You Want Fear Mongering? We got your fear mongering right here.
Everyone calm the hell down.
I shook hands with with someone from Liberia. Her name is Christine Tolbert Norman – she’s the Mayor of Bentol City, Liberia. Bentol City is just outside of the capital, Monrovia.
Mayor Norman is the daughter of former President William Tolbert and like most Liberians and 99.999% of all people from Africa does not have ebola. She likely never will have ebola and neither will I.
And neither will you… or anyone you know.
Every year FoxNews, CNN and the rest of the news media give you something to be terrified about. Bird flu, swine flu… whatever. The idea is to get you terrified enough that you don’t want to turn off your television.
The Mudflats has learned from this and we’ve decided to join in on the media terror campaign. Here is our list of 5 things we think you should be terrified of, in no particular order. So please bring on the clicks… and share this with your dad so he gets it out on his e-mail list.
1: Weekend Surgery
“BMJ study finds mortality rate within 30 days of operation rises each day and is 82% higher at weekends than on Mondays.”
-Source The Guradian
2. Death by Television
“Last year, 41 people — mostly children — were killed when television sets fell on them. Here’s what you can do to avoid tragedy”
-Source The Week
3. Police [in America]
“The FBI reports that in 2011, cops in America killed 404 suspects in acts of “justifiable homicide.” Astonishingly, though, as FiveThirtyEight reports, this number likely doesn’t include every civilian fatality that year since it relies on voluntary reporting and doesn’t include police homicides that aren’t justifiable.
Still, 404 is a large number. By comparison, just six people were killed by police in Australia over the same period. Police in England and Wales killed only two people, and German police killed six.”
-Source Business Insider
4. Coal Mines
“According to preliminary data released by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Mine Safety and Health Administration, 42 miners died in work-related accidents at the nation’s mines in 2013, an increase from the 36 miners who died in 2012. While mining fatalities occurred at a record low rate for the first three quarters of 2013, during the fourth quarter of 2013, six coal miners and nine metal/nonmetal miners died in mining accidents, a significant increase from the same period in 2012, when four coal miners and two metal/nonmetal miners died.”
-Source Department of Labor
5. Global Warming
“Climate change is already responsible for 300,000 deaths a year and is affecting 300m people, according to the first comprehensive study of the human impact of global warming.”
-Source The Global Humanitarian Forum via The Guardian
Some of these things you really should be terrified of, some of them you don’t really have a reason to be. Can you tell the difference?