Month: March 2011

Exum does some math: 

A Tomahawk Missile cost $569,000 in FY99, so if my calculations are correct, they cost a little over $736,000 today assuming they are the same make and model. The United States fired 110 missiles [Saturday], which adds up to a cost of around $81 million.

Issandr El Amrani poses some questions about Libya:

Once empowered, the insurgents will naturally want to go all the way and topple Qadhafi. I totally support them in that endeavor. But we don't know much about them, or how they might behave towards non-combatants that back the Qadhafi regime. I'm sure any violence against civilians by insurgents will be ignored by the intervention force in the fog of war, but this is possible only to a certain extent before it becomes embarrassing, particularly as UNSC Resolution 1973 gives a mandate to protect civilians from everybody, not just the Qadhafi regime. Sometimes the good guys can be bad guys, as we saw in Darfur (both in terms of the stalled peace process and in terms of the actions of certain Darfuri groups).

This rebellion was not a universal, non-violent act of civil disobedience, as in Iran, Egypt and Tunisia. It was a violent uprising that begin with the rebels insisting on no foreign interference. And the brutality of the Qaddafi forces will doubtless prompt rage from their enemies, if they get the upper hand.

Why not get a UN Resolution in a few weeks' time that will prevent the people we are now supporting from subjecting Qaddafi loyalists to a campaign of murder and terror? Kinda like Afghanistan, sped up.

Stephen Dubner summarizes a new study:

“Schools facing increased pressures to produce academic outcomes may reallocate their efforts in ways that have unintended consequences for children’s health. For example, schools may cut back on recess and physical education in favor of increasing time on tested subjects.” Caveats apply, but the scholars find that “schools that were on the margin of passing have about a 0.5 percentage point higher rate of overweight in the following year.”

(Photo: A cafeteria worker supervises lunches for school children at the Normandie Avenue Elementary School in South Central Los Angeles on December 2, 2010. By Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images)

After reading the story of the brother joking over his sister's death bed, a reader recalls an old column by Dan Savage:

After a long struggle, we had to go into my mother's hospital room and tell her that nothing more could be done. She didn't go into the hospital expecting to die and she was not ready to go. But she took the news with her characteristic grace. She said her farewells, asked us never to forget her (as if), and paused for a moment. Then Mom lifted an eyebrow, shrugged, and said…

"Shit."

My mother wasn't crude; I didn't get my foul mouth from her. She used profanity sparingly and then only in italics and quotation marks. When she said "shit" on her deathbed, we understood the joke. What she meant was this: "Now, the kind of person who casually uses profanity might be inclined to say 'shit' at a moment like this. But I'm not the kind of person who casually uses profanity—and certainly not at a moment like this. But if I were the kind of person who casually used profanity, 'shit' might be the word I would use right now. If I were that kind of person. Which I'm not."

Everyone gathered around her bed—my mother's husband (my son has two fathers and so do I), my sister, my aunt—knew what Mom wanted: She wanted us to laugh. This woman, so full of life, who wanted so badly to live, having just been told she would not, she was trying to lift our spirits.

A reader writes:

I tended to my leukemia-stricken father for two years prior to his demise. His wife and I joked throughout, especially in the moments after he died and we called the mortuary to take him away. He had had a penchant for giving driving directions even when he was delirious after chemotherapy. I said that even now he was telling the hearse driver to change lanes, the exit was coming up. The ensuing laughter was our appropriate goodbye.

Another returns to the original subject of Gilbert Gottfried:

I think your reader who described his sister's death misses a key point. It is one thing, as he points out, to make "tasteless" jokes about YOUR OWN tragedy, but an entirely different one to make tasteless jokes about someone else's. He and his family were "entitled," so to speak, to do anything and everything to get through that painful situation with as much of their sanity in tact as they could.  Americans making jokes about Japan is an entirely different story.

Jon Lee Anderson finds one:

I talked to a wounded Qaddafi fighter in a specially guarded back room. His name was Mustafa, and he was from the southern oasis town of Sebha. He said that he thought he was fighting pill-popping Al Qaeda extremists, as Qaddafi had repeatedly described the revolutionaries. Mustafa said this with a straight face that was difficult to read. He had six bullet holes in him which he began to show me, painfully, until I asked him to stop.

Yesterday, by some weird coincidence, was the exact date the Iraq war began. It was also a night of spectacular beauty, as NASA reveals above.

A parliamentary debate will be held and a vote on the Libya war will be taken. When will the US Congress be able to debate and vote? When will the congressmen and Senators actually take a position for the record? Or is that kind of democracy the kind of thing we only export and don't actually follow ourselves?

A useful reality check:

Early in the briefing, Gortney said the attack involved "110 Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from both U.S. and British ships and submarines."  Later, a reporter asked: "Can you specify how many British ships were involved compared to the U.S. ships?"

"We had one British submarine," Gortney said.

"And the rest were all U.S.?"

"Yes, ma'am."

Was this really about his re-election chances? Stephen Harper has some political challenges as well.