American Power And Imaginary Numbers

My conservative counterpart Donald Douglas of American Power breathlessly cuts and pastes the following from FOX News in his recent post "Total Costs of Iraq War Less Than Obama-Democrats' Economic Porkulus Package":

As President Obama prepares to tie a bow on U.S. combat operations in Iraq, Congressional Budget Office numbers show that the total cost of the eight-year war was less than the stimulus bill passed by the Democratic-led Congress in 2009.

According to CBO numbers in its Budget and Economic Outlook published this month, the cost of Operation Iraqi Freedom was $709 billion for military and related activities, including training of Iraqi forces and diplomatic operations.

The projected cost of the stimulus, which passed in February 2009, and is expected to have a shelf life of two years, was $862 billion...

And how's that "stimulus" working out?

Now I've mentioned on several occasions that economics is not my strong suit and that I even find that field of study fairly boring but I do speak English pretty well and I'm no slouch when it comes to basic mathematics so I was able to detect a few flaws in Don's argument here. Ignoring the fact that I automatically take people who use cute little nicknames like "Porkulus" when discussing serious political topics less seriously than those who speak like actual grown ups, the operational word one should really pay attention to in the above article is "projected".

The cost of the Bush administration's war in Iraq is stated flatly and in the past tense, as if the final bill has arrived in the mail and therefore will not increase past the stated $709 billion price tag while the final $862 billion cost of the stimulus is "projected" well into next year. Now this disparity might prompt an honest (or at least curious) person to ask, "Say, is there also a 'projected' final cost for the Iraq war as well?" Interestingly enough, there is:

As of February 2010, around $704 billion has been spent based on estimates of current expenditure rates^[1], which range from the Congressional Research Service (CRS) estimate of $2 billion per week to $12 billion a month, an estimate by economist Joseph Stiglitz.^[2]...

According to a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report published in October 2007, the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could cost taxpayers a total of $2.4 trillion dollars by 2017 when counting the huge interest costs because combat is being financed with borrowed money. The CBO estimated that of the $2.4 trillion long-term price tag for the war, about $1.9 trillion of that would be spent on Iraq, or $6,300 per U.S. citizen.^[9][10]

Stiglitz, former chief economist of the World Bank and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, has stated the total costs of the Iraq War on the US economy will be three trillion dollars in a moderate scenario, and possibly more in the most recent published study, published in March 2008.^[11] Stiglitz has stated: "The figure we arrive at is more than $3 trillion. Our calculations are based on conservative assumptions...Needless to say, this number represents the cost only to the United States. It does not reflect the enormous cost to the rest of the world, or to Iraq."^[11]

So the projected cost of Bush's war (which he never paid for in any of his budgets because apparently deficits didn't matter back then) is actually conservatively estimated at almost four times that of Obama's stimulus bill, which he passed in order to pull the country out of the economic recession and possible depression he inherited from Bush and company. And it seems that FOX News is having a little trouble with their own research as well. From the AP last week:

WASHINGTON — President Obama’s stimulus measure has created or saved as many as 3.3 million jobs and continues to boost economic growth in the second half of 2010, but it’s come at a higher price tag than originally billed.

Congressional analysts released new figures today estimating that the law enacted in January 2009, when it projected to cost $787 billion over a decade, would cost $814 billion. But that’s still less than the Congressional Budget Office estimated in January, when it said the measure would cost $862 billion.

So FOX's difference was only off by $48 billion or around 6% (maybe their researchers haven't read the news since January) but admittedly the stimulus did go over its projected budget by $27 billion or almost 4%. Now everyone knows that government spending almost always goes over its estimated costs so the 4% run over isn't surprising but noting that the stimulus went over its original projected cost might also prompt an honest (or at least curious) person to ask, "Say, was there also a 'projected' original cost for the Iraq war as well?" Interestingly enough, there was:

WASHINGTON — At the outset of the Iraq war, the Bush administration predicted that it would cost $50 billion to $60 billion to oust Saddam Hussein, restore order and install a new government.

Five years in, the Pentagon tags the cost of the Iraq war at roughly $600 billion and counting. Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and critic of the war, pegs the long-term cost at more than $4 trillion. The Congressional Budget Office and other analysts say that $1 trillion to $2 trillion is more realistic, depending on troop levels and on how long the American occupation continues.

