Was It Worth It?/Bacon.

Salon HERE asks if the $1 trillion we've spent on Homeland Security since 9/11 is worth it.  As you know, I say hell no.  Of course most Republicans would disagree with me, since when it comes to defense spending they like to think in a "worst case" scenario: no dollar should be spared in case some "whackjob" on the other side of the world is spending 24 hours a day creating bombs that could blow up the Milky Way, including pouring billions of dollars into missile defense systems named after movies during which we're supposed to believe overgrown dogs can fly spaceships and Mark Hamill can be employed.  Even though, as we already know last year terrorism accounted for not even twice as many deaths (25) as did vending machines (13), and yet I haven't heard any reports of us spending $52,000,000 last year preventing vending machine deaths.  I'm not a math genius, The Gnat will attest that in 6th grade we got to work at our own pace in math class, and it took me 28 days to get past the page on Pi, but I'm fairly sure that's what the math would be based on 13/25.

Meanwhile, those same Republicans would utterly lose their shit if Obama walked up to his teleprompter tonight (I just wrote that!!) and laid out a plan to spend a trillion dollars on education, healthcare and infrastructure, since when it comes to things like taxes and public services, Republicans think in "best case" scenarios. It never occurs to them to wonder what would happen if, God forbid, some unlucky series of events finds them broke and out on the street; instead, they are haunted by nightmares of winning the Powerball lottery or waking up and finding themselves CEOs of a Fortune 500 company and therefore being taxed at a different rate than a clerk at a Blockbuster Video.  After all, if you're born into poverty or bad health it's just because you're lazy and wanna get your money-grubbing mitts on any handout you can get.  And the infrastructure thing just reeks of being the French, so fuck that.

I suppose anyone can think what they want re: "is it worth it?"  But the main point is that anytime someone writes "a trillion dollars" we get deluged with what a trillion dollars looks like, or stupid facts like "a trillion dollar bills would reach the sun!" or "it would take 32,000 years at a dollar a second to spend a trillion dollars" or "you could buy the NY Mets 100,000 times, but then you'd be stuck with the Mets so why not just fucking kill yourself instead?" and yet it's not until today that I've actually found anything remotely interesting with that little game:

With a trillion dollars you could buy out America’s supply of bacon for the next 500 years.

Now THAT would be worth it.

More HERE.