Some stagger and fall, after all, it's not easy...banging your heart against some mad bugger's wall

So the big news on the international front is that just like Pink Floyd, the US Army is busy building a wall. No, this time it's not a metaphor about shielding oneself off from the public eye, but rather walling off a Sunni neighborhood to "protect" them from Shiites by basically turning their neighborhood into a ghetto in the classical sense. Needless to say, the residents are vastly unhappy, since they now live in a walled-off enclave surrounded by enemies and cut off from friends. Funny that.

Not to say that the news we get from Iraq may be unduly optimistic, but that's basically what I'm suggesting. First, we have very quietly abandoned the latest rationale for our troops doing what they do: that as "they stand up, we'll stand down". Seems like they aren't standing up at all:

Training Iraqi troops, which had been the cornerstone of the Bush administration's Iraq policy since 2005, has dropped in priority, officials in Baghdad and Washington said.

No change has been announced, and a Pentagon spokesman, Col. Gary Keck, said training Iraqis remains important. "We are just adding another leg to our mission," Keck said, referring to the greater U.S. role in establishing security that new troops arriving in Iraq will undertake.

But evidence has been building for months that training Iraqi troops is no longer the focus of U.S. policy. Pentagon officials said they know of no new training resources that have been included in U.S. plans to dispatch 28,000 additional troops to Iraq. The officials spoke only on the condition of anonymity because they aren't authorized to discuss the policy shift publicly. Defense Secretary Robert Gates made no public mention of training Iraqi troops on Thursday during a visit to Iraq.

In a reflection of the need for more U.S. troops, the Pentagon decided earlier this month to increase the length of U.S. Army tours in Iraq from 12 to 15 months. The extension came amid speculation that the U.S. commander there, Army Gen. David Petraeus, will ask that the troop increase be maintained well into 2008.

About that increase in the length of military rotations. Bush tried to blame it on Congress not sending a bill...but a few reporters even picked up on the fact that the increase was announced BEFORE funding "ran out', by which I mean won't really run out at all:

This speculation was fueled by Wednesday’s White House press conference, where Dana Perino explained the strange timing by claiming that President Bush had been in the dark about this major policy shift until the morning it was announced:

Q So why did he tell the American Legion that people would be staying in Iraq longer because of the Democrats, when his own Pentagon, 24 hours later, was going to keep people there longer?

MS. PERINO: Well, one, I don’t know if the President knew about the — the meeting — remember, yesterday morning is when Secretary Gates came and talked to the President. […]

Q And so the President didn’t know about his own policy until Wednesday?

MS. PERINO: I’m not aware that the President knew that there was going to be — that Secretary Gates had come to any decisions.

We might be hearing more about our problems in Iraq, of course, but for the fact that the military is telling officers to keep their mouth shut and won't let them talk to Congress:

national Journal's Congress Daily:

Pentagon lawyers abruptly blocked mid-level active-duty military officers from speaking Thursday during a closed-door House Armed Services Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee briefing about their personal experiences working with Iraqi security forces.

The Pentagon's last-minute refusal to allow the officers' presentations surprised panel members and congressional aides, who are in the middle of an investigation into the effort to train and organize Iraqi forces.

Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee Chairman Martin Meehan, D-Mass., called the Pentagon's move "outrageous" and left open the possibility of issuing subpoenas.

One correspondent suggests: "My guess: the training is not going well, there are some big gaps, and a bunch of horror stories that the Pentagon doesn't want aired. ... That said, this will backfire."

Right now, the"grown-ups" are debating on the Sunday morning news shows whether Harry Reid was wrong to suggest "The war has been lost" if we continue on our current course. He is right of course, and let me suggest that it only shows the vapidity of today's media that they are discussing this in relation to its effects on politics, rather than asking if he is indeed correct. After all, what are a few thousand deaths in relation to the opportunity to strategize and fundraise for the various political committee's right?

Money, so they say, is the root of all evil today.

In the continuing furor over care at Walter Reed, it seems even more bizarre that the VA system is considered to be the best healthcare system in America according to any number of recent surveys...until you realize that the two statements I just made have no relation to each other at all. Walter Reed, like many of the problematic medical facilities out there, is a military hospital run by the Department of Defense, in this case by the Army. Bethesda Naval hospital, as the name implies, is run by that service branch. The VA system, on the contrary, is run by the Department of Veterans' Affairs, a completely different branch of the government. The latter has been hurt lately by an influx of new wounded veterans without a corresponding increase in its budget and the fact that it's current head, Jim Nicholson, is a Republican toady:

He has been accused by some veterans and the organizations that represent them of being primarily a mouthpiece for the Bush administration and of being slow to respond to increasing strains on his agency as returning soldiers move from facilities like Walter Reed, which is run by the Defense Department, into the veterans affairs system.

Critics say he has under-emphasized his agency’s budget needs to Congress, has not responded to calls for more mental health workers and brain trauma specialists and has failed to overhaul disability claims procedures. Some leaders of veterans groups say Mr. Nicholson is less communicative than his predecessors.

