Personal Dork Assistant

Wars and SARS

Most antiwar blogs are nothing more than self-righteous masturbation from screechy liberals. As if anyone cares about dead or maimed Iraqis (or journalists, for that matter). On the other hand, the mainstream public is also painfully bad at order of magnitude estimation, so it's good to see someone balance CENTCOM's proclamations with some more sensible numbers. Well, they might not be that sensible, but at least we can split the difference between the extreme scenarios and end up with a reasonable estimate without resorting to tin-foil hat paranoia.

For some legitimate paranoia, how about the spread of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome? The whole Iraq Adventure is just a little right-wing realpolitik that'll soon be forgotten once Americans realize that they still don't have any fucking jobs. A virus is not so easily distracted. It doesn't help that China is stonewalling, as usual, even though southern China has been the breeding ground of funky viruses for ages. Mom actually knows someone whose mother went on a trip to Guangdong and ended up dead from an (then as of yet) unknown pneumonia-type disease in February, and there were cases going back even further. Now we just need a superspreader to hop on a plane, and the super-duper-mutant cold virus will be really on the loose. We are soooooooo fucked.