Mauna Kea

Mauna Kea

Civilian Fatalities in Iraq as of May 31, 2005

Civilian Fatalities: Estimate
Reported MIN	Reported MAX	Avg	Days
21940	24897	29	808

Reported civilian deaths resulting from the US-led military intervention in Iraq as of Tuesday, 31st May 2005

Source: The Iraq Bodycount Database

Iraqi Police and Guardsmen Fatalities in Iraq as of June 4, 2005

Iraqi Police and Guardsmen Fatalities: Estimate
Total	Avg	Days
2203	2.7	808

Source: Iraq Coalition Casualties

Coalition Military Fatalities in Iraq as of June 4, 2005

Coalition Military Fatalities
US	UK	Other*	Total	Avg	Days
1670	89	96	1855	2.3	808

* Polish, Danish, Spanish, Italian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Thai, Estonian, Salvadoran, Netherlands, Slovaks, Latvian, Kazak, Hungarian

Source: Iraq Coalition Casualties

Methamphetamine Epidemic

The U.S. is experiencing a methamphetamine epidemic. Over the past ten years meth moved from being a predominantly rural problem in isolated areas to a national epidemic. A google news search of methamphetamine returns over 5,000 news articles for just the past 30 days. Every state is reporting strained resources for emergency services, law enforcement, fire fighters, treatment services.

This is not a rural problem in Iowa, not an inner city problem in Chicago, not a California problem, nor a New York problem. The epidemic is spreading through rural areas, urban centers, suburban neighborhoods, from Maine to Florida, Arkansas, South Dakota, Texas, Nebraska, California, Alabama, Oregon, Kansas, Louisiana, Hawaii ... I could list all 50 states, and all the counties in those states, and still have to add on Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico.

A google search of the top ten U.S. newspapers during the same 30 day time period returns 70 results. The meth epidemic appears to be invisible to the major and national media which makes it even more difficult for local communities to get help and resources for the front lines battle against this epidemic.

Article Counts by Media (May 5 - June 4, 2005):
USA Today - 4
Wall Street Journal - 4
New York Times - 6
Los Angeles Times - 19
Washington Post - 12
Daily News - 0
New York Post - 2
Chicago Tribune - 0
Newsday - 14
Houston Chronicle - 9
Christian Science Monitor - 2
Miami Herald - 14
Reuters - 0
MSNBC - 3
CNN - 3

Middle Class Shrinking according to Bureau of Labor Statistics

Factcheck.org has done the summarizing for me in Update on Kerry's "Shrinking Middle Class" -- Still Shrinking in 2003. Read the Bureau of Labor Statistics, "Real Earnings in July 2004" and the U.S. Census Bureau, "Current Population Reports, P60-226, Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2003" available from the U.S. Government Printing Office for yourself if you're skeptical.

If you are skeptical, then could you loan this downwardly mobile workaholic a few dollars?

Give the Middle a Break (rumored to be an email to president@whitehouse.gov)

Dear President Bush,

I have been saving for retirement for fifteen years. I have -18.9% return on my investment. Although I am a cautious investor with a graduate degree in finance, I was unable to survive the market downturn which hit me hard beginning in 2001. I stayed away from internet stocks and other high-fliers, but was unable to guess the extent to which companies were lying on financial statements, nor the extent to which Wall St. analysts were lying about their analysis.

If you proceed with your present plan, I will not receive enough social security to help me during retirement. Half my parents retirement income comes from social security. The other half from their company sponsored pension fund. I have never worked for a company with a pension fund because most pension funds have been eliminated.

When I retire, I will have no pension, almost no social security, and the very small sum of money that may survive the vicissitudes of the investment market. In reality, I will not be able to retire at any age.

Yet, my work in the information technology field is being not only out-sourced, but in-sourced also. When my department requests additional employees, we must wait until they can be brought in from overseas. Even temporary employees must be brought from overseas. I work 60 to 80 hours a week to keep my management from thinking that it would be cheaper to replace me with a worker imported from overseas.

I work for a Fortune 2500 firm which will remain nameless. Because our parent company has been bid-rigging for years and recently was investigated, our stock has recently severely declined. This has had a negative impact on our investments through the company stock option program.

From every direction my government and private industry is working against typical middle class wage earners like myself. You want to cut my social security benefits. You encourage outsourcing my job by keeping in place tax incentives. Now I hear that you want to increase my taxes by getting rid of my mortgage and state income tax deductions, so that you can decrease the taxes of people who already have lots of savings.

