Free Thought Project – by Justin Gardner
The 2016 presidential election, in keeping with the American tradition of a two-party dictatorship, is looking to be a choice between a modern-day fascist and a thoroughly corrupt, lying war monger. As mainstream media cheers on the failure of democracy, the candidates go on telling us how they will spend the money that is taken from us through a convoluted system of taxation rigged to benefit the corporatocracy.
This warped system of revenue collection is complemented by an equally warped system of spending. The practice of lawmakers bringing home pork was highlighted by the infamous “bridge to nowhere,” but in terms of how government spends money on saving lives, we find its priorities in a truly backward state.
A statistical analysis found that more than $500 million spent per victim on anti-terrorism efforts, while about $10,000 is spent per victim on cancer research. Indeed, there is a long list of things that kill people at a rate far higher than terrorism—and could benefit from more resources for study and prevention—but get far less funding from lawmakers.
Heart disease, cancer and stroke top the list of killers, taking about 1,356,000 lives every year. In the 21st century, about 3,000 Americans lost their lives to terrorism, averaging out to 200 fatalities per year.
Cancer and Heart Disease be damned — there are people across the globe that hate your freedom.
However, it is estimated that federal government spends $150 billion annually on anti-terrorism efforts, while it spends $2 billion a year to combat heart disease and about $300 million a year on research into strokes. Diabetes, pneumonia and Alzheimer’s disease are other threats to human lives that get hardly any funding relative to terrorism.
One obvious answer to why spending is so disproportionate to magnitude of threat is the existence of the military-industrial complex. Reaping death and destruction overseas is a very profitable business. Much to the disappointment of President Dwight Eisenhower, government and the makers of bombs and bullets have fused into its own leviathan.
As Think by Numbers points out, there may be other factors contributing to the phenomenon of misplaced spending.
“Evolutionary psychology may be able to explain this phenomenon. The human brain has been around for 200,000 years. More than 99% of that evolution has been characterized by starvation and general scarcity of resources typified the environment in which humans evolved. In this situation, violent acquisition of resources from other groups was often a necessary survival technique. Hence, human brains most hyper-vigilant and aggressive toward human threats (i.e. terrorists) were most likely to survive and propagate these characteristics.
On the other hand, throughout evolutionary history medical science was almost non-existent. Hence, there would be no survival value added by a tendency to focus on more likely health-related causes of death. We just weren’t designed for these times.”
Interpersonal or inter-societal conflict seems to naturally occupy our thoughts more so than other forms of death. Dangers that are imposed on us are amplified, while risks from voluntary behavior such as driving a car are downplayed.
It is important to note that the more the US spends ostensibly ‘fighting terrorism” the more dangerous the world becomes, creating a vicious cycle. As we have pointed out in the past, the aggressive, murderous, and tyrannical US foreign policy of occupation and war does far more to create terrorism than stop it. Since 9/11 the United States has likely created a million Osama Bin Ladens by blowing up their children or family members in ‘surgical’ drone strikes.
Society, unfortunately, seems to be fascinated by human conflict. With all of our knowledge and capacity for reason, far too many people can’t overcome the tendencies of the primitive brain. We know how to avoid war and we know that violent conquest is no longer needed to obtain resources, but willful death and destruction still run rampant.
We also know that things like heart disease and cancer are far more likely to take our lives or the lives of loved ones, yet we allow government to spend most of our money on bombing the boogeyman in some distant land.
It’s no coincidence that the mainstream media, which is now an arm of government, sets the public policy agenda. Fear of the boogeyman gets high ratings, and the stoking of that fear guarantees access to the inner circles of Washington D.C.
As the presidential election plays out, fear and fascination with human conflict will again be major topics of the candidates. It is in their best interest to counter the advance of human enlightenment and perpetuate the status quo of wildly misplaced spending priorities.
Read more at http://thefreethoughtproject.com/shock-report-anti-terrorism-spending-50000-times-death/#WBwi62L0exi4jMlH.99
“… while about $10,000 is spent per victim on cancer research.”