Based on the time periods cited those numbers are from 2 1/2 years ago so they've obviously increased since then but if we use the higher original Bush administration estimate of $60 billion as well as the older CBO estimate of $1.9 trillion (much lower than Stiglitz's own current conservative estimates) the Iraq war will eventually go over its original projected budget by at least 3200%, again estimating extremely conservatively. Not only is this scenario the exact opposite of what Don tried to claim above but it's cost overruns are higher by several orders of magnitude.

Now I don't blame Don for foolishly stating what is an extremely obvious falsehood about the comparisons between the Bush administration's profligate wartime spending and the Obama administration's relatively modest depression averting spending. I actually had to Google complicated phrases like "original cost iraq war", "original cost stimulus", "projected cost iraq war" and "projected cost stimulus" to gain access to all of this esoteric information. And I don't know if you noticed but those phrases contain several words each, some of them are even multi-syllabic! So I guess Don can be forgiven for lazily cutting and pasting a story from the propaganda media wing of the Republican party rather than doing actual minimal research to make sure that what he's posting isn't an outright partisan lie. The man only has one PhD. after all. Hey, it's hard out here for a hack.

100,000 Hits

If I can just keep up this pace I should get my first million hits in just under a quarter of a century! Yes, yes, meaningless I know but I suppose bloggers are supposed to keep track of this sort of thing. Thanks as always to everyone who visits Brain Rage; the visitor from Whittier, California has 1 hour to collect their prize.

Live Tracking The BP Gulf Oil Leak

Well this is certainly depressing yet I can't help remarking about how cool it is that we can watch an ecological disaster happening a mile beneath the ocean in real time:


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Brain Rage's Belated Second Birthday

It was actually back on February 20th and I totally spaced on the date this year; it's a good thing I don't have any kids. We've slowed down a bit in our second year (I say "we" because my liberal hate monkey Thade handles most of the complicated IT work; the constant presence of banana peels lying around everywhere is somewhat of a nuisance but the simian really knows his HTML) since I've cut back on the vino and the subsequent alcohol-fueled rants yet our 2000th post went up just a few days ago and there have only been a handful of days over the last two years without new posts.

As always, thanks to everyone who wastes time reading Brain Rage and a special thanks to all those who take the time to leave comments, suggestions, criticisms, etc. Your participation in this virtual community makes this as much fun for me to write as I hope you find it to read, and the fact that I've never had to implement comment moderation is a testament to the civility and manners of the average reader here despite your disparate views on a wide range of subjects. So I suppose I'll keep writing here until I either find something better to do or until I run out of opinions (don't count on the latter happening anytime soon though). Thanks again, Ragers.

How To Say The New Year

There's a right way and a wrong way. Spread the word.

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Cell Size And Scale

This interactive chart from the University of Utah shows the relative scale of dozens of objects from a coffee bean all the way down to a single carbon atom. Cool.

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Brain Rage In Academia

For the past few days I've been getting several hits from the same location in the great state of Missouri. It turns out that Brain Rage is now a required part of the curriculum for a Career Development in Psychology course at Southern Missouri State University. Now to be fair the week seven syllabus link is to this post featuring a Daily Show segment about the uselessness of cable news show texting polls but I assume that it's only a matter of time before this little blog of mine fully explodes on the academic scene. SMSU is probably just a few notches below Harvard on the national collegiate rankings, ya?

TDS: Poll Bearers

Jon Stewart explores why cable news channel polls are all completely worthless:

[Update: Welcome to all Southeast Missouri State University Psychology 103 students! Please feel free to have a look around Brain Rage, and if you have any ideas about how to make the voices in my head subside leave a detailed comment.]

Bill O'Reilly: Number Cruncher Extraordinaire

Maybe I slept through too many statistics courses when I was younger but I'm having a hard time making sense of this claim:


Umm...what? How does having a larger population affect life-expectancy? Having ten times the population obviously means having ten times the accidents and crimes (and everything else); it's pretty much the definition of the term "per capita" but again, what does it have to do with life-expectancy? Canada's life-expectancy is 10th in the world while ours here in the States is 45th. They live on average a full two years longer than we do because what? They have less people? By that logic people in Vatican City should be living well into their 120's while the Chinese all die by 40. Or maybe Bill O'Reilly is merely a dishonest dolt who will say anything to discredit any health-care system besides his own despite statistical and empirical evidence to the contrary. The bar for getting your own television show in this country is set depressingly low.