I'm not asking for any help. Just please, stop doing so much harm, harm to the middle class wage earners. We're the oil in the machinery of this country. We help the rich get richer, and keep the poor from completely starving. We're squeezed from every direction. Our benefits only decrease; our taxes only increase; our real wages steadily decline; our expenses steadily increase; and yet we continue to show up to work early and stay late in order to put in our 14 hour days week in and week out.

We don't have any lobbyists. No one in government needs to consider us. There is no profit and no glory to championing the middle class wage earner. Yet, no democracy can survive without a large and healthy middle class.

Regards,
Jag Hwawck Ulaga

Pronunciation: 'jag 'wäk ü 'läg ä
(Just Another Glamourless Hard Working American Who Can't Keep Up Let Alone Get Ahead)

Moviephile

Favorite Movies:
The Insider, The Secret of Roan Inish, The Straight Story, Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man, Horseman on the Roof, Queen Margot, Elizabeth, Run Lola Run, The Princess and the Warrior, Amelie, Songcatcher, Chocolat, Benny & Joon, What's Eating Gilbert Grape, The Man Who Cried, A River Runs Through It, The Four Feathers, Lone Star, Pride and Prejudice, The Missing, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch, Hero, 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon', `Eat, Drink, Man, Woman', A Room With a View, Don't Look Now, The Seventh Seal, My Dinner with Andre, Gosford Park, Gandhi, Indochine, The Lover, Two Brothers, Middlemarch, A Room With a View, Persuasion, Full Metal Jacket, Sound of Music, Moulin Rouge!, Election, Desperately Seeking Susan, Stranger Than Paradise, The Tango Lesson, Finding Neverland, Doctor Zhivago, Monsieur Ibrahim, My Brilliant Career, Babette's Feast, The Piano, The Portrait of a Lady, Ran, Korol Lir (King Lear/Russian), Shadow of the Vampire, Heaven's Gate, , Big Night, Vatel, Tous les matins du monde, Like Water For Chocolate, Tampopo, Scent of Green Papaya, Bread and Tulips

Other Notable Movies:
Fanny and Alexander, Persona, House of Flying Daggers, Raise the Red Lantern, Ju Dou, The Story of Qiu Ju, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Nosferatu, Breathless, Week End, 8 1/2, Blow-Up, Eraserhead, The Story of Adele H, Camille Claudel, Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, Enigma, Michael Apted's 42: Forty Two Up, Dead Again, Charlotte Gray, Stage Beauty, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Sling Blade, Map of the Human Heart, American History X, Girl Interrupted, The Opposite of Sex, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Antonia's Line

Documentaries:
Roger & Me, Bowling for Columbine
Waco: The Rules of Engagement, Super Size Me, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Riding Giants, Hoop Dreams, Control Room, Born Into Brothels, Salaam Bombay, The Fog of War

Kobe must go.

Kobe has created his own triple crown triumph. Over a 12 month period he has alienated three future hall of famers and successfully had them removed or blocked from the Lakers organization. Not even Michael Jordan had this much power during his tenure with Chicago, or if he did he certainly never wielded it in such a careless and callous manner.

Winning is everything in professional sports and if the Lakers win the championship this year, all will be forgiven of Mr. Bryant. But the legion of Kobe detractors is growing, and waiting for the crown prince who rules Laker management to show the world that his crown is nothing but fool's gold. Pyrite worn by a pyre. A combustible heap for burning a dead body.

When Kobe goes the Lakers can begin their resurrection.

soldier and child

So you were wondering about the Iraqi casualties...

When the Iraq war began, I read that the US military is prohibited from gathering information related to Iraqi casuaties. The US military has well developed methods and statistical models for calculating casualties. However, that sort of information is difficult to keep secret. Gathering no data would be the only way to ensure that no Iraqi casualty data could be leaked.

Still, I wondered how Iraqi military and civilian casualty counts compared to US and coalition counts. Recently, I read a news article about a study published by the Lancet, a UK medical journal, regarding the Lancet's report that "Making conservative assumptions we think that about 100,000 excess deaths, or more, have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq."

excerpts from the article
Violence accounted for most of the excess deaths and air strikes from coalition forces accounted for most of the violent deaths." Violent deaths were mainly attributed to coalition forces - and most individuals reportedly killed were women and children.

Violent deaths were mainly attributed to coalition forces - and most individuals reportedly killed were women and children.

Dr Les Roberts, who led the study, said: "Making conservative assumptions we think that about 100,000 excess deaths, or more, have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The Lancet published research by scientists from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the US city of Baltimore.

They gathered data on births and deaths since January 2002 from 33 clusters of 30 households each across Iraq.

