Causes of Death

I'm taking another excellent class this week, although not as absolutely stellar as the last round. For an exercise we were given the list of the top 15 causes of death in the US listed on death certificates and then asked to work in groups to rank them. The issue was how we went about working in groups, not the right answer, but it amazed me that a major discussion in our group was if ACCIDENT was #1! Many groups picked accident as #1, and quite a few in the top 3, when it is really #5 by a fairly wide margin.

The top 5 are Heart Disease, Cancer, Stroke, Lung Disease, and then accident, with heart killing over 600K, cancer 550K and then dropping down to less than 200k, AIDs wasn't even in the top 15.

In a democracy, the populace has to know what is going on if they are to govern themselves. The coverage of accidents shows the "sell papers" bias of a market driven media, reasonably intelligent people can have the capacity to adjust for that if they are aware. The AIDs reporting shows the political bias. It is reported because the measures taken to combat it promote the lifestyle choices the MSM encourages.

Freedom means stepping back from the media control and using the media as a TOOL. It is ONE WAY to carefully and skeptically gather information. When the information choices, priority, and bias of the MSM is followed without those cautions, we are cut off from reality and unable to govern ourselves.