Friday, May 16, 2008

Who's worse (and giving up golf)

at killing people? (I was going to ask "better", but I thought better of it)

Consider this:

The recent earthquake in China was easily the most deadly earthquake since 2005. It killed at least 12,000 people almost instantly, and multiple sources estimate the final death toll at greater than 50,000.

The recent cyclone in Burma killed more than 40,000 people and the final death toll is estimated to be over 100,000.

But mother nature doesn't really have anything on the U.S. military. Check it out. In 1945, we killed 110,000 people almost instantly in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with the final death toll from those two bombings estimated over 220,000

We've instigated a war which has killed at the lowest estimate 83,000 people over the last 5.5 years, with the actual death toll estimated at over 1,000,000, which works out to nearly 200,000 per year.

Of course not only is our *actual* death and mayhem toll way worse than mother nature's. Our *potential* death and mayhem toll is orders of magnitude worse than mother natures (at least in the short term). Name something mother nature could do tomorrow to compare with, say, an all out launch of the 10,000 active nuclear weapons we still possess. You think Nagasaki and Hiroshima were horrific? *All* of the ones we've got now (yep, all 10,000 of them) are fusion, which means they're at least 1,000 times more destructive than those relatively itty bitty things we dropped on 200,000 people in Japan.

All of which is to say that George W. Bush is currently at the helm of the largest death and destruction machine every created--called the U.S. military. But, hey, at least he has the ... grace and sense of honor to give up playing golf as a gesture of solidarity with the 4,569 dead American soldiers, along with the 70,000 wounded, injured, and ill ones.)

1 comment:

byron smith said...

I entirely agree with your point (that humanity is generally able to be (and actually is) far more destructive than "nature"), but to answer your challenge (Name something mother nature could do tomorrow to compare with, say, an all out launch of the 10,000 active nuclear weapons we still possess), how about a catastrophic meteorite strike or a gamma ray burst from a hypernova? Granted that total nuclear war is far more likely than either of these possibilities, nevertheless they could both cause similar, basically total, destruction of human life.