In America, the land of the free, we have 2.2 million people in prison, roughly 3.1% of our population. This is the highest percentage of any country in the world. Further, 25% of the world’s prisoners are in America, while America represents only 5% of the world’s population. China, with a population of 1 billion, more than three times our own, has only 1.5 million people in prison.

The United States spends roughly $623 billion on military expenses and on 737 foreign military bases in 130 countries. China has the second highest military budget in the world, an estimated $65 billion a year. Russia, the third biggest spender, spends $50 billion a year. The combined military spending of every country in the world other than the US is $500 billion, $123 billion less than US spending.

The richest 1% of the world owns 40% of the wealth, and one half of the world owns, combined, no more than 1% of the wealth.

For the first time in US history 20% of American children born in into poverty.

The UN Estimates that for a total cost of $4 billion a year for 15 years, world hunger can be eliminated. 35,000 people die of starvation every day, roughly 12 times the number of people killed on 9/11. Roughly 75% of them are children.

The West Nile Virus kills an average of 200 people a year.

There were 17,000 murders in this country in 2006.

In 2007 roughly 43,000 people died in car accidents, averaging 118 automobile deaths a day in this country. In two days the number of automobile deaths exceeded West Nile deaths for a year.

In 2007, 14 people died by having a vending machine fall on them. You are 14.2 times more likely to die of West Nile than by having a vending machine land on you.

The leading cause of death for a white American male is heart disease. For a black American male it’s homicide.

In the 15 years since Osama Bin-Laden declared it a Muslim’s obligation to kill any and all Americans there have been a number of attacks and attempted attacks on America, including the first world trade center bombing (designed to knock one tower into the other and resulted in 6 deaths), a plot to blow up 6 airplanes over the Atlantic simultaneously, a plot to assassinate Clinton, the Millennium plots, and multiple bombings in Yemen and South Africa.. In those 15 years they have killed about 3,000 Americans, an average of 157 people a year.

Currently the population of the world is about 9 billion people. This is greater than the sum total of all the human beings ever to have lived. In the year 1930 it was only 2 billion, in 1800 there were only 1 billion, and in the year 1 A.D. there were 300,000 million people alive in the world – roughly the same number of people living in the US today.

Since the dawn of man to roughly the 1800’s, the average human lifespan was about 35 years old. Today, in America, for the first time in history, the average human lifespan is 82 years old.

The worst Polio outbreak in the world was in 1952 in the United States with 58,000 cases, 21,000 people paralyzed and 3,000 people dead – a total of 254,000 people were paralyzed by the disease by 1977. After a vaccine is found in 1955 the World Health Organization vows to eradicate polio from the face of the planet. There were only 1900 polio cases in 2006 and only 922 reported to date for 2007, the vast majority coming from India and Nigeria with less than 100 coming from elsewhere.

90% of people think their driving skills are above average.

26.2 Percent of Americans suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder. One quarter of those have a serious mental disorder. The United States leads the world in mental illness per capita.

Roughly ½ of Americans believe that as of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Saddam Husain did have Weapons of Mass Destruction.

The average presidential primary campaign costs $75 million or more. After that, the average presidential campaign costs an additional $75 million.

Thank you, and have a wonderful 2008

“I do know that it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could — if that were your sole purpose — you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down”
Bill Bennett (09/28/05)
“We have been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That’s cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it’s not cowardly.”
Bill Maher, Politically Incorrect (09/26/01)

A few years ago I met a psychic. Skeptical at first, I was amazed by the overwhelming proof of her ability to predict the future. She had even predicted the assassination of JFK and called the White House days before his trip to Texas, warning him not to go. If only they had listened to her….

She keeps with her a clipping from a newspaper, where her ominous warning to the president was published, as were her credentials as a psychic.

Unfortunately, as impressive as her abilities are, there are a few things she fails to mention to prospective clients. First of all, the White House receives 600 calls a year from “psychics” warning the president of his impending assassination. At nearly two calls a day, a far more surprising event would be if the president was assassinated and someone hadn’t predicted it.