Still, VA care is among the best in the country, as this Washington Monthly story demonstrates:

And so it goes today. If the debate is over health-care reform, it won't be long before some free-market conservative will jump up and say that the sorry shape of the nation's veterans hospitals just proves what happens when government gets into the health-care business. And if he's a true believer, he'll then probably go on to suggest, quoting William Safire and other free marketers, that the government should just shut down the whole miserable system and provide veterans with health-care vouchers.

Yet here's a curious fact that few conservatives or liberals know. Who do you think receives higher-quality health care. Medicare patients who are free to pick their own doctors and specialists? Or aging veterans stuck in those presumably filthy VA hospitals with their antiquated equipment, uncaring administrators, and incompetent staff? An answer came in 2003, when the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine published a study that compared veterans health facilities on 11 measures of quality with fee-for-service Medicare. On all 11 measures, the quality of care in veterans facilities proved to be "significantly better."

Here's another curious fact. The Annals of Internal Medicine recently published a study that compared veterans health facilities with commercial managed-care systems in their treatment of diabetes patients. In seven out of seven measures of quality, the VA provided better care.

It gets stranger. Pushed by large employers who are eager to know what they are buying when they purchase health care for their employees, an outfit called the National Committee for Quality Assurance today ranks health-care plans on 17 different performance measures. These include how well the plans manage high blood pressure or how precisely they adhere to standard protocols of evidence-based medicine such as prescribing beta blockers for patients recovering from a heart attack. Winning NCQA's seal of approval is the gold standard in the health-care industry. And who do you suppose this year's winner is: Johns Hopkins? Mayo Clinic? Massachusetts General? Nope. In every single category, the VHA system outperforms the highest rated non-VHA hospitals.

Not convinced? Consider what vets themselves think. Sure, it's not hard to find vets who complain about difficulties in establishing eligibility. Many are outraged that the Bush administration has decided to deny previously promised health-care benefits to veterans who don't have service-related illnesses or who can't meet a strict means test. Yet these grievances are about access to the system, not about the quality of care received by those who get in. Veterans groups tenaciously defend the VHA and applaud its turnaround. "The quality of care is outstanding," says Peter Gayton, deputy director for veterans affairs and rehabilitation at the American Legion. In the latest independent survey, 81 percent of VHA hospital patients express satisfaction with the care they receive, compared to 77 percent of Medicare and Medicaid patients.

No, the current problem lies with Walter Reed and the military's hospital management. In many ways, they are suffering from the same problem as a number of government agencies do: complete hubris and incompetence in the face of a Congress and media that basically spent six years ignoring their roles as guardians of the public interest. Just like the Justice Department decided that it could can a bunch of US Attorneys and no one would notice, just like the administration decided to put cronies in charge of FEMA and no one would notice, just like they decided to make up the reasons to fight a war, and are trying to do it again, hoping no one will notice...it's just the way that they operate.

If I told you that Halliburton is ultimately at fault, would you be shocked? At this point, you shouldn't, because Halliburton's fingerprints are all over the scandal:

In a letter from the committee to Weightman, the members said the Garibaldi memo “describes how the Army’s decision to privatize support services at Walter Reed Army Medical Center was causing an exodus of ‘highly skilled and experienced personnel.’ ... According to multiple sources, the decision to privatize support services at Walter Reed led to a precipitous drop in support personnel at Walter Reed.”

The committee’s letter also noted that Walter Reed awarded a five-year, $120 million contract to IAP Worldwide Services, which is run by Al Neffgen, a former senior Halliburton official.

The committee also noted that more than 300 federal employees providing facilities management services at Walter Reed dropped to fewer than 60 by Feb. 3, the day before IAP took over facilities management. IAP replaced the remaining 60 employees with 50 private workers.

“The conditions that have been described at Walter Reed are disgraceful,” the committee statement said.

“Part of our mission on the oversight committee is to investigate what led to the breakdown in services. It would be reprehensible if the deplorable conditions were caused or aggravated by an ideological commitment to privatize government services regardless of the costs to taxpayers and the consequences for wounded soldiers.”

The committee letter said the Defense Department “systemically” tried to replace federal workers at Walter Reed with private companies for facilities management, patient care and guard duty — a process that began in 2000.

“But the push to privatize support services there accelerated under President Bush’s ‘competitive sourcing’ initiative, which was launched in 2002,” the committee letter states.

During the year between awarding the contract to IAP and when the company started, “skilled government workers apparently began leaving Walter Reed in droves,” the letter states.

“The memorandum also indicates that officials at the highest levels of Walter Reed and the U.S. Army Medical Command were informed about the dangers of privatization, but appeared to do little to prevent them.”

The memo signed by Garibaldi requests more federal employees because the hospital mission has grown “significantly” during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It states that medical command did not concur with their request for more people.

“Without favorable consideration of these requests,” Garibaldi wrote, “[Walter Reed Army Medical Center] Base Operations and patient care services are at risk of mission failure.”

Seriously, it's not a new scandal each time, it's the same scandal being created by the same folks, whose effect always seems to be to poison this country. It's not that all of them are evil, though some may be, it's just that they don't really give a shit, and that's a bad thing for the people running the country to think.

