Thursday, April 28, 2005
Priorities
Here's the latest from the US State Department:
The fight against international terrorism remains "formidable" for the United States and its allies, with 651 significant attacks taking 1,900 lives worldwide last year...Checkout those numbers - 1,900 lives worldwide! OK, now from the FBI's website: Murder and nonnegligent manslaughter = 16,503; violent crime = 1,381,259; and that's just the USofA.
Well, we all know what you can do with statistics. Basically, with the right selection of statistics you can prove just about anything. I didn't do a bunch of data mining for those numbers. The FBI stats came from their web site and the US State Departments stats came from a news release on CNN
Whether you agree with them or not, I'm guessing they're pretty close. However, I really question the 1,900 terror-related deaths (my guess would have been 100s of thousands) - but who questions the State Department. The point is, that the State Department considers 1,900 deaths to be formidable (in fact, bad enough to spend, oh, what - $500 billion or so??). So what should we consider 16,503 deaths? How about doing some house cleaning here in the US. There must be some reason we have one of the highest jail population percentages in the world and yet still have 16,503 murders. How about spending some of those billions going overseas here in the US to clean up our act.
