My housemate just brought up the point that the Iraq War has now used up more money than the value of all the oil in Iraq, even if you don't count the cost of extracting the oil. He had his numbers off a little way off, but the point is still interesting to think about.

Let's see, under the sands of Iraq there's about $5.6 trillion worth of oil (figuring about $50/barrel). And the Cost of the Iraq War so far: $234 billion. How much more will the U.S. spend? How expensive will the oil be to extract? What will the price of oil do, and whose oil is it? These are all things that will effect the final result of the equation, but it's looking like even from just a business perspective, the "Blood for Oil" may not end up being is still well worth it. (In other words, my housemate was totally wrong. I did the math wrong at first so i thought he was only wrong by about a factor of 2, but he's actually wrong by a factor of 20, hence the crossed-out sections.)

But one final thing to point out: you could buy about 11 million Toyota Prius hybrid cars with the money the Iraq War has cost us. Not quite enough for every car-driving Unitedstatesian, as my housemate claimed, but maybe the government could get a bulk discount....

(and isn't it amazing that in about 5 minutes I can go to the web and check a statistical factoid that someone tells me and come up with how true or false it really is? Things haven't always been this way...)

I just went to get groceries. Recently whenever I go food shopping I'm just filled with dread and despair, because I'm sort of caught in a dilemma: On one hand, I'm not much of a cook. I've never been really into food, or cooking food (at least not in commparison to a lot of friends of mine) though it can be fun to cook with and for others. On the other hand, although that lack of interest in cooking leads me toward easy-to-prepare "instant" sort of meals, it lately has just disgusted me on so many levels that so much food is so processed. Even something as benign as tofu or rice milk is an incredible manufactured result of industrial society. A lot of it has to do with my travelling in the developing world and seeing people eat really simple food that they've prepared themselves. Like limonada homemade from real limes right in the kitchen instead of buying some can of frozen concentrate or whatever.

Ideally I should just get more into cooking and gardening and permaculture and stuff, and prepare more of my own food and eat less frozen/instant junk. It's pretty hard though. It's just one of many lifestyle things that's really difficult to change. In some ways I can look at how I live and feel good, like that I don't own and drive a car. But there's still so much improvement to do, and so much juggling of priorities. Like, how can one spend 6 hours a day editing progressive advocacy videos, and also have time to grow one's own soybeans and make one's own tofu from it?

This Volkswagon commercial is really fucked up - making light of terrorist suicide bombing to sell cars is just not acceptable, in my opinion.

The ad looks like it's intended for European audiences, given that I don't think the specific model (the Polo) is available in the U.S., and that the setting is obviously a European city. I wonder what reactions to it have been, and I wonder how they would differ in the States.

This also brings up a shortcoming with Google video. The interface is confusing, and there's very little information about where this thing came from. Who uploaded it? There's a "more from this user" link, but who's the user? How can we contact him? Why can't I leave comments? I'd prefer it be more like Flickr with tags, comments, messages, etc., rather than just some totally anonymous and under-described repository of media.

http://steev.hise.org/vids/GermanengineeringvAr.avi

But note that it's a DIVX file so you may have to install that codec if you don't have it already. Though I find that VLC plays it fine.