And that is how I know...when I try to get through on the telephone to you...There'll be nobody home

There was a brief period when I was first introduced to Slashdot, the web's leading technology news source, when I used to leave comments. I soon realized it was pretty useless, given the general chaos in their comments, which span the full range between insightful points and babbling idiocy, with very few people aware of the difference in spite of their extremely complicated comment moderation system. Still, it should be pointed out that there are precious few stories about anything technical that escape their attention, and three from tonight really made that clear. I'll skip straight to the linked articles, since that is where the real interest lies.

First, a quickie about a mission to go sample the Earth's mantle with a deep sea mission. MSNBC reports that the exposed mantle is located near the Mid-Atlantic Ridge where matter is upwelling, slowly pushing America and Europe apart, though nowhere near as fast as our President has been doing so. No one is quite sure exactly why the crust seems to have ripped open in this one spot, according to the article, though they seem to think the crust above fractured and was more tightly bound to itself than to the mantle below, leading to fissures. Given the huge uncertainties we have with respect to the physics of what happens underfoot, especially compared to the ease with which we study the stuff above, I'm sure that anything they find will be more than interesting. Heck, just last week they announced that a big chunk of the mantle beneath China contains as much water as the Arctic Ocean, though no one has much of an idea how to access it anytime soon.

Switching over to matters above, if you will, the NYTimes has an article about our evolutionary conditioning to believe in God. Just to set up the basic parameters:

About 6 in 10 Americans, according to a 2005 Harris Poll, believe in the devil and hell, and about 7 in 10 believe in angels, heaven and the existence of miracles and of life after death. A 2006 survey at Baylor University found that 92 percent of respondents believe in a personal God — that is, a God with a distinct set of character traits ranging from “distant” to “benevolent.”

The article mentions several interesting psychological studies, demonstrating that as young children we first believe that everyone thinks exactly the same (i.e., exactly like us), and later that we still seem to believe in omniscience, especially with regard to our parents until about age 5 or 6, and essentially suggests that God may be the residual of this belief.

Now, I might be genetically predisposed to be a non-believer, since neither of my parents are believers, but I am wary of the "nature instead of nurture" tone of the article. There is a strong social component to religion, especially given the role played by parents in teaching religion to their children (you have no idea how hard it was not to use the word "brainwash" there). Also, there is a bizarre tendency in humanity to believe completely random crap about just about anything, no matter how contradictory those beliefs may be, rather than admit to not knowing. Ask people if there is gravity on the moon, and more people will tell you "no" than "I don't know" (the answer is yes, of course, since mass is a source of gravitation and the moon has quite a bit of it). For reasons beyond me, people would rather believe their lives have an inherent point, even if we can't really define it, rather than admit we have no idea if we do or not. Most of it comes down to a sense of perspective: people ignore the fact of just how small and insignificant we are on the global scale, much less an astronomical ones. Maybe this is the byproduct of evolution: we specialize in explaining things, with very little regard to whether or not the explanations are correct, and uncertainty just flusters our well-evolved brains. Then again, I really don't know.

Finally, having looked up and down, let's just look all around at the invisible things all around us, in this case Wi-Fi networks. John C. Dvorak of PC Magazine, who is a very good writer, suggests that cellphone companies will try to kill off citywide WiFi projects, which would compete with their overpriced, tortoise-paced cell-based internet networks. He's certainly right about the telephone companies, who like just about all media/communication companies are fundamentally shortsighted about literally every technological issue with which they have to deal. I just wonder whether he fully understands kids these days. To anyone used to Hi-speed internet (let's say 10 Mbps or so), dial-up speed is physically painful. So long as there are restaurants and coffeeshops with free Wi-Fi, I'll blissfully ignore the existence of slower connections. If trapped at an airport without Hi-speed, I'll watch a DVD or read a book. I doubt I'm alone in this, it's just that a slow connection seems like a waste of time in the end. Outside of an airport, where exactly can one not find a coffeeshop these days? I would certainly look at paying for city-wide WiFi , but anything else is just a bit too close to the telegraph and the Pony Express. Thankfully, the cellphone companies don't have time on their side: free municipal WiFi may be hard to get implemented, but once in place it's hard to see what could make it go away. Besides, once Apple takes over the market with the iPhone, and then switches over to a WiFi/VoiP basis rather than cell when possible, how much longer will the cell phone industry be around, anyway?

And if your head explodes with dark forebodings, too

It's often been said that "Sports is human life in microcosm", but sometimes it's a pretty tawdry microcosm. Other times, it's just frickin' bizarre. We'll get to tawdry in a second, but first, the quotable sports story of the day:

The chicken toss has been declared off limits at Kansas State. For years, Kansas State students have smuggled live chickens into basketball games against Kansas, then thrown them onto the court and behind the opposing bench before tip-off mocking their rival's Jayhawk mascot.

Umm, how exactly does one get not one, but several live chickens into a basketball game? These days, many stadiums still check purses, on the chance that Al Qaeda might hate not only our freedom, but also varsity college sports. In what exactly can one keep a chicken hidden and quiet, out of view of security until it is chucked onto the court? This has to rank as one of the mysteries of the universe, as far as I'm concerned.

