Real Fears

My daughter recently told me of a classmate who has succumbed to the boogey-boogey media, and is afraid that terrorists are going to come and bomb her town. I told my daughter the chances of that are less than her friend being struck by lightning while being eaten by a shark, while simultaneously winning the lottery.

It's odd how afraid people are of remote possibilities, while actual likelihoods glide right by their mindset. For example, look at the numerous recalls of contaminated food. Thousands of Americans are being poisoned daily by dirty food, because the government does not have the desire or the will to inspect it, which would cost mere pennies a serving. They have zero interest in keeping us safe from a very real threat, one that kills thousands of Americans every year, each one a preventable death. Every year more people die from bad commercial food than died on 9/11. Yeah. Where's the outrage?

Diane Carmen had an excellent column in the Denver Post, describing how we gobble tainted food, while being paranoid about stupid, near-impossibilities. Here's a quote:
"If 19 million pounds of meat distributed to half this country had been contaminated with a deadly strain of E coli bacteria by terrorists, we'd go nuts. But when it's done by a Fortune 100 corporation, we continue to buy it and feed it to our kids."

We used to regulate food, but Saint Ronnie Reagan did away with that, costing us thousands of dead citizens. The FDA is now completely industry-controlled. As proof, look the the recent "food pyramid" that replaced the easy-to-read informational one. The new one is incomprehensible to the average citizen, as it was designed to be. The bribes of the food industry to those in power worked, and they can shovel garbage at us at their will.

And they can sell us poison, as there is almost no inspection, and any regulation is now voluntary. We are at risk from companies that don't care, because America doesn't give a rat's ass about protecting itself from a real threat. Just the stupid stuff, please, like we see on television, where most people get their information.