GET YR WAR ON (INVOICE EDITION)

ITEM: A new study guestimates that Iraq War 2 – which kicked off ten years ago today) is going to ultimately cost the USA $6 trillion. 

That includes the $1.7 trillion in war expenses to date, an additional $490 billion in benefits owed to war veterans, and another $4 trillion factors in to pay interest through 2053.

According to the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University (which wrote the report), that last figure is due to the fact that the US govt had to borrow all that money to fund the war (seeing as how George W Bush was in the business of cutting taxes, not raising them), which it has to pay back with interest over the next 40 years.

FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY!

BTW, here’s what you got for that:

The new study concluded that both the war and the subsequent $212 billion reconstruction effort were failures as the war "reinvigorated radical Islamist militants in the region, set back women's rights, and weakened an already precarious health care system" while "most of [the reconstruction] money was spent on security or lost to waste and fraud," according to Daniel Trotta of Reuters reports.

As usual, Wonkette offers more concise commentary than I ever could:

What a deal! Freedom, water, and antiquities for the low low price tag of $6 trillion dollars. Did we also mention that over a hundred thousand people died and almost a million more were displaced? Did we also also mention that there may be around 16,000 people held in secret prisons and the female relatives of politically active men are routinely imprisoned and tortured or, at the very least, threatened with rape?

And people ask me why I don’t take Republicans seriously when they say they’re a whole lot better with money than Big Govt Tax/Spend Socialist Democrats. 

BONUS MATERIAL: More good commentary can be found in The Economist.

Bill shock and awe,

This is dF

LISTEN TO IT #70: NOTHING CAN GO ON WHILE FOREVER INCREASING!

Get out yr thesauruses – Bad Religion is back with their 16th studio album.

Or, if you prefer, they’ve recorded the same album and released it for the 16th time.

I kid.

I do like Bad Religion a lot, but it’s fair to say they’ve stuck to the same formula for so long that the albums are musically interchangeable.

Granted, in this case Greg Graffin has fresh material from the 2012 election cycle to work with (and trust him to work “Corporations are people” and Citizens United references into a song lyric). Other than that, though, it’s really more of the same.

Whether that’s good or bad, as always, depends on yr existing opinion of the band (not to mention politics in general). For me, I think it’s okay. It delivers what you’d expect in a Bad Religion album – breakneck tempos, lush background vocals, intellectual lyrics with occasionally hard words you won’t find in the average Pitbull song. (Precariat! Meta-cognition!)

The problem, as always, is that it’s hard for songs to stand out when you stick that closely to a proven formula. And there’s not very many here.

Let’s put it this way: the first time I listened to True North, I accidentally had my MP3 player set to “shuffle”. So I listened to the songs out of order. It made absolutely no difference whatsoever.

Anyway, here’s a couple of highlights for me.

Listen.

My north is true,

This is dF