Can You Say $1,000,000,000,000? That’s the current cost of Iraq’s invasion, and it can easily ended up more than double of that.

Let’s see how that amount of money can REALLY improve the ordinary American’s quality of life, and/or others :

…note that the annual budget for the Department of Education is about $55 billion, which puts the price tag for Iraq at about 18 EDs. Just a few of these EDs would certainly have put muscle into the slogan “No child left behind.”

A… time analogy is illuminating. A million seconds takes approximately 11.5 days to tick by, whereas a billion seconds requires about 32 years. Fully 32,000 years need to pass before a trillion seconds elapse.

Another way to get at the $1 trillion cost of the Iraq War is to note that the Treasury could have used the money to mail a check for more than $3,000 to every man, woman and child in the United States. The latter alternative would have an added benefit: Uniformly distributed and spent in this country, the money would have provided an economic stimulus that the war expenditures have not.

Alternatively, if the money was spent in an even more ecumenical way and a global mailing list was available, the Treasury could have sent a check for more than $150 to every human being on earth. The lives of millions of children, who die from nothing more serious than measles, tetanus, respiratory infections and diarrhea, could be saved, since these illnesses can be prevented by $2 vaccines, $1 worth of antibiotics, or a 10-cent dose of oral rehydration salts as well as the main but still very far from prohibitive cost of people to administer the programs.

Of course, … (these) isn’t quite appropriate when trying to come to terms with the more than 3,000 U.S. soldiers killed, the 20,000 wounded, and the number of Iraqis killed and wounded. The latter number is staggering, whether you subscribe to the figures put out by Iraq Body Count or those published in Lancet or to other even higher estimates.

While at it, we must not forget Cheney the Joker, who might be seem to be funny with his comment below; although somehow I suspected that he actually meant it from the bottom of his (bottomless) heart :

Of course, some might argue that the $1 trillion expenditure in Iraq has made us both more secure domestically and more respected internationally than ever before. Perhaps as many as a dozen people agree with Cheney’s recent hallucinatory comment that “we’ve had enormous successes, and we will continue to have enormous successes” in Iraq.”

John replied :

At times, it seems that the nightmare and expense of these enormous successes will continue for the next trillion seconds.

Well said, John.

Drinking Lighter Fluid, Eat Chicken McNugget : If you’re feeling crazy sometime, try eating McDonald’s Chicken McNugget. It’s like drinking the lighter fluid, only tastier.

According to a new study, alcohol & tobacco is worse than drugs.

Quoted :

Tobacco causes 40 percent of all hospital illnesses, while alcohol is blamed for more than half of all visits to hospital emergency rooms. The substances also harm society in other ways, damaging families and occupying police services.

“This is a landmark paper,” said Dr. Leslie Iversen, professor of pharmacology at Oxford University. Iversen was not connected to the research. “It is the first real step towards an evidence-based classification of drugs.”