Secondly, she failed to mention that that particular call was the fourth she had made predicting an assassination. The previous three had all been wrong (as were the next 12 she made for future presidents). Further, as impressive as predicting the assassination was, she has not made any other successful predictions in the last 40 years.

It is true, that she accurately predicted, and even attempted to warn of, the Kennedy assassination. But that fact, without a larger context, is extremely misleading.

When Bill Bennett said that one could lower the crime rate by aborting black babies, the media went wild. How could he advocate such a position?

The truth is he didn’t. He stated a fact.

It is far easier (and more self satisfying) to adopt a position of anger and moral outrage, than it is to look at his statement in context, and see if the apparently obvious implication of the statement is in fact what he intended to say. It is a case of Attribution Error, assuming that his motives must have been racist.

A listener had called into Mr. Bennett’s show and argued that the “lost revenue from the people who have been aborted in the last 30 years” would have been enough to save Social Security.

Mr. Bennett was immediately skeptical of that statistic, and argued he did not believe it to be accurate, that it painted an incomplete picture of the economic impact of abortion. The caller claimed the statistic to be completely accurate, to which Mr. Bennett replied that it was also true “that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could — if that were your sole purpose — you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.”

His point? That statistics can often only paint half the picture, that such “far-reaching, extensive extrapolations” (as he put it) were meaningless, and that to argue that abortion should be illegal as a means of saving Social Security was as ludicrous as to argue that abortion should be legal as a means of reducing crime, no matter what the statistics said. His called his own statements “ridiculous, and morally reprehensible”, which is of course why he made them.

For his comment about the 9/11 hijackers, Bill Maher was fired from ABC for being to insensitive (despite the fact that he had held an empty seat on his show for a month for conservative commentator Barbara Olson, who died when her plane hit the pentagon while she was on her way to be on his show). What was Bill Maher’s point? That it’s easy to be dismissive of the terrorists, to call them cowards and say that there is no reason that they hate us, but it isn’t the truth, and it greatly underestimates them.

I once announced to a college class that women generally have smaller brains than men, suffering a politically correct backlash that followed me for four years. Somehow I was sexist. Somehow people thought that I must mean that women aren’t as smart as men. The fact that my statement was scientifically accurate had no bearing on the fact that I was obviously sexist, that I obviously meant to say that women weren’t as smart as men. I was in fact attempting to discuss the differences between men and women, in how the hemispheres of the brain communicate through the corpus callosum.

Women do have smaller brains (if you find that offensive, talk to God, I had nothing to do with it). Why anyone thinks this implies a lower intelligence is beyond me. A five foot person has smaller organs (including the brain) than I do, but can easily be smarter. A blue whale has a significantly larger brain than I do, but it can’t calculate a 15% tip. Intelligence is measured, not by the size of the brain, but by the ratio of brain mass to body mass. This fact, which I had assumed would be obvious given the wide range of human body sizes, was not considered by the people who judged my statement, leading to the erroneous conclusion that I necessarily implied that which I hadn’t.

I have never heard of Bill Bennett. He may be a racist – I have made arguments neither for nor against that claim. His declaration was a stupid thing to say, and I can imagine a hundred better ways to prove the point he was trying to make. But this country has (likely out of boredom) concluded that he stated or implied that blacks are the cause of crime, or that they should be aborted, or that blacks are less important than whites. He implied none of those things. What he said was that statistics can, when extrapolated properly, be used to justify positions which are clearly incorrect. And he’s right.

Effective communication is the basis of civilization. It can not exist without an understanding of what one is trying to say. That understanding comes in part through the sharing of a common vocabulary, but language alone is often ineffective at conveying thoughts. As important as language is, of equal importance is learning how to listen. One can attempt to understand offensive speech without condoning it, but one can never truly object to offensive speech unless they know what was said.

Having just defended him, I do hope he’s not a racist.