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[Update: Following up on my post about FOX News trashing the Netherlands the Dutch have similarly responded by using verifiable facts and figures to counter the slander put forth by people who most likely couldn't be bothered to visit that country before espousing their biased opinions as if they were true:


Sullivan has this to add:

The issue O'Reilly has with Holland is that, compared with the US in many respects, it values individual liberty.

Well said. If you have to trash someone else in order to make yourself look better, you probably don't look as good as you think you do. Unfortunately, this is what passes for introspection and honest self-assessment about our country amongst many on the political right these days.]

Things Overheard At Palin's Farewell Party

Yesterday was her last day as Alaska's governor (but she didn't quit, of course). David Letterman has the top ten list. Number three is my fave:


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Something Someone Else Said

"After 9/11, the GOP’s favorability rating stood in the low 60s. Since then it has steadily fallen, with a brief uptick in the wake of Bush’s 2004 reelection, to a low of 34% today.

Cheney, of course, is the less popular member of the duo who brought the party to its knees. He aggressively pushed the policies that squandered all the goodwill the GOP enjoyed (see Iraq, Hasty Invasion Of) and led to last year’s rout. Yet far from withdrawing from public life, according to Gallup’s numbers yesterday, Cheney is seen as a leading GOP voice.

Even more galling to GOPers (see this interview with Mark Sanford), his media tour isn’t even about helping the current GOP. It’s narrowly focused on salvaging his own reputation by defending policies he championed that aren’t even operative or relevant anymore.

The larger story here — absurd, cringe-worthy, funny and sad all at once — is that the guy who did as much as anyone to practically destroy the GOP just won’t let the party move on." -Greg Sargent, The Plum Line

Am I wrong in thinking that for a party floundering in the wilderness and unable to even choose a suitable leader that it's kind of counterproductive to have your least popular member constantly front and center before the national media, especially when this recent turn of events is juxtaposed with his own shadowy existence as far as the press is concerned for the past few years? I keep hearing talk of the need for "fresh new leaders and ideas" yet I see the same tired, old white men (along with the occasional female or minority surrogate yet again spouting the same tired talking points) as the leading faces of this party.

On a related note, you just know that W's kicking back in Dallas with a cooler full of Silver Bullets and "heh-heh-heh"ing about this whole situation. How badly do they need to lose before they actually make some significant changes to bring their party back into the good graces of the American public? I'm not sure but it's going to be fun finding out as the whole thing unfolds.

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The Super Toilet

I won't be buying one because my flushing needs are thankfully not this severe but it's impressive nonetheless:

O'Reilly Pwned On Drugs

This is why I simultaneously love and despise this man (even in classic clips such as this) at the same time: he can be so incredibly entertaining and sure of his own rightness and moral superiority while at the same time so incredibly maddening and impervious to logic and points of view contrary to his own:

Somebody needs to tell this jackass that the world is not the simple black or white fantasy land he thinks it to be. He's raising kids as we speak. I'm just saying.

Near Earth Miss

President Obama may have to fill in for Morgan Freeman one of these days:

Sky-watchers in Asia, Australia, and the Pacific islands welcomed a surprise guest Monday: an asteroid that passed just 41,010 miles (66,000 kilometers) above Earth.

Discovered only days ago, asteroid 2009 DD45 zipped between our planet and the moon at 13:44 universal time (8:44 a.m. ET). The asteroid was moving at about 12 miles (20 kilometers) a second when it was closest to Earth.

"We get objects passing fairly close, or closer than this, every few months," Timothy Spahr, director of the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center in Massachusetts, said in an email.

"Also, though, note these are only the ones that are discovered. Many more pass this close undetected"—as asteroid 2009 DD45 nearly did.

Astronomers didn't notice the oncoming asteroid until February 28, when it showed up as a faint dot in pictures taken at the Siding Spring Observatory in Australia.

