The World is Better

To listen too much to the MSM, you'd think we're going to hell in a handbasket.

The fact, however, is things can only be objectively getting better, since we've finally started responding to a war that has been waged against us in secret for a very long time.

The psychotic hate of the jihadists and their twisted culture was always around us; we just didn't notice. It's a common psychological error to now assume that things have gotten worse suddenly very recently, only because everyone's talking about it now.

But to solve a problem it must first be perceived. Spotting the termites eating out your foundations didn't make them suddenly appear; it instead give you a chance to fix things before it all falls apart.

It's this way with gun accidents, for example. You'd think guns in the home, ownded by ordinary law-abiding people, were dangeroud items, because every single time a tragic mishap occurs somewhere in this big country, you hear about it because the media reports it. But many, many more people are killed or injured in more mundane ways every day, but you just don't hear about it.

Ergo, most people have a skewed perception of the relative probability of risk from owning a gun, with respect to, say, owning a backyard swimming pool or a ladder.

Have fun playing with the mortality statistics at the Centers for Disease Control to find out for yourself. Click a link under "unintentional injury" by age range for a breakdown. Firearms are involved in around 1% of the cases.

But in the meantime, reflect how things have really gotten better due to our wake-up call of 9/11, as described by Varifrank, found via The Anchoress:

In 2001, Osama bin Laden traveled the world unmolested. The Taliban ruled Afghanistan with a bloody iron fist. Pakistan would barely return our phone calls. Saddam tossed UN inspectors out of his country and fired Anti Aircraft weapons at NATO aircraft that were enforcing UN sponsored Sanctions. Libya openly flaunted international conventions on the spread of nuclear weapons. Syria controlled Lebanon as a colony, and Arafat called for martyrs against Israel.

In 2005, Osama can’t go anywhere outside of his close protection of tribal Waziristan, he sleeps in a different bed every night, hunted by the infidel enemy in his own Islamic countryside. He lives in constant fear for his eventual betrayal by men of his own command. His ‘circle of trust’ grows smaller every day. The Taliban now hides in the shadows of the outskirts of afghan cities, while Hilton and Sheraton build new hotels in Kabul and Bagram. Pakistan returns our phone calls, offers help when they can, stays out of the way when they cant. Three million Afghanis left their refugee camps in Pakistan to return home in Afghanistan where free secular democratic elections in which women also vote have now occurred. Saddam is now in a cell awaiting trial and quick hanging, cleaning his own underwear in the sink just above his toilet. His two hell spawn children are dead and buried courtesy of the 101st Airborne and a relative who ratted them out for the reward. Non-believers now occupy Baghdad, the third greatest city in Islam. Libya is now a popular western tourist destination, while the famously anti western Libyan leader Quadaffi now offers to go to North Korea to help convince them to give up nuclear weapons as he has done. Syrian troops have retreated from Lebanon, returning the country to a secular western parliamentary democracy. After a long painful humiliating illness, Arafat is now dead. Palestine is about to be walled off from the rest of the civilized world, despite their protests and bombings of pizza parlors.

In 2001, they killed mostly infidels. In 2005, they kill mostly other Muslims.

In 2001, In Manhattan, DC and Pennsylvania by destroying aircraft and buildings with people in them they killed 3,500. In 2005, they killed 52 with explosives on a bus in London.

In 2001 the call for bloody Jihad was heard throughout the Islamic world. In 2005, the call for freedom and western democracy is heard throughout the Islamic world.

I particularly liked this observation:

In 2001, Aceh Indonesia was a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism where westerners were unwelcome. In 2005, Due to an act of God, Aceh no longer exists.

Ooooo, that's gotta hurt...

Read it all!