Anyway, to the tawdry. The chairman of the N.F.L.’s research committee on concussions, Dr. Elliott Pellman, has resigned. Ok, that's not the tawdry part. It turns out that not only was he caught a few years back seriously padding his resume, and not only is he not a freakin' neurologist, but his "research" for the league seems to contradict virtually all the established medical research on concussions. ESPN published a story on him and the NFL's treatment of concussions a year ago which was truly disturbing:

Since it first published research results in 2003, Pellman's committee has drawn a number of important conclusions about head trauma and how to treat it that contradict the research and experiences of many other doctors who treat sports concussions, not to mention the players who have suffered them. For example, Pellman and his colleagues wrote in January 2005 that returning to play after a concussion "does not involve significant risk of a second injury either in the same game or during the season." But a 2003 NCAA study of 2,905 college football players found just the opposite: Those who have suffered concussions are more susceptible to further head trauma for seven to 10 days after the injury.

Pellman and his group have also stated repeatedly that their work shows "no evidence of worsening injury or chronic cumulative effects of multiple MTBIs in NFL players." But a 2003 report by the Center for the Study of Retired Athletes at the University of North Carolina found a link between multiple concussions and depression among former pro players with histories of concussions. A 2005 follow-up study at the Center showed a connection between concussions and both brain impairment and Alzheimer's disease among retired NFL players.

Just to make it clear, post-concussive syndrome can be incredibly serious. Merrill Hoge, a former player and current sportscaster, described his symptoms:

Five weeks later, he was hammered on a tackle in a game against Buffalo and collapsed on the next down. His vital signs vanished for a few seconds. He spent two days in an intensive-care unit, and was told by neurologists that his eight-year career was over.

For a year, Hoge said, he could not stand bright lights and had dizzy spells. He struggled with arithmetic, and reading was difficult. He also had no sense of direction.

"It's one of the most helpless feelings I ever dealt with," he said. "I would get lost in my own neighborhood."

It can get worse. Andre Waters, a player for the Philadelphia Eagles, committed suicide in November, and the brain damage he incurred during his career is being blamed:

Brain damage caused on the football field ultimately led to the suicide of former NFL defensive back Andre Waters, according to a forensic pathologist who studied Waters' brain tissue.

Bennet Omalu of the University of Pittsburgh told The New York Times that Waters' brain tissue resembled that of an 85-year-old man and that there were characteristics of early stage Alzheimer's. Omalu told the newspaper he believed the damage was related to multiple concussions Waters sustained during his 12-year NFL career with the Philadelphia Eagles and Arizona Cardinals.

Anyway, back to the NFL's concussion committee. Were one to be uncharitable, one could suggest that the committee is blatantly violating their Hippocratic oaths and endangering players for either hidden payoffs or possibly even worse, the continued opportunity to be the medical equivalents of starfuckers. Shockingly enough, their systematic trend is to suggest that athletes being paid millions of dollars maximize the value that teams get out of a contract, even if it endangers their lives and livelihoods once they are no longer team property. I'm not trying to suggest that the people on the committee range from physicians little better than tools because they are working outside their field of expertise to compromised hacks who should actually know better...but I'm not really in the mood to suggest any other alternative, if you get my drift. As for the league, it's important to remember that while fans talk of tradition and good times, owners think of dollars. We see championships, they see dollars. We have heroes, they have profits. There may be an occasional exception (Mark Cuban of the Dallas Mavericks comes to mind), but in general, it's all about the money, and we are their all-too-willing ATM machines, as they pull their clever reverse Robin Hood trick on us.

There would be a larger outcry about this kind of thing, except for the fact that in discussing sports, most men take out their brains, place them gently on a padded surface, and replace their cognitive capacities with a mix of testosterone and bullcrap. We value things like "shaking off a hit" even if that hit has left an athlete with a permanent brain injury. Again from the ESPN piece:

A knee to the back of the head knocked Chrebet stone-cold unconscious a quarter earlier, and now the Jets' team doctor is putting the wideout through a series of mental tests...Then he asks, "Are you okay?" When Chrebet replies, "I'm fine," Pellman sends him back in.

For some sick reason, this kind of behavior is seen as exhibiting "toughness" and "resolve", and is admired and complimented. Forget the fact that Chrebet has a family and decades more to live, of course, since he's a wide receiver and this is a close game! For all that I love watching sports, sports culture often disgusts me, as my anti-Chief diatribes should probably have indicated. I'm still trying to convince myself that athletics can be separated from the culture surrounding them, but I haven't come up with an argument that sounds vaguely plausible as of yet. Thankfully, baseball lacks the violence associated with football, and merely has to deal with the fact that some people estimate that over 80% of all players take either steroids or some form of amphetamines. Joy!

Got to keep the loonies on the path

I'll have a great deal to say tomorrow about my current University's decision to dump their racist mascot tomorrow. Needless to say, I'm in favor. For today, some good news on why we will actually win the science wars, if none of the current military ones.

