Posts by Berck

And it’s only the middle October! Woohoo!

So, the most accurate study up until now showing how many Iraqis had died as a result of the US invasion was 100,000, based on a 2004 Lancet survey. Before you discount it, you should probably listen to this. Even Joanna agrees the survey is probably accurate. And since they purposely didn’t survey Fallujah, it’s probably much higher than that. The most disturbing part? Almost all the deaths could be directly attributed to Coalition forces, rather than death from disease, etc, attributed to war.

Well, they’ve updated it for 2006, and are up to 650,000 deaths over baseline. To put it into perspective, similar surveys of our own civil war suggest somewhere around 615,000 deaths over baseline.

Amazingly, we’ve watched two good movies in a row. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was excellent. It’s clearly taken a page from Pulp Fiction but is worlds funnier. Absolutely hilarious on the surface, and a lot of the dialogue is subtly funny. There’s a character named Flicka which eventually leads to the line, “Oh, my friend flicka told me,” which wouldn’t have been funny if they’d try to play it up. The narration was done by someone aware that he’s narrating a movie, which is old, but not too bothersome. A-.

We just finished watching Thank You for Smoking. Hilarious look at big tobacco from their side. Most entertaining movie we’ve seen in awhile. A-.