More on numbers--and on the moral imperative to sometimes lose a war

There are so many ways to look at numbers, especially when it comes to cost/benefit analyses.

There are 26 million people in Iraq--or were, before they started dying off. What if, instead of spending half a trillion dollars in Iraq, we had simply given Saddam Hussein $1 billion and told him to retire to a palatial estate in Saudi Arabia or Sudan, and then distributed the rest of the half trillion to Iraqi citizens to help them establish themselves after Saddam's departure? If we gave each Iraqi $18,000, we'd still come out ahead.

And, as an added bonus, a half-million dead Iraqis would still be alive. Iraqi fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, sons, 4-year-old daughters, newborn babies, babies still in the womb--considerably more than Saddam Hussein murdered during his brutal reign. I don't suppose there's a need to factor those lives into the cost of the war, since they're not really on OUR balance sheet, which only contains some 3,000 American soldiers and an unspecified number of "contractors." But still.

Of course that's not the whole story. Long after the conflict is over, there's that twenty percent of soldiers who will be so mentally and physically disabled that they will need lifelong care. This considerably boosts the cost of the war--to as much as $2 trillion, say the experts.

Of course, we've had a run of bad luck in Iraq. But what if the invasion had been more successful? The balance sheet would have looked a lot better then. The invasion would have penciled out. We'd all be patting ourselves on the back for bringing democracy to Iraq, never mind the sacrifice of all those lives. And we'd be ready to move on to the next country in need of a democracy.

The nice thing about looking at things in terms of numbers on a balance sheet is that you don't have to deal with the immorality of invading a country that was no threat to the United States or any other country, and lying to justify the invasion. Or the greater immorality of needing to continue the devastation until you "win," because winning is more important than anything else.

This is not ultimately about numbers. It's about morality. For the sake of our immortal soul, we need to lose this war.

Everyone talks about money in politics, but nobody does anything

Death Knell May Be Near for Public Election Funds - New York Times

WASHINGTON, Jan. 22 — The public financing system for presidential campaigns, a post-Watergate initiative hailed for decades as the best way to rid politics of the corrupting influence of money, may have quietly died over the weekend.

This is why campaign finance schemes like matching funds and voluntary spending limits don't work. The only campaign finance reform that works is Clean Money/Clean Elections, a voluntary publicly funded system that's changing the political landscape in Arizona, Maine, Connecticut and the cities of Albuquerque and Portland. John McCain--Mr. Campaign Finance Reform himself before he dropped his principles to become a presidential candidate--supported this kind of reform.

Clean Elections is a bipartisan movement with major support from figures on the right and left, who say

Congress would only have to spend $6 per citizen per year to publicly fund each and every election for the House, the Senate and the White House. When you consider that "pork barrel" projects cost every one of us more than $200 last year alone, it’s no contest.

Many of the political outrages we rail about--however dire--are symptoms of our campaign finance system and will arise endlessly until we solve the problem of money in politics. I've long wondered why the progressive community doesn't put more of their energy into this core issue. It hardly ever arises on Daily Kos discussions, for instance. Any ideas?

Our Friends in the Middle East

Detained Iranians Had Iraq Approval - New York Times

The Kurds are our friends--but wait, they are friends with Iran, who is not our friend.

Al-Maliki is our friend--but wait, he is also friends with Al-Sadr, who is not our friend.

The insurgents are Sunnis, and therefore not our friends--but wait, they want to destroy Al-Sadr, who is, as mentioned above, not our friend, even though he wants to destroy the Sunnis, many of whom are not our friends.

Saudi Arabia is our friend--but wait, they are also friends with the Sunnis, many of whom, as mentioned above, are not our friends.

Oh, and Turkey is our friend--but wait, they are not friends with our friends the Kurds.

New posts below

Yeah, I've been writing. Just not posting. See below.

History of a box

I threw out a 50-year-old cardboard box today. It was kind of beat up. It contained Christmas ornaments and it came to me along with a bunch of other things my dad had put in storage after he and my mom got divorced. After some 30 years of storing an evolving Christmas "collection," I decided the box was due for a reorganization.

The string of original lights left had to go, because they were huge energy consumers, and I hadn't used them in years. Over the years, strings of lights had been added and subtracted as old ones wore out, or trees got bigger or smaller. Next to pieces of glass ornaments, unidentifiable crumbly white objects in the bottom of the box represented the year when we made ornaments with cookie cutters from homemade cornstarch-and-flour modeling clay.

More stuff was added than was taken away. An assortment of felt ornaments personalized with school photos of my kids in various stages of development accumulated year after year, from their respective school classrooms. In later years, the box grew decidedly more rotund than it started out, as did I. It was barely recognizable as a rectangular solid. The original staples holding it together had given way to several newer layers of packing tape, which are now in turn disintegrating. Time to go.

This box was made in Antioch, California, about an hour from where I live now. On the bottom of the box is a stamped "Certificate of box maker." The certificate declares that the box conformed to various official specifications and even tells what railroad container it came/went in.

Unfortunately, I can't recycle this box. One side is covered with pale yellow paint, which my dad used to paint a whole series of identical cardboard boxes he labeled and placed on shelves he built in the garage to hold just that size box. The yellow paint was a sort of unifying theme. I remember him painting the boxes, 50 years ago. Paint does not recycle well, so into the landfill it must go.

My mom left the contents of the garage to my dad when she moved out, so he bundled them all into storage while he sorted out his life. When I bought a home in 1977, he gave me the key to the storage space and the loan of a U-haul truck. They were transferred to my garage, but with considerably less order. The one marked "XMAS" is the last of the bunch.