Cracked Mag - 6 weirdest things we've learned since 9-11

[90-percent]

http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-6-weirdest-things-weve-learned-since-911_p2/

It is amazing that a humor magazine is more spot on about 9-11 than our entire main stream media.

Our governments continued over-reaction to 9-11 is like curing dandruff by decapitation, as my hero Frank Zappa has said in Senate Testimony about Rock Record Ratings.

Our government USED 9-11 to construct a totalitarian fascist police state. If they wanted to "keep us safe", they could have been not so criminally incompetent to let it happen in the first place.

In rational world, 9-11 would be discussed in a rational measured context. 3000 dead by collapsing skyscrapers and commercial airplanes auguring into the ground at 600 mph is truly horrifying, but.......

"That same year in the United States: 71,372 died of diabetes. 29,573 were killed by guns. 13,290 were killed in drunk driving accidents" *

America looses about 500,000 a year by heart disease alone. In terms of logic, our governments over-response is absurd. In terms of allocation of resources, shouldn't they work on stuff that kills 500,000 a year as a start? Terrorism on American soil, if you start at Dec 7, 1941 (Pearl Harbor) and continue to the present, has produced about 7,000 casualties over a span of 74 years. That's 95 people per year for this time slice. If you had half a trillion dollars to solve a problem, would you direct it toward avenging and preventing the loss of 95 souls per year or would you spend it to try to prevent the deaths of 500,000 per year just from heart disease instead? Or for preventable causes like guns and drunk driving, would you spend that half trillion to bring gun deaths down from 29,000 per year to perhaps below 100, "saving" 28,500 lives a year from gun violence alone. If we want government "Run like a business" (which I don't advocate) then in terms of their mission "to keep us safe", they are doing an abysmal job.

-90% Jimmy

*http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/06/13/we-shouldn-t-treat-terrorism-the-way-we-treat-bathroom-falls.html

[obxhead]

1. K&R

[Nine]

2. #4 is interesting

The truth is that law enforcement has done a fantastic job of monitoring the sale of black market bomb-making materials (the transatlantic bombers were being watched by more than a thousand agents -- they only got as far as buying the components before police swept in). See, we've been fooled by action movies, where any mobster can come up with a block of plastic explosive to stick under the car of a snitch. Hell, the Joker can buy entire buildings full of explosive liquids without anyone noticing. In the real world, it turns out that no, you can't really order large quantities of anything that goes "boom" without the government kicking down your door five minutes later.

Contrast that with this Wired article about how Aurora shooter James Holmes amassed his stockpile:

If you want to kill large numbers of people, you should seriously consider buying a handgun or assault rifle. As the movie-theater massacre in Aurora, Colorado demonstrated, chances are federal law enforcement and homeland security and counterterrorism agents won’t see you amassing an arsenal of assault rifles, handguns and ammunition.

Longtime law enforcement and intelligence veterans say that the feds simply don’t have ways of spotting stockpiles of firearms. It stands in contrast to their successful post-9/11 efforts at stopping the spread of bomb precursors like chemical fertilizer.

There is no watchlist that captured Aurora suspect James Eagan Holmes, who appeared in court on Monday, as he spent thousands of dollars on AR-15s, Remington shotguns, Glock pistols and body armor. Holmes did much of his ammunition shopping online, where he purchased thousands of bullets and hundreds of shells with what the New York Times called “a few keystrokes.”

In short, one of the most useful tools for killing people is effectively excluded from the attention of federal agents who have received sweeping powers over the last decade to prevent mass-casualty events. “I don’t know of anything” about Holmes’ gun purchases “that would’ve notified law enforcement as a matter of policy right now,” says Jack Cloonan, a retired FBI counterterrorism agent.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/07/aurora/

[IronLionZion]

3. It's also interesting to hear Republicans explain why white guys with guns are not terrorists.

there's a lot of ideological summersaulting and spin when they try to list the many reasons why its as different as night and day.

A lot of this happened with the Boston Marathon incident where Republicans desperately protested that the literally Caucasian brothers were not "white" because they're Chechnyan and good guys with guns could have prevented it somehow through the magic of predictive precrime preemptive strikes.