That is the highest estimate that has been made publicly. It's a bit of a shock.

A Millennium Late and a Barrel Short

-----Original Message-----
From: Kimberly
Sent: Nov 10, 2004
Subject: Bush Looking Anew for Alaska Oil Drilling - EarthLink - Political News
Hooray! Oil costs will start to come down as we make progress!

Don't count on it. Oil is a non-renewable resource which will continue to go up in value and price. Exploration in Alaska is expensive and the extent and location of the reserves is unknown. Expect to pay more for gas from Alaska. There is also no evidence that sufficient oil can be drilled in Alaska to free us from our dependence on foreign oil which is the real problem. We still need to intervene in the Middle East in order to secure our oil supply.

Iraq has the second largest (after Saudi Arabia) oil reserves in the world and the exploration is already done and the reserves proved. We just need to set up an infrastructue in Iraq to get the oil out. The catch is that as long as the US intervenes in the Middle East, we will be targets for terrorists who find foreign intervention upsetting (to put it mildly). We can't stay in Saudi Arabia to secure the world's largest oil reserve because the peninsula is considered holy to too many of those Muslim folks.

Neo-cons thought that Iraq would present a good alternative to Saudi Arabia, but their strategy is running into some unexpected resistance and the US is drawing the ire of Islamic militants who suspect that the US wants to set up a permanent military presence in Iraq and export her oil to theUS using US oil companies, US workers. Their suspicions are in fact true, but we're doing it in their best interest which is why Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, et al can't understand why there is an insurgency going on.

I am forgetting about the increase in oil consumption overseas. In October, Greenspan noted in a speech that "Adding to the difficulties is the rising consumption of oil, especially in China and India, both of which are expanding economically in ways that are relatively energy intensive."

Greenspan along with many other economists (both conservative and liberal) believe that "... much of world oil supplies reside in potentially volatile areas of the world. Improving technology is reducing the energy intensity of industrial countries, and presumably recent oil price increases will accelerate the pace of displacement of energy-intensive production facilities. If history is any guide, oil will eventually be overtaken by less-costly alternatives well before conventional oil reserves run out. Indeed, oil displaced coal despite still vast untapped reserves of coal, and coal displaced wood without denuding our forest lands."

By "reducing energy intensity", he means using less oil. This all means that oil prices will remain high due to steadily increasing world demand, but the high prices will accelerate the pace of developing alternatives.

Alaska doesn't matter one way or the other. By the time Alaska can come online, we may not need it anymore. The benefit of development in the Alaskan wilderness is short term and temporary job creation during the exploration and building phases, and short term windfall profits to the owners of a very few companies. There are no long-term benefits to development in Alaska. We probably don't fully understand the long-term risks of developing Alaska. Some try to suggest that the risks are only to the environment, the wildlife and man's spirit; however, we are learning a little late about the connectedness of the various elements that make the Earth uniquely life supporting.

Word of the Year: kakistocracy

kakistocracy: : government by the worst


etymology: Greek kakistos (superl. of kakos bad) + English -cracy

Cacti and other Details

The news stories on Theo Van Gogh's memorial services attributed the leaving of cactus plants by mourners to his having had a "prickly personality." Yet at least one story reported that Van Gogh used to give guests a cactus plant when they appeared on his television talk show. Obviously, mourners left cactus plants because they were a trademark of Van Gogh.

This is a minor detail, but sometimes a minor detail can suddenly make one aware of the tenuousness of the faith we can put in all our sources of news. When you read a novel the author asks you to suspend belief for the duration. When you read a media article, you are asked to excercise belief. In other words, the media asks us to suspend disbelief.

Since beginning this blog, I read news articles differently, more critically. When you begin to deconstruct the information flow of the media, you must begin to question.

Silencing the Artist: Theo Van Gogh

Services were held today for Theo Van Gogh, the Dutch filmaker who was murdered by a suspected Islamic extremist a week ago. His murder has been linked to "Submission," a short film he directed which criticized the treatment of women under Islam. The film was controversial and ill-received in the Muslim community.

Mourners "...left cactuses, a tribute to the filmmaker's prickly nature, and bottles of beer."

"Van Gogh was a cherub-faced cynic who loved to irritate - and sometimes insult - those he felt were too sensitive.

"I'm deeply religious - I worship a pig," he once said. "I call him Allah."

During his award-winning career, he lost several jobs for crossing boundaries of good taste and had complaints filed against him by Jews, Christians and Muslims.

