Manhattan Project 2.0 part 4

The Global Meltdown of FEAR (2 of 3) Page last updated: 7/15/2010 The War on Terror Yes 9/11 happened, and yes it was very tragic. Between planes crashing, people jumping out of the burning buildings, and the towers crashing, it was very scary and very emotional stuff. Now in the wake of such an event, do we want leadership that uses it to scare us indefinitely, or leadership that projects reason. Shouldn’t the bewildered and confused masses expect leadership that conveys logic about the event and what caused it, instead of ‘catapulting the propaganda’ by endlessly scaring the bejesus out of everyone? Sure, we want payback. Get the people who did it, right? Now there’s a lot of controversial explanations of the ‘truth’ about 9/11, but here the issues are what was the motivation for Islamic terrorists to want to do such a thing, and what would cause them to go to such an extent? The explanation has been (A) “they hate our freedoms”, but is that all there is to it? Okay, so they’re also pissed about (B) the way Israel treats the Palestinians. So they don’t like our culture, and we support their local enemy. What else? According to the 9/11 Commission Report, the number one reason the group of predominantly Saudi hijackers was (C) because we have military bases in Saudi Arabia, which the Islamic World considers to be their Holy Land. The bases there help keep the Saudi royal family in power. What has the greatest odds of pissing them off to the extreme measure of suicide terrorism: A, B or C? Bin Laden’s base was in Afghanistan, which happened to not be occupied by the U.S. at the time, yet not one of the hijackers were from there. It’s important to realize that how you might perceive the existence of U.S. military bases in those monarchies and dictatorships is irrelevant. It’s how the people in those nations feel, and to the majority of them the U.S. is an occupying force. Since overall they’re opposed to our culture, to them it’s the equivalent of if the Soviet Union had military bases on U.S. soil during the Cold War. Therefore, the opinion of many U.S. citizens, that the U.S. bases somehow don’t equate to military occupation, doesn’t take away from their more personal perceptions of the U.S. being occupiers. In effect, we can’t expect the anti-American hatred that fueled to the 9/11 hijackers to ever cease as long as we’re an occupying force. Consider the 4th of July, the day we celebrate our independence from the English monarchy. Monarchies are dictatorships, by definition. Yet we have the nerve to support numerous dictatorships across the Middle East, and act surprised when they hate us? Given our national heritage, every person that calls themselves an “American” should be 100% against the support of any and all absolute monarchies, or any other forms of dictatorship, period. Yet the Saudi royals aren’t even the only monarchies we keep in power in the Middle East. We have military bases in the majority of the nations there, especially after 9/11. In fact the ones where there weren’t bases were the ones all added to the “Axis of Evil”. What are the odds of that? If you don’t let us put military bases in, to support your dictatorships, then you must be a terrorist! Now obviously a great deal of people have supported the overall idea of US foreign policy in the region for a long time, but take a step back for a moment and ask yourself how this doesn’t sound like totally hypocritical and childish at the same time. How can we legitimately celebrate the 4th of July, that is independence from a foreign monarchy dictatorship, when we support foreign monarchies and other forms of dictatorships? A sociology professor, from the University of California no less, named Robert Pape, conducted a qualitative study on the causes of suicide terrorism. His results found that the vast majority of suicide terrorist attacks don’t even originate in the Middle East, or by Islamics. The overwhelming majority, quite literally every single case worldwide, of these attacks are caused by occupation. It’s an act of desperate freedom fighting. Now of course things like religion and other cultural differences are fuel on the fire, and suicidal terrorists aren’t rational, but to propose things like freedom to choose religion, or none, as the sole cause for people to spend enormous time training and preparing to then actually fly planes into buildings is beyond absurd. The following video features Robert Pape, Michael Scheuer (former head of the Osama Bin Laden Unit), and Richard A. Clarke (former US Counterterrorism Czar) all agree that U.S. occupation in the Middle East was the cause of the 9/11 attacks and the widespread hatred of the U.S.: War on Terror Delusion from IIB IIF on Vimeo. For corroborative evidence, consider how terrorism has exploded across Iraq and the Middle East following the U.S. invasion of Iraq. If we were invaded, wouldn’t you be creeping around trying to attack the occupiers (thus being labeled a “terrorist”)? So what are the risks? Here’s some perspective… The annual odds of dying by various means: The odds of death by terrorism doesn’t seem to be mentioned on that chart, but this one shows the odds of dying in a terrorist attack on an airplane: The odds of dying in an oridinary aircraft accident are 1 in 5,051, while you’re 11,000 times more likely to die in an ordinary accident than you are a terrorist plot involving an ariplane. If one commercial flight per week was hijacked and crashed in the U.S., a person who flies once a month would have 135,000 to 1 odds of being on one of those flights, while only one attack per month would reduce those odds to 540,000 to 1. Also consider that if one of the 40,000 shopping malls in the U.S. were attacked and completely leveled per week, a person shopping for 2 hours per week would have 1.5 million to 1 odds of dying. It isn’t to marginalize the individuals who were murdered during the 9/11 attacks to put the statistic into perspective. A total of 2,976 people died that day. Now that’s a lot of people, all in one wave. In contrast, 2,417,798 died in the U.S. in 2001. In 2001, terrorism accounted for about 0.12% of deaths in the United States. It’s worth noting that 42,443 people died in automotive accidents in 2001. It’s estimated that more Americans die from medical mistakes each month  than died on 9/11. Over 2.5 times as many people died from aspirin alone in 2001. Comparing these numbers