0.2916% –or– I always knew you were stupid. I never believed you were evil.
Thursday, 11 September 2008
Let’s say you worked your entire life to save $1,000,000. A cool million. And when you went to your bank to take that money out, they handed you $2,916. That is the ratio—minimum ratio—of the cost of damages done 7 years ago today to the cost of what we’ve done and will continue to do in response. 11 September 2001 cost, at most, 0.3% as much as we’ll spend in our manifold, pointless, impotent reponses.[1]
Weigh further–
3,000 lives.
Some buildings worth 0.3% the cost of going to war over them.
5,000 dead servicemen, contractors, and journalists so far.
More than 50,000 wounded.
2 ruined countries and the uncountable billions of dollars of waste that go with that.
Up to and perhaps over 1,000,000 dead.
5 million refugees.
7-fold increase in world-wide terrorism.
Bill of $1,000,000,000,000 so far, $2,400,000,000,000 eventual total looking quite solid.
Loss of habeas corpus.
The extra hours at airports we all could have been working or enjoying ourselves instead.
$4.00 gasoline.
…and you know you can fill in plenty more.
