Typically outraged Michael Moore open letter to George the Second here, taking him to task for Enron:
What shame do you feel tonight, George, for the lies you have told? What shame do you feel using the dead of 9-11 as a cover for your actions, hoping that our sorrow for those lost souls and our fear of being killed by terrorists would distract us from what your boys and Kenny Boy were up to during those horrific weeks in September and October?
References collected here.
Girls were, in fact, just as aggressive as boys, though in a different way. They were not as likely to engage in physical fights, for example, but their superior social intelligence enabled them to wage complicated battles with other girls aimed at damaging relationships or reputations … up to the age of 4 girls tend to be aggressive at the same rates and in the same ways as boys — grabbing toys, pushing, hitting. Later on, however, social expectations force their hostilities underground, where their assaults on one another are more indirect, less physical and less visible to adults.
The Cordelia character on Buffy/Angel was much more fun when she was an Alpha Girl.
Lisa’s from Toledo, near where, apparently, there’s an outbreak of killing by human clones. Send in Mulder!
So it’s definitely seeming more and more unlikely that an attack on Iraq will come anytime soon. This article says Afghanistan exhausted critical munitions supplies, and the Pentagon lacks the 200,000 US troops required:
Pentagon planners say it will take six months to produce enough Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs), the precision systems that guided 1,000-pound bombs to Taliban and al Qaeda targets, to contemplate an attack on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq … Former Pentagon officials in touch with current planners say as many as 200,000 U.S. ground troops may be needed. By comparison, 60,000 U.S. military personnel are in the Central Command region — 4,000 of them on the ground in Afghanistan.
And even if they get these supplies, bringing down Saddam Hussein is unlikely to be as easy or come with as few US casualties as fighting deluded stone-age religious nutters in the hills and valleys of Afghanistan:
The Iraqi regime is also much stronger than the Taliban was. The Taliban fielded perhaps 45,000 troops, while Iraq has armed forces totaling 400,000 … By early March 1991, the Iraqi armed forces had been reduced to a shadow of their former selves. Yet weak as they were, they still had enough strength to crush the largest insurrections in Iraqi history and keep Saddam in power. Those who favor the Afghan approach against Iraq are therefore betting that a U.S. military effort significantly smaller than the one mounted in 1991 would somehow produce much greater results this time around … The key Iraqi divisions never broke and fought hard, although not particularly well, during the coalition’s subsequent ground offensive … Once an Afghan-style air campaign began, Saddam would have every incentive to crush the Kurds. Since America’s ability to defend them without ground forces is extremely limited, it has relied on deterrence — the threat of a massive air campaign — instead. If such an air campaign is going on anyway, that threat will no longer work, and Saddam would likely move to reoccupy the north — with all of the attendant slaughter and repression that would entail.
So I was baffled why people seemed to be taking this new Saudi “peace proposal” seriously. Or at least, letting it see the light of day. Given that it demands Israel’s withdrawal from the territories it occupied after 1967, and the current mood Israel’s rulers, that seemed absurd. Then I read this:
If oil trading were left to market forces, the kingdom’s oil exports to the United States would fall by half. Instead, Saudi Arabia pays a price for its market share, a price that fluctuates each month as market forces change. Saudi Aramco, the state oil company, earns about $1 a barrel less on sales to the United States than on sales to the countries of Europe and East Asia. That discount translates into a subsidy to U.S. consumers of $620 billion per year. In return, the United States deploys military forces in the Persian Gulf, which is of course also expensive. And given U.S. sensitivity to Riyadh’s policy concerns on an array of issues, from the Arab-Israeli peace process to Kosovo to Central Asia, Washington pays the additional price of being constrained in its own foreign policymaking.
See how badly you’re infected.
My results:
I liked this from NTK. The old bio for Bush the Second’s Secretary of the Army dwelt at length about his 11-year stint as an Enron executive pirate. In the current bio, Enron gets barely a mention.
A Minnesota doctor whose 13-year-old son was visiting his father in California arrived yesterday morning at the upscale Burlingame home where he was staying and stabbed the boy to death with a kitchen knife … She then went to a rear bedroom of the house where her son was awake and dressed [his father] went to the back room after hearing the boy screaming and allegedly found Anderson stabbing him multiple times in the chest and torso with a seven-inch blade.
What does a busy killing machine need on the road? Why, a Containerized Chapel.
There’s also, of course, the Containerized Latrine. What a thoughtful army, providing warm prefabs where people can expel their guilt, then their faeces, in total comfort.
