meta-roj

rock on, old man

“sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor liberty to purchase power”

hero

it sounds good when you say it out loud, doesn’t it?

president george w. bush [2006.01.10]

Compromise and consensus and power sharing are the only path to national unity and lasting democracy

tyranny on the home front while we bomb democracy into those silly foreigners.

an interesting statement that floated into my brain…

Bush signs bills but keeps his fingers crossed [btc news]

Bush doesn’t veto bills because in his view, he doesn’t have to; he can simply ignore the ones he doesn’t like.

congress makes laws, but they only apply to the executive branch when they are convenient. and i only get access to the courts if i’m not designated an unlawful combatant or shipped offshore to a camp. from the “conservative” party, no less. i’m sure the people that wrote the constitution felt that it was more of a guideline than a rule.

i just have to nod to jaron for the use of brobdingnagian in an essay.

hopefully that’s enough to focus your valuable attention over there for a few moments…

myspace got popular, and then it got bought, and now, apparently, it’s being pruned by the new owners…

Get out of MySpace, bloggers rage at Murdoch [independent, 8 jan 2006]

The 38 million subscribers to MySpace, which News Corp bought for $629m (£355m) last July, discovered that when they wrote to each other about rival video-swapping site YouTube, the words were automatically deleted, and attempts to download video images from YouTube led to blank screens.

…

A spokesman for MySpace said it would not explain how the blocking of YouTube came about, nor how it was resolved, nor whether in future it would continue to block links to rival websites or censor messages between MySpace customers.

sounds like one of those determinism things to me.

since i can’t quote without permission, i’ll just cut to the simple math (someone else has done the hard math).

an economist with some street cred among economists has published an estimate of the cost of war in iraq as high as $2 trillion.

visiting the population clock gives a current us population of 297, 869, 425 (give or take).

$2,000,000,000,000 / 297,869,425 = $6714 and change.

that is not entirely fair, since a good portion of the cost is being borne by non-us citizens, and i’m using the high estimate from the paper as opposed to the low estimate.

but, let’s put this in an historical context…

White House Cuts Estimate of Cost of War With Iraq[NY Times via The Iraq Foundation, 2 jan, 2003]

The administration’s top budget official estimated today that the cost of a war with Iraq could be in the range of $50 billion to $60 billion

in case you’re keeping track of the zeroes, that’s a little more than 33 times the white house estimate. 16 if you’re feeling conservative.

so much for the end-of-season

les paul, hangin’ with vh1

i don’t care what they do, just come on up [to the] stage and we’ll do the best we can and make them a star

walt whitman, leaves of grass

That you are here-that life exists and identity, That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.