Kansas is something of an interesting state, deeply red and somewhat famous for having something the matter with it. It's also home to one of the most impressive fossil beds in the country, one that proves that the middle of the USA was under water eons ago. Politically, the state has been undergoing an evolution. The governor, Kathleen Sebelius is a moderately conservative Democrat who has made a cottage industry out of convincing moderate Republicans to switch parties and run as Republicans, including the current attorney general (who soundly defeated the wingnut opponent described in the linked article), and the former chairman of the state Republican party. It went little noticed during the landslide election of November, but voters also elected a slate of Democrats and moderate Republicans to replace the crazy religious kooks on the state board of education. As a result, the infamous anti-evolution science standards adopted in 2005 are now history. From The Guardian:

In a 6-4 vote on Tuesday night, the Kansas state board of education deleted language from teaching guidelines that challenged the validity of evolutionary theory, and approved new phrasing in line with mainstream science.

It was seen as a victory for a coalition of moderate Republicans and Democrats, science educators and parents who had fought for two years to overturn the earlier guidelines.

The decision is the latest in a string of defeats for proponents of creationism, and its modern variant, intelligent design. It reverses the decision taken by the same authorities two years ago to include language undermining Darwinism - on the insistence of conservative parents and activists in the intelligent design movement.

This is very good news all around. It's been noted that the Republican party has both a long-term and short-term crisis on its hands. Going into 2008, they are squarely on the hook for the Iraq war, and unable to convincingly blame anyone else for their mess. Today's vote in the House of Representatives may have been on a non-binding resolution, but several Republicans just made their races in 2008 much tougher. Chris Shays, the last Republican Congressman left in New England, may have just created an all blue region of the country by voting for against the resolution, and thus for the surge. Ditto several Republicans in NY and PA. In the longer term, however, the R's may be just as screwed. They rely on an uneasy alliance between business oriented economic conservatives, who they've been pissing off by being generally as incompetent with regard to the economy as they are with foreign policy, and the religious right, who are basically the only people left in the country who still support the president and the war. Without business groups and their cash, you end up with a vocal group of lunatics running the show who will start to alienate a great deal of the American population. I'm not confident the Democrats are fully ready to take advantage, but at least they are now showing some sporadic signs of life, though they still could show more courage on some politically charged issues.

As an example of the wingnuts who will hopefully be Left Behind soon (it's a pun, get it?), we turn to some Republican state legislators in Georgia and Texas. Georgia state Rep. Ben Bridges recently sent out this um, er, uhh, "interesting" FYI to his colleagues around the country:

“Indisputable evidence — long hidden but now available to everyone — demonstrates conclusively that so-called ‘secular evolution science’ is the Big-Bang 15-billion-year alternate ‘creation scenario’ of the Pharisee Religion,” reads the letter that went out under Bridges' name. “This scenario is derived concept-for-concept from Rabbinic writings in the mystic ‘holy book’ Kabbala dating back at least two millennia.”

As these kind of screeds go, it's basically three-for-three. Anti-Semitic, as I can only assume that "Pharisees" means Jews in this context. Anti-science just on its face....and to top it off, as anti-English grammar as any document I've ever seen. Seriously, read that quote again. Amazingly enough, a Texas legislator, Warren Chisum, the Texas House Appropriations chair, decided this would be a good thing to forward along, and sent it to all his colleagues. From Talking Points Memo, the inevitable reaction:

The ADL caught wind of the Bridges memo and now Chisum says he's "willing to apologize if I've offended anyone" if anyone got their big nose bent out of shape.

Reports the Dallas Morning News: "Mr. Chisum said he hadn't looked at the Web site and didn't realize that he was distributing that type of material. He expressed chagrin that he didn't vet the material more carefully."

No S#!t, Sherlock. It's generally a good idea to, you know, like read these things before you pass them along. Somehow, neither legislator managed to realize that the website from which the great Big Bang/Pharisee/Kabbala conspiracy theory originated has another rather..."fringe position"...

Barnes' memo [ed. note: the one forwarded by Bridges and Chisum] pointed fellow state legislators to the information at fixedearth.com which rails against the “a mystic, anti-Christ ‘holy book’ of the Pharisee Sect of Judaism” and claims that “the earth is not rotating … nor is it going around the sun.” They've even caught on to the "centuries-old conspiracy" on the part of Jewish physicists to destroy Christianity.

Yup, us crazy Jews and our embrace of the Heliocentric model of the solar system!?! My Sweet Lord, these people are absolutely bats#it insane, and these are state legislators in positions of real power. Just imagine the crazier people who are voting for them...

Money, it's a crime; Share it fairly but don't take a slice of my pie.

I've been known to complain that much of modern journamalism is either committed by idiots, or written assuming their readers are idiots. I'm not the only one who thinks so, Berkeley economics professor Brad DeLong has a running series entitled "Why Oh Why can't we have a better press corps", in which he argues the Washington Post should pay its readers, rather than the reverse, if all was fair in the world (warning: my link goes to the Google search result. If you click on the first link, it returns a VERY big page).

