The extent to which the thought of terrorism freaks us out

How much is our conception of risk warped by the thought of "terrorism?" Consider that there was a study conducted prior to 9/11 in which people were willing to pay more for insurance to protect them from terrorism than from any cause of death:

A further example highlights how making the description of an event very specific can induce people to see it as much more risky. In an investigation of the effects of wording on people's intentions to buy insurance for air travel, researchers found that that people were willing to pay more for a policy that would insure them against "terrorist acts" as opposed to death from "all possible causes." And yet, as must be obvious to the reader, death from terrorist acts is only one of many ways that could lead to death on an airplane. However, because this scenario was made explicit, it became more salient to people thereby increasing their perception of the risk as measured by their willingness to pay an insurance premium.
[Citing to Johnson, E. J., Hershey, J., Meszaros, J., & Kunreuther, H. (1993). Framing, probability distortions, and insurance decisions. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 7, 35-51.] This study was briefly discussed by Daniel Kahneman while discussing his new book, Thinking, Fast and Slow: In his book, Kahneman suggests that things that are vivid in our minds often have far too much influence over us, compared to equal or greater dangers that are not as vivid. For example, you are far more likely to die of colon cancer as a result of not getting a colonoscopy than to die from an act of terrorism. Yet our national budget priorities are massively skewed to try to achieve zero-tolerance regarding terrorism, which is an impossibility despite the rhetoric of virtually every politician who opens his or her mouth on the topic. It seems that we need to work much harder to make non-vivid dangerous activities more vivid, so that we can rationally prioritize. And certainly, we need to resist the urge to decide budget priorities regarding vivid activities in isolation from all other budgetary needs. I write this assuming, perhaps naively, that the bottom line, the thing for which we are ultimately striving, is the general welfare, including the prevention of needless deaths. To the extent that this is true, when setting public policy we need to work much harder to recognize that a death is a death, regardless of the cause.

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About Twins, about National Geographic

When I hear people say that we all need to "read," it irks me. "Read what?," I ask myself. There are many books and magazines to choose from, and large numbers of them are not challenging on any level. Today I picked up this month's issue of an incredibly challenging magazine, National Geographic. It was an extraordinary issue, which is the norm. I've truly never been disappointed with an issue of National Geographic, perhaps because the magazine combines exquisite photography and excellent story-telling, much of it with a scientific angle, faithfully so, even when inconvenient. The cover article this month is "Twins: Alike but not Alike." Beware, that you will not be able to read the full story online; nor will you be able to read most of each issue's stories. To do that you'll need to subscribe. Here's an excerpt to an article filled with delightful and and often counter-intuitive information:

The story began with the much publicized case of two brothers, both named Jim. Born in Piqua, Ohio, in 1939, Jim Springer and Jim Lewis were put up for adoption as babies and raised by different couples, who happened to give them the same first name. When Jim Springer reconnected with his brother at age 39 in 1979, they uncovered a string of other similarities and coincidences. Both men were six feet tall and weighed 180 pounds. Growing up, they'd both had dogs named Toy and taken family vacations in St. Pete Beach in Florida. As young men, they'd both married women named Linda, and then divorced them. Their second wives were both named Betty. They named their sons James Alan and James Allan. They'd both served as part-time sheriffs, enjoyed home carpentry projects, suffered severe headaches, smoked Salem cigarettes, and drank Miller Lite beer. Although they wore their hair differently—Jim Springer had bangs, while Jim Lewis combed his hair straight back—they had the same crooked smile, their voices were indistinguishable, and they both admitted to leaving love notes around the house for their wives.
When you are finished learning about twins, you might want to educate yourself about the horrors caused by landmines through the eyes of Cambodians. The article is titled: "Cambodia's Healing Fields."
Although weapons of war, land mines are unlike bullets and bombs in two distinct ways. First, they are designed to maim rather than kill, because an injured soldier requires the help of two or three others, reducing the enemy's forces. Second, and most sinister, when a war ends, land mines remain in the ground, primed to explode. Only 25 percent of land mine victims around the world are soldiers. The rest are civilians—boys gathering firewood, mothers sowing rice, girls herding goats.
What are people doing about landmines? Trying to dig them up and hoping that loved ones don't have their lives shattered by stepping on them decades after a war has ended. The United States has funded many efforts to dig up old land mines, but the U.S., which has a stockpile of some 10 million land mines, has a mixed record:
Worldwide, millions of land mines are buried in nearly 80 countries and regions—from Angola to Afghanistan, Vietnam to Zimbabwe. That's one of every three nations. Many of them are following Cambodia's example. In 2002 almost 12,000 people worldwide were reported killed or maimed by land mines or other explosives. Since then, annual casualties have fallen to fewer than 4,200. This dramatic improvement is a direct result of the Mine Ban Treaty signed in Ottawa, Canada, in 1997, an international agreement banning the use, production, or transfer of land mines and calling for mandatory destruction of stockpiles. Today 157 countries have become party to the treaty, including Afghanistan, Liberia, Nicaragua, and Rwanda; but 39 countries have refused to join, including China, Russia, North Korea, and the U.S.
If these excerpts have intrigued you, consider supporting the research, writing and photography of National Geographic for an entire year for only $15. For this extremely modest sum, you'll receive and enjoy a year's worth of issues. I'm not affiliated in any way with National Geographic. I'm merely urging you to take a look if you don't already subscribe.