At that point the asteroid was already a mere 1.5 million miles (2.4 million kilometers) from Earth, and closing in fast.

This thing just missed us by 66,000 kilometers. To put that distance in perspective, the average distance to the moon from Earth is just over 384,000 km, about six times that distance. Now of course at only 20 to 50 meters wide (about the size of a 10 story building) this rock is nowhere near the size of the 10 km wide giant that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago (you can view a cool simulation of a similar event here) but consider this: it is roughly the same size as the object that is thought to have caused the Tunguska Blast a hundred years ago over Russia and that thing did some major damage.

We didn't even know about this thing until it was right on top of us and if there had been any chance of it hitting an inhabited area we would not have had any kind of plan in place to stop it. I've called attention in the past to how woefully unprepared we are for a possible asteroid strike of serious size but I'm afraid that only an event of significant destruction will rouse the people of this planet out of our big blue cocoon.

[Update: I forgot to include the link to this very well done commentary by Greg Easterbrook of The Atlantic magazine.]

Did You Know?

A well done and informative video on the progression of information technology:

Brain Rage Is One Year Old Today

Crap, I almost forgot about it. My Sitemeter counter went live on leap day last year but I actually put up this inaugural post one year ago today. Wow. I could probably have written an entire novel with all the time I've spent working on this site but I have a feeling that the same handful of people would still be the only ones who would read it. Thanks again to everyone who wastes time here (and no, I didn't have a cake made; it's just been altered digitally).

Countries That Don't Use The Metric System

That's right: Liberia, Burma and the United States of America. Fine company we find ourselves in, no? The last industrialized Western nation to switch over was Canada and even that was almost four decades ago. Maybe President Obama can rub some change on this problem as well, but I'm not holding my breath: when it comes to this simple and practical issue we Americans are extremely stubborn, to the point of actually taking pride in the fact that we're being so different and non-conformist by not adopting the system used by the rest of the civilized world.

Remember that satellite we crashed into Mars a decade ago? It burned up in the planets atmosphere because one of NASA's subcontractors used the wrong units in their thruster software and it cost us over $327 million. Remember the national outcry by the American people to finally officially switch over to the metric system to avoid massive fuck ups just like that one? Neither do I. Ask the average American how many kilometers there are in 100 miles and they'll stare at you blankly. It's embarrassing, and it's what Obama is talking about when he says he wants to return science to the White House (but as I said, I'm not holding my breath on this particular issue) and one of my great hopes is that he'll be the leader who makes smart cool again. Dumb has had a free ride in this country for way too long.

[Update: I just ran across this new rule from Bill Maher that puts our national anathema to the metric system into better perspective:
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[Update II: Forget it, we've lost. M. Lavinashree will own us all soon.]

One Billion Dollars As Art

The image above is from an artist's site called ArtMarcovici. It depicts what one billion dollars in one hundred dollar bills of United States currency would look like stacked on twelve standard size pallets. I post it for two reasons: 1) long time readers may want to compare it to this post from the first few weeks of this blog when I relayed the following information:

one billion dollars in one hundred dollar bills weighs about 11 tons (22,000 pounds), as much as 3 adult elephants and stacks up about 4/5 of a mile high.

And 2) whenever you watch a movie like Heat where several villains are hauling around large sums of cash, pay attention to how much they say they are carrying because they almost always overestimate. It's a lot easier to appreciate the sheer mass and volume of money when you see it stacked in front of you.

A Plea To The Silent Amongst Us

A non-political appeal to the several people I know are reading this blog yet are not commenting at any great length: Doug E, Jeremy, Reza, Angela, Matt, Toby, BD: bring the noise! Tell me what's what! This community thrives and dies at your discretion. Please, help us thrive. Nuph said, ya'll.

My 1000th Post

Per the prediction made in my 100th post nine months ago, the 1000th has come quite close to landing on Barack Obama's inauguration but since it's a few weeks premature we'll commemorate the occasion with this fictional yet smooth looking $1000 dollar bill, reflecting the massive inflation that may well be inflicted on America by our current economic woes. Not the most uplifting topic I know but unlike the one before it, an Obama administration will hopefully be based in reality: we can't afford eight more years of wishing and denial from our leaders.