Afghanistan War Deaths Pass One Thousand

This is Memorial Day even though if you're a purist, the date was yesterday that we celebrated the holiday for over a century. But today is the day they are doing all the military ceremonies. Last week the one thousandth troop was killed by a roadside IED in Afghanistan. There were surely be later one thousand intervals to commemorate along the way. They also announced last week that the overall cost of this war in Afghanistan just topped one trillion dollars. That would build a lot of schools or feed a lot of hungry children. Also just recently the troop level in Afghanistan surpassed that in Iraq. We are now down to 92.000 in Iraq and have 115,000 or so troops in Afghanistan. These are all troubling milestones. No way are we going to beat that July 2011 deadline for starting to pull troops out of Afghanistan. War is an addiction and the more you feed it the harder it is to let go. Of course tacked on to that trillion is all the future medical expenses of those troops who have yet to be, but will be wounded in battle. They will need a lot of intensive care.

Well the "Top Kill" maneuver by British Petroleum has officially failed. Too much mud and oil was continuing to gush up. The plan has been to fill the pipe with mud and later with cement. And they even tried that rubber tire and golf ball combination they were talking about. This is the sixty major maneuver they have tried and now they are contemplating number seven, which is plan G, I suppose. Some day they're going to run out of letters. This plan involves sawing off a pipe and putting a cap on the well, but if the thing blows more oil will be escaping than ever. I don't see why they just don't run a long hose from the pipe to the surface and start filling up oil tankers. They say there is a lot of oil on the surface now that could be skimmed but they just don't have the equipment to do it. Obviously everybody involved in this whole fiasco, including the President, gets an F. People are resigned to the notion of endless oil flowing out till August when they have those relief wells dug.

I guess since living here or at least the last four years (since 2006) Memorial Day hasn't been my favorite holiday. I've had a cold for over a week and most of that time I have had a bad hacking cough that just won't go away. It makes it hard to string two intelligent thoughts together knowing you're hacking your brains out in-between thoughts. Of course these days any holiday that comes at the end of a month I won't like because it means I'm low on money, and ditto if that holiday comes on a Monday. Also I don't like the fact that talk radio thinks they can start playing reruns. I've never figured that one out because if there is one time they'd want to attract new people it would be on a day they don't normally get off. And finally I don't like Memorial Day because it's the start of the endless summer reruns season on TV. Well, that's just my take on the day.

This is Saturday morning a little after nine and I just watched the end of “24” overlapping the last twenty minutes of what I’d already seen. It doesn’t pay to quit before knowing the whole story. Jack Bower was down because Jack had Clowie shoot him in a “clean shot” that missed all major organs and arteries. But they still suspected Clowie and her assistant and brought the data card to the President. President Taylor’s relenting and not signing the peace treaty at the last possible moment was truly the news flash of the final hour. Then it was simply a question of trying to rescue Jack from that ambulance ambush she had planned to put Jack in a “black site”, or kill him outright as former President Charles Logan had planned. .Jack Bower made it through the episode alive, which is more than I expected. People look for that redeeming turn in events in Christianity, but if you're me you never seem to find any there. There is a definite warming trend in the weather today.