Anyway, in light of my scorn, I was blown away today by the superb job the New York Times did in explaining the cost of the war versus any number of possible other efforts. To summarize the chart contained within the piece, here is the annual cost of some various projects:

• Iraq War: $200 Billion


• Universal Health care: $100 Billion


• Universal preschool: $35 Billion


• Fulfilling the 9/11 Commission recommendations: $10 Billion


• Cancer Research budget: $6 Billion


• Immunizing all the world's children: $600 million (that's million, not billion)

For completeness, I could add to this list the budgets of NASA, $16 Billion, the National Science Foundation, $6 Billion, and the National Institutes of Health, $28 Billion. Needless to say, besides the fact the war was begun on immoral grounds, has killed over 3,000 US troops and many hundred thousand Iraqis, and has dramatically eroded goodwill toward the US in the rest of the world, it is a terrible waste of resources. Hint to the Democrats: we know you want to spend money on things besides the war, but don't want to be labelled "tax and spend liberals". Try the following: say the war is a failure and bankrupting the government, and propose instead to eradicate a disease. It's been done before, for smallpox! We've almost eradicated polio, with under 2,000 cases per year remaining. Experts estimate it would cost $3 billion per year to stop malaria. Americans may be parochial about having to use tax dollars for anything that benefits the rest of the world, but I think this one has some legs. There's a side benefit, too, one that all-too-often goes unmentioned, inexplicably missing from most discussions of the cost of war.

Money spent fighting malaria goes to scientists, makers of mosquito nets, and the local workers on the ground in the affected countries. Much of this money will eventually end up in people's pockets, and they can then spend it in turn, boosting in some small way the economies of several countries in the developing world. This is the good thing about many forms of government spending: it gets used to build things that add to the net value of the world's infrastructure. War, on the other hand, blows shit up. Shit like roads, buildings, and factories (and, of course, people). Every time we bomb those things, we decrease the value of the world's infrastructure, which in its own way hurts us all. Add to that the environmental devastation, the lost productivity because people are dead, too afraid to go to work, unable to work because the factory at which they work was part of the shit we blew up, or unable to work because they have no electricity, because the generating plant was also amongst the shit we blew up, and you start to see just how bad an investment a war is. It's really not a good idea to boost the economy by building things like Humvees that are also going to get blown up, when you can invest in infrastructure that might have a lifetime of more than a few years, like roads, schools, hospitals, and International Space Stations (actually that last one is a $5 Billion per year boondoggle, I just wanted to see if you were paying attention).

Remember, next time someone quotes a cost for the war, that they are only counting the cost to the US now, ignoring the benefits that said money could have been used for, to say nothing of the wreckage we are creating elsewhere. Any war, no matter how justified, spends money that could be used to end malaria, or even to fund small businesses in the developing world, like the Rooted Cosmopolitans Charity of the Month, Kiva, to which you can donate by clicking on the link at the top right of the page. I'll leave for later the explicit argument of just how immoral we are in not spending more on these things (and yes, I should be taxed more to pay for them, especially if they really soak the rich in the process), but it should be there in the back of everyone's mind, every time they hear about the costs of anything the government undertakes, even more so when the price tag creeps into the eight figure range.

Mother, should I run for president? Mother, should I trust the government?

So, it was asked in the comments who I'm supporting in the Democratic primary for the Presidency. Oddly enough, we have a split decision at home, with my #2 as her #1 at the moment, and vice versa. Noting that my opinion may very well change, and that certain candidates may either join or drop out of the race, here's how they rank at the moment, from last to first.

6. Other:: In this category, we'll include everyone not mentioned below. Suffice it to say, there are already two candidates I'm relatively thrilled about, so I'm not looking for a darkhorse, nor do I think we need one.

5. Hillary Clinton: Unlike the candidate to be found at #2 below, Hillary combines the worst of both worlds: A candidate who's not a particularly reliable progressive on some issues, primarily foreign policy (Hotline has her at 66 for foreign policy where 100 is ultra-liberal and 0 ultra-conservative), who's seen by many in the country as a loony liberal. Honestly, even though very little of it is her fault, I worry about a candidate that so many people view so negatively. Beyond this, too, some of her advisers or just those in general still associated with the Clintons have to be among the most noxious of the backstabbing inside-the-beltway democratic crowd, and I'd be happy to see their influence wane (this list includes Carville, Begala, Lanny Davis, Mike McCurry, Larry Summers, and a few others). Hillary deserves more credit than she gets, but she's the one candidate on the list likely to hurt the party with the infighting we really don't need.

3 (tie). Wesley Clark: For a bunch of reasons, I think his strengths will be less crucial now than they would have been in 2004, and his weaknesses more of a liability. Last time around, he was the military voice that could have stood up to Bush, Cheney, and their chickenhawkishness. Kerry should have been this way too, but he was tarred early as a fake and did an awful job of fighting back properly. In 2008, with the war going badly, the Republican love for national security as theater, rather than as something to plan out in a serious manner, will be coming back to bite them. Already, we're hearing an escalation of troops described as "The McCain Doctrine", and it's going to be an albatross for them. Thus, Clark's advantage as a General is less necessary, and his status as a campaigner becomes more important. Unfortunately, he was a good general but a rather poor campaigner, and I don't see what will have changed in the past few years to alleviate this.

3 (tie): Bill Richardson: Has good foreign policy chops and executive experience as governor of New Mexico, but can't really be said to have a ton of charisma. Maybe a good darkhorse Veep choice.

