Annual Military Spending 2019

        Annual Military Spending 2019                 

             

Rank	Country	Annual Spending in US $
1	United States	$732,000,000,000.00
2	China	$261,000,000,000.00
3	India	$71,100,000,000.00
4	Russian Federation	$65,100,000,000.00
5	Saudi Arabia	$61,900,000,000.00
6	France	$50,100,000,000.00
7	Germany	$49,300,000,000.00
8	United Kingdom	$48,700,000,000.00
9	Japan	$47,600,000,000.00
10	South Korea	$43,900,000,000.00
11	Australia	$27,500,000,000.00
Total of #2-11	(The Next 10 Nations)	$726,200,000,000.00

   These are the latest figures from SIPRI (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute) on annual military spending for 2019. They were flashed on the screen by Fareed Zakaria on his CNN show this last weekend. Our nation spends more on our military annually than the next ten nations combined spend on theirs. We exceed their total expenditure by nearly six billion dollars. I found that hard to believe, so I researched it. These numbers don't include North Korea because North Korea doesn't open its accounting to the folks in Stockholm, but if they did, the chart would look about the same because North Korea is a small industrial nation that according to US State Department estimates spent between $3.7 billion and $4.2 billion in 2017. Italy spends over 5 times that much on their military and they didn't make the Top 11 List.

So what do the nations on this chart have in common? Well, all but The United States and Saudi Arabia offer their citizens universal health care. The largest industrial nation in the world “can't afford it” and the Saudis, who brought you 9/11, could care less about their citizens. Care is for the Crown.

Would you expect US to win more often, seeing the above figures? I would, but I may not be giving enough weight to the fact that our Army is always playing an away game. Perhaps it doesn't matter if we win or lose. It may only be important that we spend the money. Spending money on the military is a bipartisan endeavor. “Have gun will travel” reads the card of our nation. As the chart shows, the industrial military lobbyists are more powerful than anyone you elect. They slop over in to civilian arms sales as well. Perhaps that is why gun safety legislation, with 70% popular support never makes it into legislation. So many wonderful things (and people) money can buy.

Look to the above list for the reason the most powerful industrial nation in the world doesn't have free K-16 quality education, universal free health care, improved infrastructure, a reliable renewable energy grid and intelligent gun legislation. Every time we spend another billion on our military, another cigar butt is thrown from a yacht into the Mediterranean and a thousand human beings die.

Cheers, Old Buz 3/25/2021                                                         iambloggerbuz.blogspot.com

"What do you know?"

I checked a book out of our library recently entitled, “1421, The Year China Discovered America”, by Gavin Menzies.  It is very well written and researched.  He bases his title on many years of research into ancient maps, artifacts and genetic offspring of China, around the world.  I would tend to believe his research, but in K-6, in Ohio, I was taught that Christopher Columbus discovered America on October 12^th, 1492.  I “knew that to be true” for most of my life, since I believed what my teachers taught me.  Such faith.  I have since realized that what we are taught in school is the best guess of the present day society and that what we learn in our place of worship, from its bible,  is the mythology of the age in which it was written and the knowledge of the present day gullible.  One likes to believe what they believe, despite evidence to the contrary.  Scientists wander around our universities believing that the Universe was created when a bit of matter and energy, the size of a pin head, had a “Big Bang” and grew to over fifty billion light years across and is growing larger as the power of our telescopes increases.  I chuckle at this theory today as scientists will in the future.  I think what we “know” may relate to time and what sources we have faith in.

I had a vested interest in the Columbus theory, since I was born on October 12^th, in Columbus, Ohio.  For those of you readers born recently, Columbus Day was celebrated on October 12^th, until 1970, when it was bastardized, to be celebrated on the second Monday of October.  I liked it on the 12^th, when the whole nation celebrated my birthday with me.  Now, ask yourself, what does “discovered” mean?  Well, for Christopher Columbus, it meant bringing news back to his community, Spain, that a place exists that they previously had no knowledge of.  Columbus brought back erroneous information.  He didn’t land in India as he imagined.  He didn’t even land on the main North American Continent.  He landed on islands, off of the continent, in the area of The Bahamas and folks were already living there, so how could he have discovered it?  This sort of discovery is similar to one a young man named Rocco made in 1996.  Taking a Greyhound for a journey from the Bronx to The Midwest, exploring the area, later returning to the Bronx to tell his friends about the strange land and about the strange civilization that he had encountered was indeed a “discovery”.   We shouldn’t further diminish Columbus’s discovery by mentioning that there is fairly well supported theory that Leif Ericson landed on the American Continent as part of a Norse expedition sometime in the 11th century.  And once again, the Native Americans were already there.  I am a native American.  I was born here and so were my folks.  There is a group of Native Americans that our troops drove off of their land centuries ago, but now our government gives their descendants healthcare, a college education, the right to operate casinos in states where gambling is illegal and reserves ground for them.  There is another group of Native Americans, called Mexicans, which our soldiers also drove off of their land centuries ago, but our government has built a fence to keep them from returning and our government’s only gift to them is grief.  Go figure.

So, “What do you know?”  You know what you have been taught or have learned through your own research and if it happens to agree with reality, then it approaches truth.  I think there is damn little of that, but it is certainly worth searching for.  If there is a reason for the search for truth, it is why we came.  Enjoy the journey.

Comments are welcome, Old Buz