist organization? perhaps). We have sixty-five 9/11s every year as a result of air pollution which we might have reduced tremendously if we took action on climate change (is ExxonMobil a terrorist organization? perhaps).
So, will we do anything for safer roads, stricter gun regulations, and strong regulation of pollution to actually prevent some or all of these 9/11s going forward?
I am not hopeful.
I grieve not only for the 3,000 victims 15 years ago, but also for the 3.9 million lives lost prematurely just from these causes and from many other causes as well since then. And, I grieve for the 260,000 we will lose in 2016.
Perhaps I should subtract out the highway deaths? We do, last I heard, have the safest roads in the world. Maybe we are already doing as much as we can about that. But, the other 230,000 every year can certainly be reduced by at least several 9/11s, if we were to pretend to care.
Who ever thought that getting rid of the Westboro Batshits would be as simple as offering them a free ride to Iraq to protest against ISIS? Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of inDUHviduals! Can you say “natural selection”?
OK. I must admit that I find the thought of going to a mall a little terrifying. However, this is not what the article is really talking about. Or is it?
Comparing some of the statistics in the article to the number of deaths by terrorism since 9/11/2001 is a little silly. Let’s include 9/11. And, still, look at how many of the following beat out the 3,000 deaths from that date. Actually, more accurate mathematically would be to average some number of years including 9/11. I wonder how the statistics would look if we totaled them for the last 25 years, for example. This would include both terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.
Please read this article about Carter’s 1977 speech and tell me now that Carter was bad for the country and Reagan was good. Go ahead. Tell me now which of those two presidents had the right long term plan for this country. Tell me how much worse off we would have been had we continued with Carter’s energy plan. Tell me that this speech of Carter’s didn’t detail a large chunk of the events that have now come to pass as a result of not following his plan. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m not sure why the press doesn’t blast this guy every time he opens his mouth. He just keeps continually contradicting himself. Perhaps the press just finds him too easy a target. Perhaps it feels too much like kicking an old dog. Regardless of where you stand on the issues, you can’t believe a word the man says.
When did you stop beating your wife? This is one of the classic examples of a loaded question. This survey is a mix of both leading questions and loaded questions and probably some that are both. I’ve seen Democratic Party surveys and have never reacted this way to one. Perhaps this is because I’m a liberal.
However, I tend to be pretty fair about such things and would likely notice if they had questions that were this deliberately targeted toward proving that the constituency wants what the party is already feeding them rather than trying to find out what the constituency really wants. Of course, the next Democratic Party survey I get will likely prove me wrong since I’ll be looking at it more closely after seeing this shocker.
Note that I checked for copyright notices as well as admonitions regarding the reproduction of this document and found none. Read the rest of this entry »
OK. I’m an atheist. I do not even truly believe that Jesus as a flesh and blood human ever walked the planet. However, this fictional character plays a large part in many people’s lives and, unfortunately, their voting decisions. Perhaps, if people really think about Jesus when voting though they just might come up with different answers. So, I address this post to the believers.
So, contrary to my usual rants where I take a radical and non-standard stance in order to point out the violence in the Bible. In this post, I am going to hypothetically take the more mainstream view of Jesus. First, I’m going to pretend that I believe he actually existed. Then, I’m going to cherry pick the Bible, not in the way I did in my Thou Shalt Kill post, but instead, in the way that most religious people do when they respond to my usual assertions about the mythical character.
So, in short, I’m going to point to the nice things Jesus is supposed to have said. And then, given the mainstream view of Jesus, I’m going to discuss his political views and see how well they align with today’s religious right. Then, I’m going to attempt to address the issue of how Jesus might vote in an election if he were alive today. Finally, I will point out that if Christianity is about people attempting to be Jesus-like to the best of their ability, then religious Christians should vote that way. Let’s see how this goes.
Biblical scholars agree that Samson killed 1,000 people with the jawbone of an ass. This number has stood the test of time, being uncontested until the present day. In 1997, the The Guinness Book of Records recognized Samson’s triumph with an entry in the book. Today, no weapons of mass destruction have been discovered in Iraq. Intelligence reports show a decreased level of safety from terrorism in the U.S. since the war began. The current death toll since 2003 in the Iraq war is 28,629 Americans and 78,743 – 85,813 Iraqis, or well over 100,000. This week, no longer in book form, Guinness World Records has recognized President Bush‘s prowess in shattering the two millennia old death toll record by two orders of magnitude using exactly the same weapon.
Also, check out the incredibly impressive Heart of the Adirondacks project in the Adirondack State Park, the largest park in the continental United States at twice the size of Yellowstone.
Posted by Misanthropic Scott 
The Misanthropic Principle 