Iraq

“The cheap stuff” in LA right now is creeping up to $4.00/gal. It’s ridiculous.
17.478 gal x $3.65⁹/gal = $63.95

If you have set yourself on fire, do not run.

Making fun of “homeland security” still makes me giggle. I remember when I first saw these hysterical warnings just after 9/11. They made me laugh until I cried. A half a decade later I still smile when I see them.

Every now and again I’ll see one of these in someone’s forum signature or a blog post and I’m reminded of how great it felt to just laugh back then. It’s hard to believe that it’s been more than five years since that day. It seems like only yesterday.

The author of The Progress Paradox, Gregg Easterbrook, writes a weekly column for ESPN.com called Tuesday Morning Quarterback during football season. I didn’t get a chance to read it Tuesday because I was still in Vegas. I love Easterbrook because he’s not afraid to tackle social issues in the middle of discussing the merits of good run-blocking. Buried in the middle of this week’s football news he wrote the following:

Last week the British Medical Journal, a technical publication, released a survey in which physicians said sewers, not antibiotics or vaccines, were the greatest public health advance of the past two centuries. Those who live in the favored cities of the West should never take sanitation for granted. The construction of sewage systems in European and American cities, beginning in the late 19th century, dramatically lowered rates of disease, to say nothing of making cities more livable; lowered disease in turn helped Western nations grow more productive and affluent. Today much of the developing world is held back by the fact that its citizens are often sick, and thus not productive. Open conduits of sewage run down the streets of many large developing-world cities; raw sewage pours directly into the Ganges, where bathers are supposed to go for purification rites. In many developing nations the No. 1 need is clean water: clean drinking water, buried sewer systems and modern wastewater treatment plants. The United States appears to have wasted nearly $1 trillion in Iraq. That sum could have brought modern public sanitation to the 25 largest cities of the developing world, and made America the hero of the world’s poor for generations.

from an episode of Dennis Miller on CNBC:

Dennis Miller:  When Clinton was President, I found him to be a really reprehensible human being. I didn’t like him. … But on a day-to-day basis, him being President never really bothered me. I thought, “Well, listen, Bill, it’s a tough job. I’m behind ya.” I didn’t like him. I thought he was a bad guy, but I remember thinking, “I’m not gonna whine about it too much because it’s a tough gig.” If Bush is re-elected, will it upset your day-to-day life?

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Your homework project:
Compare and contrast the information contained in the article quoted below with Keats’ assertion (poetic, true, but an assertion nonetheless) that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”

NBC is planning to make a movie about Pfc. Jessica Lynch, the rescued American POW, even if it doesn’t get her permission. Can the network do that? Doesn’t NBC need to buy the movie rights to her life?

Yes, it can, and, no, it doesn’t - so long as NBC sticks to the facts.

Americans share President Bush’s harsh feelings about Iran and Iraq, but attitudes about the third “Axis of Evil” country outlined in his State of the Union address — North Korea — are more up in the air.

The new CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll shows that 82% of Americans are willing to use the word “evil” to describe the government of Iraq, while 69% say the government of Iran is evil. But only 54% say the government of North Korea is evil. Americans are also less convinced that North Korea has weapons of mass destruction that threaten the United States than they are that Iraq or Iran has these weapons.
There is strong support among Americans, in general, for the concept of acting to prevent countries that sponsor terrorism from threatening America or its allies with weapons of mass destruction.

I wonder why Americans are “less convinced that North Korea has weapons of mass destruction that threaten the United States.” It only takes a simple AskJeeves query to find numerous pages discussing North Korea’s nuclear capabilities.