Michael: Carpe Media

Posted September 21, 2016

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Let us put our ‘terror’ in perspective for once. (And credit here to Yuval Noah Harari and his new book Homo Deus).

“In 2012 about 56 million people died throughout the world: 620,000 died due to human violence. (120,000 were killed in wars). In contrast, 800,000 committed suicide and 1.5 million died of diabetes.”

Yet, in the US we spend $16 billion a year fighting ‘terrorism’ and just over $1 billion a year fighting diabetes. That’s about $360 million per terror victim. By way of comparison, we spend about $38 per person with diabetes in search of a cure.

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. Terror attacks make far better TV than does diabetes research.

Here’s another interesting statistic, again from Homo Deus: In 2010, obesity killed about 3 million people worldwide. Terrorism killed 7,697 people across the globe, most of them in 3rd World countries.

‘For the average American or European, Coca Cola poses a far deadlier threat than al-Qaeda’.

We are terrorized, all right, but we are terrorized by the media. Watch TV, read the papers, listen to the blogosphere and you would think that the nation was on the verge of collapse. It isn’t. In fact, in a very weird way, things have never been better.

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