My posts are too damn long.

So, the news from Iraq sure doesn’t sound any better that it was a week ago. The death rate of American’s looks on track to rise for another sequential month since the hand-off of power.

Meanwhile, Bush continues with his rosey lies, or “optimism” as Republican spin doctors prefer to call it. It’s this sort of lying optimism that lay behind Bush’s announcement a few weeks back that they’d be reducing the number of troops stationed abroad in places like Europe. Much was made of how this would make lives easier for Military families, since they’d be less likely to be posted abroad, and would instead remain near their families and friends.

It sounded great, the way he talked about it, and it would be great, during peacetime. We aren’t in peacetime though. The worry for military families isn’t whether they might all have to spend a few years in germany. The worry is whether both mom and dad will be called up from the reserves, or, in many cases, whether, having been called up, they’ll be coming back alive any time soon.

My guess is that after the election, if Bush is elected, he’ll quietly put the rest of the plan into effect and draw on the troop reductions in europe to beef up or relieve the forces in Iraq.

I’m looking at one of my paystubs. I’ve got my 401K contribution maxed out, and yet, every month I’m putting slightly more into paying for someone elses Medicare and Social Security than I am into my own retirement. I’m all for the social safety net, but lets face it, that is messed up.

Its just going to get worse too, because right now, that federal government is spending most of our social security contributions on other programs, like failing to reconstruct Iraq, because there is currently a surplus. In 10-15 years though, as more of our aging population starts to retire, that surplus is going to become a deficit, and they are going to have to jack up tax revenues.

It’s complete bullshit.

Wired News: Attack of the Radio Clones
This is interesting. Microsoft is basically cloning the playlists of 978 radio stations and then offering streams of the music from those playlists under the names of each of the cloned stations for $30 year.

1. Given consolidation in the media industry, I wonder how different many of those streams are from eachother.

2. Appearantly, despite having less talk and more music, the copy’s are in some ways worse than the originals, repeating popular songs and artists even more often than the already repetitive commercial stations they are copying from.

librarian.net : avoiding the PATRIOT Act since 2001