Posts by Berck

To date, as of tonight, is $463 billion. (As you read this, it’s more like ###.) There’s really no way to think of this number in any way that makes sense. What got me thinking about it was the Superconducting Super Collider, canceled by the republicans, because it was just insanely expensive at $12 billion. We could have built 38 of them by now. That’s right, 38. Wow. How does this compare, to say, the international space station? The total costs of the space station through 2010 are estimated at $130 billion. So, we could nearly have four ISS’s for the cost of the war… to date. By 2010, if the spending continues as it has today, the war will have earned us another 1.5 ISS’s. These numbers for war cost are on the low side, and doesn’t include any long-term equipment costs.

You can play this game lots of ways. Some sites estimate the cost at $4,100 per US household. Or $3,791 per Iraqi (I don’t know if this number counts the dead ones or not). We’d certainly have been better off just trying to buy Iraq.

I wonder how many folks would still support the war if we gave them the choice of getting a tax refund of $4,100 or going to war. Not that we had/have the money to do either.

Even if you persist in the insane belief that the Iraq war was necessary, or good, can you seriously think that it’s been good enough or necessary enough to justify the cost? Where the hell are the fiscal conservatives?

My wife is driving off into the snow to straw poll caucus for religious nutjobs that (thankfully) don’t stand a chance. I vaguely considered voting, but caucusing is too much trouble, and as an independent, I’m not welcome in this two-party monopoly anyway.

Things are becoming less and less clear about my job. Folks in the class before the class before ours are still waiting around for sims. The whole thing is pretty much absurd.

I’ve pretty much settled on driving down there on Sunday. I’ve got a few days left to do whatever it is I need to do before I leave. I’m not entirely sure what it is I need to do.

Jonah wanted a picture of the massive pile of beans at San Tung. I figured I’d get it after we were done eating, but by then they’d processed most of them. Dave got this one before they were completely done.

When it comes out that the Christian leader of the fight against gay rights has bought gay sex from a gay prostitute (as well as some crystal meth while he was at it) I’m not at all surprised.

Similarly, this nugget is just too grand for me to let it escape unmentioned: There’s a Utah-based company, Clean Flix, that edits and resells Hollywood films after removing all the sex, nudity, violence, and “bad” words. So why am I not surprised that the company’s owner was just arrested for sexual abuse and statutory rape? Also, it seems that the owner also told the girls that Clean Flix was merely a front for a porn studio!

This is not an uncommon pattern. Crazy Christian seeks to restrict or eliminate something which he views as deviant behavior (or likely to lead to deviant behavior), only to have it come out that he himself engages in this very same behavior. One could argue that they want to prevent others from becoming similarly deviant, but I think it far more likely that the restrictive culture tends to cultivate deviants. I don’t mean to necessarily indict Christianity specifically, as I’m sure any ultra-conservative restrictive culture has the same problem, but it seems to be more prevalent in Christianity. This is, perhaps, a result of the “ask and you shall be forgiven” nature of Christianity which leads to the belief that the sin is okay because “We’re all sinners, but we’re going to heaven anyway!”

I just wish we (as a society) could focus more on our real problems, rather than the perceived ones. Why can’t evangelical mega churches be leading the fight against poverty instead of spending so much time, money and effort condemning the gays and converting foreign heathens? Sure, there are plenty of churches doing plenty of good, but no good comes out of breeding intolerance– especially not for themselves.