What do you know about that?

You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.

Eric Hoffer (1902 - 1983)

For quotes, always check out quotations page.

And, once you've voted, you'll need this training

Okay, they have a few good points

I love Matt Taibbi

And sometimes he writes things that make my jaw hang slack:

McCain's transformation is so complete that at a recent town-hall meeting in Nashville, when asked to name an author who inspired him, the candidate -- who once described televangelists of the Jerry Falwell genus as "agents of intolerance" -- put none other than Joel Osteen at the top of his list. "He's inspirational," McCain said.

Standing at the meeting, I didn't write Osteen's name down in my notebook -- apparently because my brain refused on some level to accept that McCain had actually said it. Of all the vile, fake, lying-ass, money-grubbing shyster scumbags on the face of this planet, there is perhaps none more loathsome than Osteen, a human haircut with plastic baseball-size teeth who has made a fortune selling the appalling only-in-America idea that terrestrial greed is actually a form of Christian devotion. "God wants us to prosper financially, to have plenty of money, to fulfill the destiny He has laid out for us," Osteen once wrote. This is the revolting, snake-oil-selling dickhead that John McCain actually chose to pimp as number one on his list of inspirational authors. So much for "go, sell everything you have and give to the poor," and all that other hippie crap from the New Testament.

End to end and edge to edge

Robert and I cooked up this little project a few weeks ago, and only tonight worked on the math. Check us and see if we're right.

So, this required a little research. (edit - and, fortunately, I know a Canadian who helped me with the metric conversion error)

Iraq is 438,317 km² or 438,317,000,000 square centimeters (edited to correctly reflect cubic centimeter calculation)

A dollar bill is 156 mm by 66 mm by .11 mm, or 102.96 square centimeters (edited from 1029.6 centimeters, which I thought looked pretty big...)

We've spent $3,000,000,000 on Iraq according to the Washington Post.

If each of those dollars were laid flat across the land surface of Iraq, they would cover 3,088,800,000,000 square centimeters.

3,088,800,000,000 centimeters divided by 438,317,000,000 centimeters is .7046954601. (edited to correctly show relationship between smaller dollar size and larger Iraq size)

If we'd have just taken the cash, and laid it all end to end and edge to edge, we'd almost have covered the surface area of Iraq with dollar bills. (edited to allow for corrected math.)

Taken another way, the WaPo estimate is considered by many to be low, and is several months old. Pretty soon, we could conceptually have covered the entire country with dollar bills.

Thanks to Wikipedia for providing the measurements of Iraq and the US Dollar, and to Google for its most helpful up and down conversion function, and Excel for being able to take numbers over 100,000,000.

And, thanks to my favorite Canuckistanian, Eric in Vancouver, who provided me with this very helpful conversion:

Ya know D,

After going to bed, I thought of an easier way to calculate this without losing track of erroneous zeroes and to help you with imperial-vs.-metric measurements:

Let's start with 1 square metre. A metre is approximately the size of a yard (39" or so). A metre is 100 cm, so a SQUARE metre (approximate the size of a square yard) is is 100cm x 100cm or 10,000 square (NOT cubic) cm.

A square cm (a little under a half inch squared ) is about the size of a sugar cube.

By your measurements, it would take 103 to cover a dollar bill. Let's round it down slightly to 100, and add the 3% later.

A km (1.6 miles) is by definition 1,000 metres. So a square km is 1,000 x 1,000 metres or 1 million square metres.

So to cover a square km with dollar bills we need 100 (to cover a square metre) X 1 million, or 100 million of 'em.

10 (TEN) square km would therefore take ten hundred million (aka 1,000 million, aka a BILLION) singles to cover it.

Let's stick to 10 (TEN) square km needing a BILLION bills for now:

Iraq is 438,317 square km.

To cover it would therefore take 43, 831 BILLION dollar bills

That's also known as 43.831 TRILLION bills.

(Remember that 3% we rounded up a while ago? Let's take it off now to bring the 43.831 BILLION down to 42.5)

So to cover Iraq in dollar bills would take 42.5 TRILLION of them

At $4.25 Trillion spent, you could cover 1/10 of the country in dollar bills.

E.

Who would best represent you, as our Senator from Texas?

This one?



Or this one?

The real effect of gay marriage

popping corn and popping bubbles

This morning, I went for a walk around the huge KBR complex up the street. I intended to listen to a Bill Moyers podcast (which takes about 45 minutes) and to get some idea of what the heck USED to be on that huge yard. As I was walking along through the mounting waves of heat and temperature, I noticed that I could hardly hear out of my left ear, but could hear great out of my right.

The first thought was that perhaps my headphones were busted. After all, these mini-cables are very tender to internal breakage and shorting. That thought lasted a nano-second, and then I started to reflect that I hold my Treo 700 (tm) to that ear. I put my Bluetooth (tm) headset in that ear. Was I suffering damage to that ear from the constant irridation of that part of my head?

I come home, and my friend Ben has sent me an article. Ben's always got something interesting to share, so I went to it right away.

Uh, scary. Seriously scary. Fortunately, it's not TRUE. But, it makes you wonder.



While we're on the subject of scary, how about this new fangled definition of two words not previously associated?

hot stain n. Because there are what scientists call “hot stains‘“…the parts of the Earth now running out of potable water. Hot stains include northern China, large areas of Asia and Africa, the Middle East, Australia, the U.S. Midwest and sections of South America and Mexico. —“Protecting water vital to America” by Marylou Healy APP.com (Asbury Park, New Jersey) June 16, 2008.

Over on Hullabaloo yesterday, Tristero wrote something that I'll never forget about the Supreme Court's decision released last week about Guantanamo...

As much as I would like to believe the Bush revolution has failed, I really don't think a 5-4 decision restoring the Magna Carta counts as evidence, or any of the other victories for America that occurred with the same or similar margins.

Lastly, here's a terrific article from Harper's magazine about the law and order herd mentality that will cause those who have an open spot in their thinking to revisit the idea that more police, more prisons and harsher punishment is the answer.

It was written in 1929. It could have been written today.