against year 2001 is important, because on any other year few few die from terrorism in the U.S. The number of terrorist attacks in the U.S. each year is also of issue: Note that those attacks include events such as arson at abortion clinics, where nobody necessarily died (note preceding chart). About 900 more people die from drowning every year than from the totality of the 9/11 attacks. Should we spend over a trillion per year sending out a massive army of privacy invading life guards into neighborhoods across the planet to prevent people from drowning? Of course there was collateral damage in the form of destruction of several massive buildings on 9/11, but can you say those buildings were worth more than the additional 900 people who die in any given year in the U.S. via drowning? That chart also shows that roughly 6 times as many people die each year from drunk driving accidents. That chart shows the number of deaths between 1995-2005. What’s amazing is there are still roads that lack guardrails. Following the War on Terror logic, should we be spending over 4 trillion dollars per year trying to stop drunk driving? Then we have ‘falls in the home’, guess we ought to be spending 1.8 trillion dollars installing elevators in every multi-story home. Apply this methodology to annual deaths via cigarettes: should we spend into the ballpark of 93 trillion dollars per year keeping people from smoking? Consider that the ‘rage’ the past few years is to pass legislation forcing “Fire Safe Cigarettes“, which is already in effect in 43 states. The way they make the cigarettes “fire safe” is by lacing them with ethylene vinyl acetate (EVA), an oil derivative polymer. This make even high grade cigarettes taste like garbage, and they all go out constantly. Each time they’re re-lit they taste worse and are harder on your lungs. Side-effects include itchy rash, allergic reactions, severe headache, vomiting, diarrhea, mouth sores, and nose bleeds. The big story is that there hasn’t even been extensive human testing done to assess the harmful effects of smoking EVA polymer on a regular basis, but testing with rats has shown the triggering the cellular proliferation necessary for tumor development. If the motivation of the massive government & military budgets for the war on terror were all about saving liives, then why wouldn’t this methodology apply here as well? Deaths from prescription pain killers is on a steady rise. Where’s the annual budget of over two trillion dollars to stop this? With fMRI machines doctors can see chronic pain regions, in the brain, which means they can verify if it even exists in a person claiming to have chronic pain. In one fMRI study, it was demonstrated that by seeing pain centers in the brain, in real time, patients were able to overcome and manage the pain with mere thought alone. Why aren’t all physicians and nurses being trained for this type of therapy, and these machines being built into every scale of clinic across the globe? If we scale the War on Terror logic all the way up, trying to save lives should cost about 1,400,000,000,000,000, or 1.4 quadrillion dollars per year (1,400 times larger than the graphic above)! By now many would say we aren’t just ‘threatened’ by Islamic radicals, we have the rest of the “Axis of Evil” to worry about. That still doesn’t explain the “defense” budget: Apparently Iran is the greatest threat, even though they have no hope of ever mustering a budget to back up their bark: Then there’s the reality that the U.S. budget isn’t even all it has going for it, as with it’s allies it easily accounts for well over 70% of global military spending: Consider that the U.S. has over 700 military bases in over 60 foreign nations (not counting Iraq & Afghanistan). Factoring the budgets of those host nations means a daunting global military infrastructure, which these days is supposedly about stopping the completely marginalized “Islamofacsists” (or so it shifted from just being the criminals who attacked us on 9/11), and the “Axis of Evil” (half of which is already occupied via brute force invasion). Now if that isn’t enough to convince you that this is all overkill, consider things from Iran’s perspective: Now if Iran had the power and resources the U.S. has, and declared the U.S. to be part of a 4 nation “Axis of Evil”, and then proceeded to invade the first 2 on the list, Canada & Mexico, surrounding the U.S. with it as next in line, how do you think we’d all be responding? If we didn’t have nukes, wouldn’t we be clamoring desperately to get them? Even if they did get some, Israel alone already has hundreds of nuclear weapons. People assert that Iran is willing to commit suicide by launching on Israel, but as we’ve already seen with suicide terrorism, people aren’t just going to go to such extreme lengths without being in total desperation. Even if they thought they could nuke Israel and face no retaliation, they’d kill all of the Palestinians with them, as well as covering countless other Muslims in radioactive fallout. Just thinking you’re messiah is coming still doesn’t make sense in destroying the Middle East with nuclear armageddon, as they’re well aware of the counter-attack they all face. The thing about 9/11 was that same day Bush said the terrorists attacked our freedoms, which was then parroted by media pundits and politicians for years. Yet the federal government has been the one attacking our freedoms increasingly and persistently, doing things to us that won’t stop Islamic terrorism, while doing things that is creating more terrorists globally, while not even doing things like securing our borders where terrorists could infiltrate our nation with supposed suitcase nukes. The U.S. citizenry are the ones being targeted across the board as terrorists, as enemies of the state. Guilty until proven innocent, and then still suspect needing to be monitored and tracked. In the aftermath of 9/11, the Bill of Rights is history, Bin Laden hasn’t been killed or captured (that we’re told of), we’re bogged down in 2 wars, we’re on the verge of total economic collapse and there are more terrorists in response to the “Shock & Awe” response. On top of it all, it’s all being used to justify the ‘need’ to build strong AI (AGI), like you see in scifi horror movies, via the AGI Manhattan Project, which we’ll get back to shortly. Should terrorism be down near global warming, or should global warming be up where terrorism is?