This wouldn’t be a proper bloggg without at least one vaguely political rant, so without further ado…
I’ve come to a conclusion, and a lot of you are not gonna like it. It goes like this: I’m not voting for any fool who wants to shit up this fine country by increasing our Homeland Security. I live in about the safest, most secure country I can think of save for maybe Canada, or the Netherlands. (Wake up, smoke a little ganje, hack a little Linux, not hear crap about terrorists all day, yeah.) Now, I’m sure the US of A is just brimming over with disaffected citizens looking to migrate en masse to the Middle East, Cuba and Beijing, but me, I think I’ll stay where I am, thanks. (All right, well just stay out of Detroit).
Now, politicians in need of fast votes on the cheap, and especially the ones who think this whole liberty bit is overblown (John Ashcroft, I’m looking in your direction), are likely to trot out 9/11 as an excuse to drop a little Big Brother on our asses (they prefer to call it “increasing our Homeland Security”). 9/11, 9/11, 9/11… we need to increase security because 9/11, we need to subpoena your library books because 9/11, we need to read your e-mail because 9/11, we need to have a look at your telephone bill, because 9/11.
Ooh, I’m looking under my bed tonight…the terrorists are gonna get me! Now, I know the politically sensitive powers of the world are going to serve my ass to me on a Pyrex plate for this, and 9/11 **victims the world over will ring my phone off its hook to express disdain over my lack of sensitivity, but here’s how I see my risk of getting “got” by terrorists right about now: 9/11, the terrorist event politicians can’t stop talking about, occurred in 2001 and consisted of 2 exploding airplanes. (2004 – 2001) = 3 years, so the American Mean Osama Bin Ladin Terrorism Rate is approximately 2/3 or 0.667 exploding planes per year. Let’s estimate America as about 3.5 million square miles, and that the kill radius of an exploding airplane is 2 square miles (accounting for flying shrapnel, etc.). So the average American citizen’s annual Probability of Getting Blowed Up by Osama is approximately (2 / 3,500,000) * 0.667 = 3.81E-7, or about 1 in 2,623,688.
Meanwhile, the odds of someone my age (20-24) dying from…
Accidents… 39.8 per 100,000 = 1 in 2513
Homicide…. 1 in 6098
Suicide…. 1 in 7813
Other stuff…1 in 3704
Total odds of dying between 20-24 in general = a little over 1 in 1000.
Yeah, I hear it now…”But wait! Osama’s not going to waste his time and copious bodily fleas crashing planes into Montana, he’s gonna come get your happy ass in a well-populated area.” All righty then, let’s adjust our figure by a factor of ten and say I have a 1 in 262369 chance of getting Blowed Up by Osama by age 24, about the same as my odds of being struck by lightning in any given year. This all means I, myself, am still a couple orders of magnitude more of a danger to myself (accidents + suicide = 1 in 1901) than this camel-riding ass nugget and all his Al-Qaeda dingleberries put together.
Needless to say, I feel plenty safe right now…but the nice man standing at the door to the T with the rubber glove isn’t making me feel any safer. As Uncle Sam adds 30 new surveillance cameras to Boston (“for Homeland Security during the DNC”…funny how they’re not coming back down once it’s over) to augment the 900+ already in place, I can only imagine how freeze-frames of me picking my nose in traffic are going to stop terrorism. Presented here are my Projected Boston Anti-Terrorism Spycam Stats for 2004:
Speeders caught: 57
Red light violators: 42
Jaywalkers: 22
WWIs (Walking While Intoxicated): 21
People enjoying a little weed after work: 6
Guys getting a blowjob in the alley when they thought no-one was looking: 3
Bin Ladins: 0
Now remember kids, statistics don’t lie, but these are projected statistics. Tellya what, first person to actually catch Bin Ladin on a lamppost surveillance cam gets a free hat (I won’t be using it anymore).
PS. First one to post pictures of me picking my nose in traffic during my election campaign gets a complimentary kick in the nuts.
QOTD: I’m a dog. I lie awake at night wondering if my owner is really a dyslexic agnostic.
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