(via Jihad Watch) From the AFP comes this bit of incredible research:

World governments are focussing too much on fighting terrorism while obesity and other “lifestyle diseases” are killing millions more people, an international conference heard Monday.

Overcoming deadly factors such as poor diet, smoking and a lack of exercise should take top priority in the fight against a growing epidemic of chronic disease, legal and health experts said.

Global terrorism was a real threat but posed far less risk than obesity, type two diabetes and smoking-related illnesses, US law professor Lawrence Gostin said at the Oxford Health Alliance Summit here.

“Ever since September 11 we’ve been lurching from one crisis to the next which has really frightened the public,” Gostin told AFP later.

“While we’ve been focussing so much attention on that we’ve had this silent epidemic of obesity that’s killing millions of people around the world and we’re devoting very little attention to it and a negligible amount of money.”

So you get a twofer for your money. First, the War on Terror is overblown. We’re wasting our time and money going after George Bush’s boogeymen when we need to be turning funds and resources over to fighting the real evildoers, that kruller that you so adore in the morning with your sugar-laden frappuccino. That leads to number two, the predictable drive for more government control ANYWHERE that it can get it. Schools are banning cupcakes from kid’s lunches, legislators are attempting to ban fat people from eating where they want to eat, etc, etc, etc…

Remember that “it’s all for your own good”.

I’m not going to even attempt a serious comparison of the deaths from obesity and the deaths from terrorism. It should go without saying that one is mostly self-inflicted and a result of life choices, barring the genetic factors, while the other is undeniably preventable because it is crazy fanatics blowing up innocent people.

You can’t hunt down and kill the goodies in people’s cabinets before they get unwrapped and scarfed down; you shouldn’t be able to. It’s freedom and personal choice that allows us to make bad decisions for ourselves. It is freedom that allows us to prioritize those snack treats over our health.

On the other hand, you can hunt down and kill the psychopaths who want to kill two million American children and prevent them from doing so absolutely because it is an undeniable scientific fact that dead man who has been blown up by the Air Force will not plot or scheme anymore.

I’ve heard this argument before personally, parroted from The Daily Show. ‘We shouldn’t fight terrorism because there is just as good a chance that you’ll be struck by a meteor as there is that you’ll be killed in a terrorist attack.’ It’s completely spurious. It always is. That’s akin to saying that we shouldn’t proactively attempt break up pedophilia rings because someone will eventually still take advantage of a child.

Not to mention that should there ever be a nuclear terrorist attack, God forbid, those odds would skyrocket. It only takes a single event to drastically, and horribly, change your odds. Or that obesity has been a problem long before September 11th. It’s all head-in-the-sand nonsense, and this time they get the double whammy of government expansion to go along with it. Eugh.

Update:

(via Instapundit) Are African medical practitioners being ’stolen’ by evil rich nations?

The Jawa Report touts the good news that Terrorism is no big deal! Whee!

Ankle Biting Pundits weighs in. (Har.)

This entry was posted on Monday, February 25th, 2008 at 11:59 AM and is filed under Academia, Nutter Butters, Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.