2. Barack Obama: My wife's top pick. I'd love to vote for him in the primary, but I can't commit to that yet. Oddly enough, race has nothing to do with it; he's not associated with the urban machine politics that tars a lot of black congressmen in some white voters' eyes (e.g., like Harold Ford). My big problem is the lack of policy in his message. He's all about tone, and he's by far the most gifted political speaker I've ever heard (better than Bill Clinton, who's damn good). He exudes charisma. He also has yet to say much beyond the need for changing the tone. If he would propose something big, he's got my vote. Calling for a redeployment out of Iraq helps a ton, but I want to hear something bold domestically as well. Presidents spend much of their time in office compromising, so I'd really prefer that he stakes out a bold set of policies as a starting point for negotiating ahead of time. If he endorses universal healthcare or something like that, he might become my number 1.

1. John Edwards: More charismatic than anyone besides Obama, he's been far and away the most substantive Democrat on the issues so far (noting that it's still early in the process). Trying to alleviate poverty is important, and I'm still a bit stunned that he seems to be the only major politician out there who noticed that New Orleans has been forgotten about by the President, a whole US city shattered and only rebuilt with piecemeal measures. Even if he ends up not winning the nomination, I think he and Obama will force each other in the right directions. Both will have to out-positive the other with the vision of an optimistic and progressive future, a message I think will have real resonance with the voters. There is a synergy to be found with their messages that would really make it difficult for Republicans to smear them, and I think this kind of optimism will win in the end against either McCain or Giuliani and their facade of strength, which in reality is a stubborn insistence on burying our military in Iraq while singing hollow platitudes to those sent off to die unnecessarily.

Wild Card: Al Gore: If he jumps in, all bets are off. He'd instantly become my favorite. I really, really doubt that he's running.

Ashes and diamonds, foe and friend; we were all equal in the end

As some of you may have heard, Gerald Ford died last night. So far, the news coverage has been relatively restrained, focusing more on his unfailing decency and impeccable statesmanship rather than his candidacy for immediate sainthood, thus falling short of the literal definition of hagiography even if it meets the pejorative one. As I was born early in the Carter administration, I can't say I have any real feelings either way about him; he seems like an exceedingly decent human being and I think he was wrong about pardoning Nixon for the reasons cited by Matt Yglesias in a post with which I agree wholeheartedly:

Promoting "healing" and a sense of "moving on" was, in fact, arguably more important than seeing Richard Nixon spend years in a jail cell. But there's a proper way to handle situations of that type designed to promote precisely those goals. It's the Truth and Reconciliation Commission model where ancien regime figures confess to their political crimes in exchange for amnesty.

As could be expected, Atrios nails the sainthood angle:

Our elites repeatedly redefine "getting past it" as "sweeping it under the rug" based on their apparent opinion of themselves as necessary moral and spiritual leaders for the riffraff. If they are revealed to be greatly flawed then without them as a shining beacon to light the way the riffraff will go astray and the country will collapse.

Oddly enough, I heard neither of these perspectives on the news today, in part because the media hates a narrative that questions their role and collective wisdom, but also because it's considered unseemly to point out that the recently deceased were recently human, as full of flaws as those still living. They will claim this is a simple courtesy done out of the respect for the family and loved ones, but they are lying. No such courtesy is shown to the living when scandal erupts, nor to the families of those killed in strange circumstances (a news network staple). No such courtesy is even shown for those who may be dying, as evidenced by the macabre coverage of Senator Tim Johnson's stroke ("Tim Johnson's illness has threatened the Democrats' majority. But that may not be such a bad thing" was the subhead of a Time Magazine article published two days after it happened).

No, speaking no ill of the dead is one of those games we play where we all put on our mask of civility and pretend that we don't notice everyone else faking it. We do it to feel like good people, taking up to a few days away from our standard daily sniping and overall nastiness, because that is what society demands of us. We revere the dead in a way that none of us would think to honor the living, even though it should be fairly obvious that the latter would appreciate it more. It is tradition, and like most traditions associated with death and its aftermath, it makes almost no sense at all.

Speaking as a Jew, I understand that thousands of years of tradition demand that a body should be buried whole, which makes the acts of suicide bombers even more horrific in their implications, if that is possible. Still, when Israel or any other country negotiates with its enemies for the remains of dead soldiers, I am left to shake my head. If nothing else, doing so increases the value for your enemies of killing your troops or taking them hostage, which is never a wise trend to encourage. If a dead body is just that, then you are negotiating for what is no longer a person; taking a more religiously oriented view, do you really care to believe in a God that judges souls based on the state of their mortal remains rather than their beliefs or actions? I'll happily take a Jewish funeral (closed casket; no flowers; burial within two days of death) over the more showy Christian versions, but I'd be happier to see more people donate organs to the living and their bodies to science. Mind you, I have to admit a preference for a nice Irish wake instead of a year of mourning, so I can be interfaith with the best of them.

