The Glade 4.0

http://newsblaze.com/story/200902211001 ... story.html

NSC Study Shows You are More Likely to Killed By a Cop Than a Terrorist


After 9/11, the fear of another attack on U.S. soil cleanly supplanted the fear of having one`s penis chopped off by a vengeful lover in the pantheon of irrational American fears.

While we`re constantly being told that another attack is imminent and that radical Islamic fundamentalists are two steps away from establishing a caliphate in Branson, Missouri, just how close are they? How do the odds of dying in a terrorist attack stack up against the odds of dying in other unfortunate situations?

The following ratios were compiled using data from 2004 National Safety Council Estimates, a report based on data from The National Center for Health Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau. In addition, 2003 mortality data from the Center for Disease Control was used.

-- You are 17,600 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack

-- You are 12,571 times more likely to die from cancer than from a terrorist attack

-- You are 11,000 times more likely to die in an airplane accident than from a terrorist plot involving an airplane

-- You are 1048 times more likely to die from a car accident than from a terrorist attack

--You are 404 times more likely to die in a fall than from a terrorist attack

-- You are 87 times more likely to drown than die in a terrorist attack

-- You are 13 times more likely to die in a railway accident than from a terrorist attack

--You are 12 times more likely to die from accidental suffocation in bed than from a terrorist attack

--You are 9 times more likely to choke to death on your own vomit than die in a terrorist attack

--You are 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist

--You are 8 times more likely to die from accidental electrocution than from a terrorist attack

-- You are 6 times more likely to die from hot weather than from a terrorist attack

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Or in other words, people are not rational in their fears.

In other news, water is wet.

Way to change "killed by a cop" into "murdered by a cop".

Of course you're more likely to get killed by a cop than a terrorist. Duh. "You" includes violent criminals who get killed by the police for perfectly legitimate reasons.

Ratios like this are meaningless anyhow. By those ratios, you're a little more than 40 times more likely to die from heart disease than from falling. Clearly, its totally irrational to fear falling from a high place if you happen to be one, and precautions like hand rails are an irrational waste of effort!

(This may also give us some insight into the bizarre lack of basic safety measure in Star Wars but that's another issue.)

edited for spelling

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

But DE, everyone knows that all cops are jack booted thugs.

And it's "Chance for murder cop" whatever the **** that means.

The point is that the fear of terrorism has caused response far far beyond its risk.

its like I have a project and risk Y has a .001% chance to occur risk X has a 50% chance to occur and I spend all my time managing the risk of risk Y.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Terrorism, terrorist, etc are reduced to old buzz words that barely evoke a response since I feel we are numb to their actual meaning anymore. That drum got beat so long and so hard that terrorism is background noise to whats happening on reality TV tonight.

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A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. ~ John Stuart Mill

This doesn't establish that at all.

Disregaring the huge potential additional harm that terrorism can cause in terms of property damage, most of these things aren't related to each other in terms of how we deal with them. Terrorism is dealt with by completely different things from drowning which in turn is dealt with by completely different things from heart disease. You can deal with heart disease effectively with a combination of research, treatment, and by getting people to do a lot of the dealing with it themselves through a healthy lifestyle. Heart disease, drowning, falling, and

We invest more effort in terrorism mainly because it is a way by which people get killed and proeprty damaged or destroyed caused by other people. Failing to del with it encourages more of it (not to mention the fact that all the deaths prevented clearly don't get counted into how likely you are to get killed by a terrorist). Because terrorism is done by people, it necessarily requires more effort to do anything about it at all. Diseases and accidents don't look at what you are doing and actively try to circumvent them; humans do.

Your example of X and Y is inapplicable as well because you are just one person. Obviously you have limited time. We don't handle herart disease and terrorism by having a doctor split his time between working on heart research and scanning bags at the airport. We have different people do that.

If you were managing a project, you would hire a chief of security and delegate him responsibility and authority for the security of the project so that you could manage the acutal work. However, if you tried to calculate the risk of someone breaking in and damaging your work versus the risk of it failing due to improperly doing the work in the first place and then decide that $100 was all you needed to spend on security, you'd get no security because you couldn't even afford the chief. In the end, you'd greatly increase the likelyhood of someone breaking in because part of the point of the security is to deter the attempt. All this because you're attempting to gloss over differences in the nature of the threats to your work by oversimplifying them down to likelyhood.

That's the other hidden message here. There is no particular reason to single out terrorism this way except to ***** about methods of preventing or combating it. Why isn't this study ***** about our wild overemphasis on falling? Fear of heights/falling is incredibly common; people fear it vastly more than terrorism. We expend huge resources on safety to prevent it; how many millions of railings do you think are present in this country? And yet falling pales in comparison to heart disease in terms of causing death.

Silly, eh? So is this "study" (which, the article first suspiciously says is done by the NSC and then later claims it produced its own ratios based on NSC data) because its basic premise is that there's some reason we should be focusing both on numerical likelyhoods at the expense of all else, and that we should do so with an eye to terrorism exclusively.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Better not let 'em build any police stations close to ground zero.

They should build a Muslim police station.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn