Not Reassured; Deadly Fleas; Counting the Costs. Three brief items.
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(1) The New York Post, the Republican Party and its President, and others on the Right keep trying to reassure us that everything is going our way in the "war on terror" / "international struggle against extremism" — or whatever it is they are calling it at the moment. Why am I still uneasy? I emailed the Post this short letter to the editor:

All the assurances the Post publishes that we are winning the war in Iraq, the forces of terrorism are on the run, and we will soon emerge from today's nightmare planet into the bright new dawn of a post-Islamist world in which moderation has defeated extremism, sound like the arguments made in the early 1940s by Indian sociologist Krishnalal Shridharani that it was impossible that India would be partitioned because partition made no sense, and the people of India were not so foolish as to destroy the unity that alone made India viable. He made a good case.

(Responsive to "Al Qaeda's Woes", column by Amir Taheri in the New York Post, August 11, 2005)
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(2) Did you know that fleas can kill kittens? I didn't, until it happened in my household. Fleas carry disease, and the blood they drain from tiny kittens can produce fatal anemia. Most anti-flea preparations cannot be used on kittens younger than 12 weeks, but if they are attacked by many fleas, they may die long before then, especially if they are simultaneously under the strain of a serious infection. I have found one flea shampoo online that says it can be used on very young kittens, but I was unable to get it in time, and several beautiful babies died because of fleas. Moreover, a pregnant cat had a miscarriage due to illness transmitted by fleas. Fleas can also introduce tapeworms into their hosts, both pets and people. Fleas are not a mere annoyance. They can kill.
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In lite of this fact, which has been ignored if not actually concealed by inexcusably irresponsible media — had I been on guard against this eventuality, I would have had Adams flea shampoo on hand and my kittens might be alive today — I must wonder why we have been unable to eradicate fleas, or roaches, from this infested planet. How is it that human beings are supposed to be able to alter the climate of this enormous globe but cannot wipe out tiny little insects? Maybe we are no more able to alter climate than to eradicate fleas and roaches.
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(3) A friend (Joe from Belleville, a northern suburb of my city, Newark, NJ) sent me the URL for a very interesting website, an online clock that tallies the present, and rapidly growing, cost in dollars of the war in Iraq: http://costofwar.com/. The cost is presented initially as the total for the entire United States, but you can then check for your specific state and for some localities within that state, and compare that tally to the costs of various categories of expenditure for which that money might instead have been used. The national total when I started to write this description was $186.811 billion. It had risen another million by the time I finished checking my state and city, written this description, then rechecked the national total.
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Try it yourself. It shows another dimension to the war than the cost in terms of dead American soldiers, which I have been showing at the end of each new entry to my blog for some time now. Are these dollars and lives well spent? You decide.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,843.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 12:16 PM