On his TV interview show, "A Nice Chat," Van Gogh wore suspenders, chain-smoked and gave his guests cactus plants as parting gifts."

Obviously, mourners left cactus plants because they were a trademark of Van Gogh.

Word of November: demagogue

demagogue: a leader who makes use of popular prejudices and false claims and promises in order to gain power

Does nice matter?

Since the sudden ending to the Kobe Bryant criminal prosecution, I have been wondering if I can be an enthusiastic Lakers fan while Kobe Bryant is the star of the organization, and it turns out I'm not alone.

The L.A. Times writer Elizabeth Kaye wrote an article about the subject and concluded that "After watching him play in the preseason, it's a moot point. Watch him and you'll get caught up, even if you don't especially want to, and his game will overwhelm the question of "should we?" and its cool, detached considerations."

She asserts that the qualities that made him an accused rapist are the very qualities that make him a great basketball player. She puts forward the opinion that "to use those talents requires that your own needs are met first. It requires an unshakable belief in one's abilities that we diminish by labeling it conceit or arrogance. We forget that selfishness and arrogance are job qualifications for an artist. Without arrogance, the canvas never fills with images of the lowly sunflower, the high note is never struck. There is no leaping into the air in defiance of gravity." In one paragraph Ms. Kaye links Bryant's athletic prowess to Van Gogh's artistic ability and the grace of the lyric soprano reaching for high notes.

Balderdash. Nice matters.

Mr. Bryant brought himself down all by himself. There was no Ken Starr, no twenty million dollar investigation, no struggle with mental illness.

If Mr. Bryant needs to meet his needs first in order to use his talents, what sort of needs is Ms. Kaye referring to? The need to treat a teenage girl like a hooker?

Unbelievably, Ms. Kaye calls rape an "abortive tryst." A woman has to have unbelievable courage to come forward with a rape charge in a society where the women are even more brutal and less supportive than the men.

Since when are "selfish and arrogance" "job qualifications for an artist"?! Apologist bullshit.

If people want to like Kobe Bryant in spite of what he has done, that's their business. If people want to imagine that Kobe Bryant is the innocent victim in this saga, then let them sleep with their cloudy illusions. But don't try to tell me that none of this matters because an artist must be a monster to be great.

We are succombing to a warped cynicism as a society. People find it easier to believe that a nineteen year old girl from a loving, supportive, middle class family is some sort of brilliantly devious and deviant, money-grubbing whore, rather than believe that one of the world's most successfully aggressive athletes didn't take no for an answer. He's aggressive enough to get rid of Shaq and Phil Jackson, two stars of basketball, but he's just a poor victim when he runs up against a teenage girl. Right. Teenage girls from supportive familes and small town backgrounds are never naive, never too trusting. No, they are as coldly calculating, as materialistic and unscrupulous as Don King. And if you believe that I have a fine plot of land in the Gobi desert that I would like to sell you.

And as to the argument that Mr. Bryant is just a basketball player, then he shouldn't mind losing all those plush endorsement contracts that use his iconic image and hero status to push products to kids.

International election?

I'm starting to hear from friends overseas. Europe is not impressed with our electing George W. Bush to a second term. Don't they have a sense of humor?

My friends from Asia have a more pragmatic approach. They like the stock market going up and disapprove of the war in Iraq.

I have heard that perhaps the US is beginning it's decline and in the future we may all be speaking Chinese in order to conduct business. At first this sounded quite humorous because most Americans barely speak English, but on second thought I decided I had better pull out my 'How-to write Chinese characters' books. If you know how to write 'Beautiful Prosperous Lilypad', my chosen Chinese name, send me a pictogram. Also, send one if you know how to write 'Leave me alone you Wart-nosed stinky toad'. (It's best to be prepared.)

One bright spot

Barack Obama won a resounding landslide victory in the U.S. Senate race in Illinois. "His victory gives Dems one of their few bright spots on a dismal day."

I would definitely be thrilled about this newcomer, even if I didn't know him. He's got some great ideas and some real clout. As USA Today wrote, "He's a player..." and a major one at that. He's got national attention now... time will tell what he does with his opportunities.

It's great to see meritocracy at work.

Congratulations and good luck Obama!

Dark Korners

Four more funny fun-filled years of George W. Bush. The only positive thing I can think of to say is that at least John Kerry won't end up getting blamed for the mess that W has made. W is the first President since Hubert Humphrey during the Great Depression to have a net loss of jobs during his term as President.

At least he didn't get appointed by the Supreme Court this time.

George W has got no heart. I can't even bring myself to link to his victory speech. He's just sucked the heart out of me for the day.