on the nature of the world, its scale, its geologic record, and its many destinies.
Archive for May 10th, 2008
on time and on budget.
that’s a job!
but i really, really, really don’t want to do this. even after talking about home heating oil i don’t. i don’t want to help people cope.
i want us up and out!
reading about the federal low income home energy assistance program and citizens energy and the CITGO/venezuela program. in terms of the coming winter’s heating oil price problem, these amount to — roughly — less than half of the need in a fifth of vulnerable households — and at the likely prices next time that half will only barely keep the winter’s cost from tripling.
joe kennedy’s the face for citizens energy, through which CITGO works. he wrote in the WSJ that extraction price for US oil is $15–20 a barrel — let’s call that 50¢ a gallon. it’s actually less than that. selling heating oil at a buck a gallon is a 100% profit. who needs larger than that?
oh! needs. who said anything about needs.
i’ll make some calls the next few days, do so more reading, find out what people are up to. most likely it amounts to the kinds of overwhelmed (and kinda humiliating) local charities like in this.
the receivership society.
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have thus far produced 300,000 psychological casualties, 320,000 brain injury casualties, plus 35,000 (probably understated) officially reported “normal” casualties. This adds up to 655,000 US casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, an average of just under 101,000 Americans killed or wounded every year since the wars began. If the idea of 101,000 casualties for every extra year in Iraq and Afghanistan gets out and infects the voting public, imagine the effect on the currently torpid national debate over leaving in five years versus fifteen years!
that’s how it ends. it starts like this…
A friend of mine who’s a librarian was recently reviewing job applicants. Asked his qualifications in library skills, one man put “machine-gunner.” He was a vet who’d served in Falluja. The library is in a state school here in the US that, last fall, had 650 such vets enrolled. The young man got the job but soon became irked by what he saw as the trivial preoccupations of his colleagues. He applied for a job at a nearby police department. All over the country police departments are advertising for Iraq vets. Three-quarters of the way through the hiring process, the PD signaled to him that things looked good. Then, in rapid succession, three Iraq vets in the area were involved in lethal episodes: two murders and one suicide. The PD immediately called the young man in for a second psychological evaluation, then nixed him for the job. He’s 24. He can’t find anything satisfying to do and is thinking of re-enlisting. He’s against the war.
because she told us not to get seconds until everybody’d got firsts.
and that’s unamerican! according to some.
ring ring ring