he suenadome

wuensche euch einem schoenen neuen Jahr. Feliz nuevo ano and so forth. Hope you all had a holly, jolly christmas.

Scholarly review of "The Simpsons Movie"

"Sir, I'm afraid you've gone mad with power!"
"Of course I have! Ever tried to go mad without power? It's boring, and no one listens to you."

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"This is Tom Hanks saying if you're going to pick a government to trust, why not this one?"

6 XL

Yessiree-bob. we broke $6,000,000 in fundraising for the 24 hr. period before midnight EST last night for Ron Paul's campaign. It was fun to watch the counter go up. Kept thinking, now how can i get 100,000 folks or so to contribute like that to my cause? Don't know if it'll get him much attention in the press, but it will buy a lot of air-time, and when it comes down to it, it doesn't matter whether the press likes him or not-- it just matters if people vote for him. SO GO VOTE!

Hey man, can you spare some change?

Today is the second of the Ron Paul "Money Bombs" planned in his campaign-- today in recognition of the Boston Tea Party, and our general disapproval of taxation without representation. So far (and it's 11:45 am here) he's cleared about 3,000,000 in donations since yesterday evening. i'd like to invite you to go to his site and donate, even if it's 5 or 10 bucks-- just to make your name count. i donated everything we can afford to donate last month and the month before, but i put ten more in today because this one'll definitely make the news and get him some coverage-- veeeeery important less than three weeks out from Iowa's caucuses and less than four weeks out from New Hampshire's primaries. Even if he just makes a really strong showing there, it'll make people in other states say, "Hey, who is this guy? Maybe he is worth voting for." Iowa and New Hampshire don't have that many delegates, but they do heavily influence the rest of the electorals just because they're first to sound off. Go here to watch the numbers rise (they're updated every few seconds), then click on the "donate" tab on the far right of the screen to give something. It's worth a li'l quid to say you did what you could to have the chance to vote for someone worth voting for.

Good news!

i found this (let's say) fascinating-- fascinating enough, at least, to induce me to break out the calculator and crunch some numbers: the AP reported today that only 718 Iraqis were killed in the last month. That is to say, the number of Iraqis killed as a result of violence in Iraq fell to 718 from some apparently higher number.

The number one killer in the U.S. is heart disease. So i thought i'd look up the statistics and compare our rather mundane serial killer (i.e. McDonalds, et al.) to the Iraqis' rather more flashy mode de mort of gundowns, shellings, bombings, beheadings, and otherwise generally being reduced by or to shrapnel.

There are just over 300,000,000 people in America. The statistics i found from the AHA are from 2004, but in 2004 157,600 folks clocked out from heart attacks. (Important note: this figure doesn't take into account any other form of CHD or vascular disease, generally.) That washes out to about 13,133 people per month, or about .0044% of our present population.

Iraq, according to the CIA's site, has approximately 27,500,000 folks: a tad over 9% of our population. If a mere 718 Iraqis a month are murdered (and do remember that's the lowest figure in the last year, which is why it made the news) it works out to 2,136 people per year. Each month, if it only stayed at that rate, Iraq loses about .0026% of its population to war-- over half the number per capita that we lose to myocardial infarcts.

Now, i realize that death is death, and once you're there, it doesn't much matter the cause; but here when someone dies a gruesome, intentioned death-- even if they were theretofore doing everything in their power to deserve it-- it makes national news. What would it be like if 7,800 people died each month from slaughter? That'd be .0026% of our population: two or three World Trade Center bombings each month.

And of course i'm not implying that we're doing the killing; it's a civil war. i'm just crunching numbers. But that's a helluva lot of people.

Bizarre world.