More than anything else, I think most of our more bizarre death-related beliefs spring from our own fear of death. I'm not talking about talking to the dead seance-style, about which little more need be said (hint: the voices you hear are inside your own head). No I'm talking the elaborate fictions that people build for themselves under the moniker of "heaven". Needless to say, I'm pretty much convinced that people who believe in the afterlife are fundamentally kidding themselves, constructing childlike fantasy worlds for their future selves because they are unable to deal with their own transience. Even Jews, whose philosophy is that the dead live on in the memories of their loved ones, are kidding themselves to an extent. Let's call it the Chester Arthur rule. Name three facts about Chester Arthur. Who is he, you ask? He was the 21st president of the USA, and a century later no one remembers him at all; most of us will be lucky to leave memories that last more than a generation or so. This bothers me not a bit. If our existence is fleeting, our effect on humanity minimal, our presence on this planet inconsequential to anyone outside a small circle of friends, family, and acquaintances, so be it. No one ever promised us that we inherently matter long after we're gone, and in many ways it serves as a security blanket that allows us to ignore our more immediate failings and weaknesses. Rather than concentrating on all the lives we are eventually going to touch, it's good to go out and do it now. The moments you spend on some project for yourself (like writing a blog!) are moments that could probably be spent on others as well, and its the same story for your money. Give up both and lead a life of poverty in service to others? Nah, life is about compromise. Everything in balance, because the world is more than happy to crush your spirits if you forget to look out for yourself. No, the point to be made here is that wagering on an eternal life because of a 2,000 year old book is a good way to overlook the present one. Live a good one now, and if it works out for the very best, you've got eternity to take part in some kind of weird angelic choral competition while wearing white robes and wings.

Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way

The best piece of opinion journalism about the Iraq war that I've come across is "The Incompetence Dodge", by Sam Rosenfeld and Matthew Yglesias of The American Prospect magazine. As a side note, TAP is IMHO the finest liberal political magazine in the country, and their blog Tapped is a must read if you want some smart policy discussion with your politics. Anyway, they argued in November 2005 that the failure of the war was not that it was a good idea marred by incompetence at the top, but rather a bad idea from the beginning, because there was little chance whatsoever the Iraqis could forge a working stable government between themselves, and no number of US troops could bring that result about.

More recently, as public opinion in America turns to the idea that the problem in Iraq is irresponsible Iraqis, it was pointed out that both our leaders and the media have a habit of infantilizing the leadership of foreign nations, buying into a reward and punishment model for dealing with foreign nations while ignoring their interests. The media, I would argue, does this habitually. Whether it be politics as theater, the complete inability to determine the difference between facts and opinion, or the complete unwillingness to challenge well-worn narratives (McCain is an independent maverick!!), they really do a shoddy job of delivering in-depth news when they break away from missing pretty white woman stories. For politicians, however, we should ask for more. They, as powerful people, should know better.

Thus, the Man of the Year, as has been the case five years running, is George W. Bush (it should have been Bin Laden in 2001, may he rot in hell). Forget Rumsfeld; to quote Brad DeLong, the Kossacks work for the Czar. BTW, skipping forward 50 years or so, I'll leave it to you, DJ EZ D, to explain this blog's clever title. The only alternative should have been Ibrahim al-Jaafari and Nouri al-Maliki, the last two Prime Ministers of Iraq. Why are they both such failures, having come into office in a wave of purple fingers and purpler press releases? Because Iraq can't work at the moment, and no amount of bargaining on our part will bring that dream back to life (I'll leave denial to the administration, anger to the voters, take depression for myself and recommend skipping acceptance altogether). Without some semblance of security and the prospect of common goals, it will get much worse before it gets any better, and neither they, nor anyone else, will be able to do a thing about it. If there was a chance to save Iraq, and I doubt there was, the key words snuffing out hope belonged to Rumsfeld, and many people realized at the time how deeply disturbed they were: "free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes". Who will eventually restore order? The guy who can establish control. It could be some combination of either Moqtada al-Sadr and/or SCIRI, since they both have militias, living in uneasy truce with the Kurds, but it won't be pretty, and we should have freakin' known that, and those who ignored the fact were foolish, criminally foolish to ignore that fact. In the end, the ultimate description of Iraq may have been provided by the aptly named movie Army of Darkness. "Good....Bad...I'm the guy with the gun."

Time is gone, the song is over, thought I'd something more to say

My co-blogger was too humble to mention it, but not three hours after we created this blog, and before we even had a post up, Time Magazine declared us to be "The Person of the Year". Well, technically it was for all of us netizens, the posters of content and meta-content on the world wide web (so it doesn't really include Ted Stevens, but does include the guy who remixed him).

Suffice it to say, this is the kind of print journalism that explains why people blog about how print journalism is dying a sad and increasingly irrelevant death, in no small part because of their complete mystification about blogs. Like most topics, I pretty much agree with Atrios, who agrees with one of the finest web comic strip writers out there.

To put my spin on things, let me just say that in a world currently featuring two wars in which the US has been enmeshed for years, as well as a number of growing civil wars in which we should have intervened but didn't, Time magazine chose to focus on the makers of viral videos and descriptions of what they think about the book they read last week (yes, that's me, the previous comment is supposed to be ironically self-deprecating). Salon, to its credit, chose a specific online incident, S.R. Sidarth being called "Macaca" by the former junior Senatorial wanker from Virginia, which did in the end flip control of the Senate away from the dark side and back to the forces of not entirely evil.

I don't expect much more from Time Magazine, who really aren't pretending to be this dopey, but you should. More tonight on why assuming rampant stupidity is a problem, in light of the book I am going to review next week and the right choice for person of the year, which is supposed to be given to the most important person for shaping world events, for good and ill.