BULLSH#T!!!
ZERO is spent on RESEARCH. There are ALREADY a number of KNOWN CURES!!!
Cure the patient, kill the ‘cash cow’.
Even supposing that’s true about cancer, the author’s overall point is a very good one. The amount of spending on terrorism is WAAAAYYY out of proportion to the threat, especially in comparison with other causes of death.
And it’s more than just spending. The amount of media attention given to the subject of terrorism is preposterous. This saturation coverage conditions the sheep to think that the threat must be really significant if the talking heads are giving it so much airtime.
Of course, we all know the ulterior motives: strengthen Israel, make lots of money for the MIC, and destroy civil liberties.
“Even supposing that’s true about cancer, the author’s overall point is a very good one.”
Granted, but the reason I focused on the cancer aspect is a personal one, BMF.
http://fromthetrenchesworldreport.com/big-pharmas-lies-exposed-cancer-is-curable/19239/
I hadn’t seen that post before. I’m truly sorry for those you lost, #1. A good friend of mine is currently losing a parent to terminal cancer, and it hurts just to watch what they all have to go through. I almost had to face that horror myself, because years ago one of my parents was diagnosed with cancer. Luckily it was caught early and surgically removed.
When I had that scare in my family, there were periods when I had to do a lot of waiting for test results and other “cliffhangers.” To ease my anxiety during those times, I did a lot of research. I learned a great deal about cancer, but the disease is complex. In fact, it’s actually a family of over 200 complex diseases. So, I barely scratched the surface with hours of reading. Basically, I learned enough to know how much I don’t know.
One thing I learned is that the immune system can *sometimes* cure cancer without external help. Indeed, if I recall correctly, most adults have a few cancer cells in their body at any given time due to random DNA mutations. Usually the immune system kills the rogue cells, but new ones pop up and also need to be dealt with. As a person gets older and the immune system weakens, it becomes more probable that the cancerous cells will get a foothold. And inherited or acquired genetic mutations can make a person more susceptible to this at any age.
If a tumor vanished after an alternative therapy, that doesn’t necessarily mean the therapy was the reason it vanished. That’s a logical fallacy: “post hoc ergo propter hoc” (“after this, therefore, because of this”). Maybe the tumor would have been killed off with NO treatment, even of the alternative kind.
The treatment of infections with antibiotics is a good analogy. Do antibiotics kill infections? Often they do. Do they ALWAYS work? No. Can the body sometimes kill off a bad infection without any antibiotics or other medical treatment? Yes, it happens. It’s just riskier NOT to use antibiotics in many cases.
Moreover, people DO regularly get cured of some kinds of cancer with standard medical therapy. I have personally met such people. And the survival rates have been rising.
Is the therapy harsh? For many people it can be brutal. Does some cancer not respond well to it, if at all? Unfortunately, yes. A lot of it depends on what kind of cancer it is and how much it has spread, if at all.
Putting it all together, I don’t rule out your belief that cancer can be cured. Truth can be stranger than fiction. But with respect, I need a WHOLE lot more than a few personal experiences, poignant though they are.
I’ll keep an open mind and will study more as time allows. But even if there’s no cure for cancer being suppressed by the medical community, there’s STILL a very valid reason to be enraged with the oligarchs who are running the US and the world. That reason is the one given by the author of this article: they’re robbing us of money that COULD be used to cure horrible diseases that we all risk getting.
If you read the comments, you would have seen only two negative ones, but a number of others testifying to their own recoveries due to B17. I cured my own lung cancer six years ago, and I never quit smoking cigarettes. And just ask Mark Schumacher about his experience with it.
Ask yourself this simple question: If B17 & Laetrile didn’t work, WHY did they FORCE it off the market? We all know they could give a rat’s @ss about cr@p that doesn’t work, because most of it doesn’t anyway (UNLESS it’s designed to do the opposite, and poison us instead).
So… WHY BOTHER?
It’s strictly about depopulation when it comes to the cancer agenda.
And LOTS of mammon in the process, of course.