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Friday, June 10, 2005

Patriotism!


Sometimes the best thing you can do for your country is to be unpatriotic.  And what is more unpatriotic than disrespecting the War on Terrorism?  

On the way home today, I heard on NPR that there are one million kids in the USA with lead poisoning.  Half of them get no treatment or even follow-up testing.

What is the implication of that?  Let's do some quick back-of-the envelope calculations.  500,000 kids with untreated lead poisoning.  Without the poisoning, 1% of them would become geniuses, if we define a genius as a person in the top 1% of intelligence.  It's probably safe to say than no one with lead poisoning will become a genius.  That means that we are going to loose 5,000 geniuses.  

If a terrorist organization somehow figured out how to assassinate five thousand of our geniuses, and did it, it would be catastrophic.  We'd probably nuke everything and everyone we could, just to show how tough we are.  Yet our own government, our our corporations, and our own landlords are doing exactly that, and nobody cares.

Another unpatriotic thing is to criticize the President.  Courtesy of Swerve Left, Slyblog, PSOTD, Florida Politics, Huffington Post, and TalkLeft, we learn that the Bush Administration was involved in a deal that would have overpaid an influential contributor to their campaign by about $80 million.  The deal is remarkable because it is contrary to just about everything the Republican Party says it stands for.  The story is remarkable because the deal never went through, after environmental activists raised a fuss.  How often does that happen?!

Wotisitgood4 went ahead and compiled a list of all the embarrassing things that have come out about the Administration this week.  The Everglades deal was one of five.