Of bombs & drones

[mahnmut]

First of all, let this sink in...

The US under Trump drops an average of 121 bombs every day in a number of undeclared wars worldwide:

This means 1 US bomb explodes somewhere every 12 minutes.

You know what they say, one person's death is a tragedy; a million deaths is just statistics. Except, if you try counting to one million, say, one number per second, that'd take almost two weeks. So it's doable. Hoorah!

The problems start after that. If we want to reach a billion (that's with B), we'd need 32 years. A trillion makes... uhm, that's even beyond my imagination.

But don't be scared by the limits of our imagination, folks! Because there's no limit to the destructive prowess of America the Great. A US economist recently dug into the military reports and found out that the Pentagon had mysteriously made 21 trillion dollars disappear between 1998 and 2016. Without reporting to anybody about it. The money just vanished into thin air, like those gargantuan pictures of our imagination that we try to paint when we try to visualize what "21 trillion" might look like. And because even the imagination of government accountants has its limits (no surprise!), the investigation as to the whereabouts of that staggering amount of money was discontinued. Yeah, just like that! Poof!

Still, there's another kind of stats that our imagination might be able to handle. Like the one showing that the efficiency of the US drone strikes is a mere 2% on average. That's the share of the people killed who had been real targets, the rest is collateral.

You see how even small figures could suddenly be of interest, and look significant. A sober assessment on these stats would make us realize that 98% of all casualties to drone strikes are just folks who happened to be near the explosion. Namely, women, children, elderly people, or random passers-by. Most of them were torn to hundreds of pieces. That's what the military jargon calls "surgical precision". Imagine a visit to your doctor, where in 98% of all cases, instead of squeezing the acne on your forehead, they'd chop your head off with a chainsaw instead. Or throwing the baby with the bathwater - literally. Pretty, eh?

Statistically speaking, the US is tearing innocent people to hundreds of pieces once in 12 minutes. The US military drops 121 bombs a day around the world, without having even declared a single war.

And this is just Trump. Remember Bush Jr and the "mere" 70,000 bombs that he dropped over five countries? And Obama, with his charming smile, Hollywood charisma and 30,000 bombs on top of Bush's 70,000 (adding two more countries)? Nobel must be squirming in his grave right now, seeing how the Peace Prize named after him was granted to mass murderers like Kissinger - and nice guys who dropped tens of thousands of bombs on innocent people.

Trump, of course, is the current on-average record holder among the most recent three emperors of the un-announced American Empire (if we assume he's really in control of the Pentagon, which is doubtful). The first year of his term "excelled" with 44K+ explosions, i.e. the above mentioned 121 bombs a day. This has caused the Pentagon to run out of "bomb stuff", and their drone pilots (read: gamers sitting before a computer screen, joystick in hand) are now lacking enough ammo for their deadly games.

Imagine being a superpower and running out of bombs at a time of peace! Whoah! A world without bombs!? Only kids would believe that... provided that they're not torn to pieces in the meantime, that is. Nah. It's hard to imagine such a world at this point, even if the bombs tend to fall in other countries, populated by brown people who talk funny, and all of this is happening as safely far away from us as possible, which we only occasionally hear about on the TV. Or a dystopian movie. I'm not sure at this point which one we're living in.

By the way, the last major bombing of innocent people in a "white" country wasn't so long ago. OK, let's skip the Serbian example - those people were obviously evil, all of them. Let's denote Poland as the last "good" country to be majorly bombed. That was about 2 billion seconds ago, which is not that much, if you employ a sufficient amount of your imagination. I could even provide footage for proof if you don't believe me.

Btw, at what point could we call the constant and systematic killing of innocent people around the world, a genocide? Or it depends on who's doing it?