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Citizens United means my very own Corporation Could be President in 2012

I’m moving to Delaware! Yep, soon I’ll be an official resident of “the First State.” My corporate counsel buddies have always told me that Delaware has the most corporations domiciled there because Delaware corporation laws are very liberal (read vague, ambiguous and authorizing anything one might wish their corporate entity to do while being hostile to lawsuits against corporate management). Delaware is very proud of its reputation as a corporate haven. And, soon thereafter I will have set my very own corporation “person” on the path to be President of the United States. The recent US Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC makes all things possible for our state’s corporate citizens. I’ll move to Delaware because our decennial census did not count the over 1 million corporate citizen persons who reside in Delaware. The US Census takes place every 10 years as mandated by Article 1, Section 2 of the US Constitution. Census data are used in apportioning the numbers of US House of Representative seats for each state, the numbers of Electoral College votes for each state and the distribution of billions in federal aid among the various states. The actual numbers used from the 2010 Census will not be distributed to the states until February, 2012. Next I’ll sue in federal court to overturn the 2010 Census for failure to include any of Delaware’s 1 million corporate citizen persons in the Census count for all of the government goodies that are apportioned using Census numbers. Citizens United actually gives us an idea of the numbers of corporate citizen persons disenfranchised by the failure to include corporations in the Census (5.8 million for-profits filed tax returns in 2006, 558 U.S. ___, p.22 (2010)). “Frivolous lawsuit!” you say? Nope. After the decision in Citizens United v. FEC, corporations are people and have the same free speech rights as any other person under the First Amendment and therefore under all the laws regarding the census and apportionment of federal goodies by the United States pursuant to the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, Section 2.

“Section 2. Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed…”
But, that’s not all, folks! The 14th Amendment also now makes corporations the same as you and me. “Corporations are people, my friend.” Remember how when we were kids we were told that anybody can grow up and be President of the United States? Someday soon, maybe one of my new states’ properly recognized and federally certified corporate citizen persons will run for and win the Presidency of the United States. The velvet glove will be off then and the corporations won’t have to get together and invent a candidate and call him George W. Bush or Mitt Romney, again. Gee, maybe that corporation will be one of my own.

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Leap of Resignation

At Huffpo, Ted Kaufman begs us to take the issue of climate change serious, pointing readers to the websites of serious science organizations and warning us of the horrific consequences of doing nothing.

Virtually every reputable organization of scientists in the world has reached the same basic conclusion. Climate change is real and poses a threat to every living thing on the earth. To not take climate change seriously, you must somehow believe there is a gigantic international conspiracy involving the world's top scientists, all of whom have agreed to distort their data. Come on.

I highly respect Ted Kaufman for speaking up when we needed to hear him, both on this issue and with regard to banking reform. He often seemed to be the lone thoughtful voice among the clowns and chaos of Congress. He's no longer in Congress, but I do think he's spot on here. Unfortunately, it seems that the people (at least the people I know) have made the leap from climate change skepticism to climate change resignation. I remember wincing when I heard Al Gore's line at the end of Inconvenient Truth that we shouldn't make this leap--it seemed even then that our economic incentives are all in the wrong places and that is exactly what we would do. I fear that is what we are now doing. Here's what I'm sensing out there: "Yep. We're destroying the Earth. We're destroying it in a thousand ways, and climate change is but one of these ways. And we're not willing to do much of anything about it. We don't even like the low efficiency light bulbs, so please leave us alone about this issues of climate change."

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Quotes for the new year

Here is another batch of quotes that I have collected over the past couple of months. Hundreds more of my favorite quotes can be found here. I don't travel in circles where people say, 'I have faith, I believe this in my heart and nothing you can say or do can shake my faith.' That's just a long-winded religious way to say, 'Shut up.' Penn Jillette, NPR interview Don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something. Pancho Villa (1877 - 1923), last words “No matter how careful you are, there's going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn't experience it all. There's that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should've been paying attention. Well, get used to that feeling. That's how your whole life will feel some day. This is all practice.” -Chuck Palahniuk Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, and went bang in the noonday sun. Kurt Vonnegut - God Bless You Mr. Rosewater “It’s pretty amazing that our society has reached a point where the effort necessary to extract oil from the groud, ship it to a refinery, turn it into plastic, shape it appropriately, truck it to a store, buy it, and bring it home is considered to be less effort than what it takes to just wash the spoon when you’re done with it.” Poster “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” ― Albert Einstein "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896 - 1940), "The Crack-Up" (1936) "Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property; Corporate personhood is the legal fiction that property is a person." T-shirt "The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately defeat him." Russell Baker (1925 - ) “True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.” Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. ‎"When I feed the poor, I am called a saint... when I ask why the poor are hungry, I am called a Communist!" Dom Hélder Pessoa Câmara (Liberation Theologian RC priest, Brazil 1909-1990) "It is said that power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power." David Brin (1950 - ) "Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them." Joseph Heller (1923 - 1999), "Catch-22" “That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.” Christopher Hitchens. "Conceit is God's gift to little men." Bruce Barton "If you think you’re too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito in the room." Anon "You will not be punished for your anger; you will be punished by your anger." Buddha "We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered." Martin Luther King, Jr. “The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people; it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government." Patrick Henry

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