Why Are We In Iraq ?

[IIC]

I have been ignoring you Doug. Two reasons. The first being would you step in a pile of crap if you knew it was shit, well maybe you would, and the second is that there is nothing there of any interest to me other than the kick I get out of watching you run off at the mouth in that authorative fashion that only you can do as well as you do.

Another one of my 3,156 Sayings To Live By is:

"Say it with authority and people will believe you"

I'm glad to see that our relationship is back to normal.

[skiracer]

Geez Ski...Now I feel better...Recently I was getting the feeling that you've been ignoring me.

One of my 3,156 Sayings To Live By is:

"The smartest people only need to know one thing...Where to go to get the answers"

BTW...How's your tax evasion scheme going???

I have been ignoring you Doug. Two reasons. The first being would you step in a pile of crap if you knew it was shit, well maybe you would, and the second is that there is nothing there of any interest to me other than the kick I get out of watching you run off at the mouth in that authorative fashion that only you can do as well as you do.

[IIC]

maybe one being that you are a typical old, more than authorative ( I couldn't resist that) blowhard who puts his mouth in motion before putting his brain in gear. Just maybe you don't know as much as you think you do.

Geez Ski...Now I feel better...Recently I was getting the feeling that you've been ignoring me.

One of my 3,156 Sayings To Live By is:

"The smartest people only need to know one thing...Where to go to get the answers"

BTW...How's your tax evasion scheme going???

[skiracer]

I want to reiterate that I am not discounting the war deaths that I was referring to in my last post.

But I do not believe that 3600 deaths have made a noticeable difference in the gender imbalance. Actually, I believe that River's comment that many women cannot find a husband goes way beyond that...In fact, it is an entirely different topic which I would consider a Relationships topic.

There actually is a gender imbalance in the USA (the reverse is true in China).

http://www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/p20-544.pdf

Why is there such an imbalance?

Well, what that chart doesn't show you is that the sex rate at conception is something like 110/100 (Males/Females)...Most miscarriages are male. Perhaps there is something to it that males are the weaker sex.

As people age, as you can see from the chart the ratio of males/females evens out until age 25 when females start to outnumber males.

What is the main reason for this?

As River mentions, war casualties have some effect...But other than physiological reasons which I don't know anything about...Boys and men generally take more risks than women.

For example, boys are more likely to fall out of trees, participate in contact sports...As boys get older they are more likely to join gangs, hunt, drink alcohol and commit crimes. Men are more likely to have high risk jobs, although the gap is less than it was many years ago. The majority of construction workers, police officers, firefighters, ranchers/farmers etc...

Also, US men are more likely to marry a woman who is foreign born vs. US women marrying foreign born men.

I just checked the death rates for those occupations and some others that are listed under high risk jobs...The death rates are not as high as I thought...So perhaps River is right and perhaps there is some physiological reason that the gender imbalance is so high...Guess there are many contributing factors.

maybe one being that you are a typical old, more than authorative ( I couldn't resist that) blowhard who puts his mouth in motion before putting his brain in gear. Just maybe you don't know as much as you think you do.

[IIC]

I want to reiterate that I am not discounting the war deaths that I was referring to in my last post.

But I do not believe that 3600 deaths have made a noticeable difference in the gender imbalance. Actually, I believe that River's comment that many women cannot find a husband goes way beyond that...In fact, it is an entirely different topic which I would consider a Relationships topic.

There actually is a gender imbalance in the USA (the reverse is true in China).

http://www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/p20-544.pdf

Why is there such an imbalance?

Well, what that chart doesn't show you is that the sex rate at conception is something like 110/100 (Males/Females)...Most miscarriages are male. Perhaps there is something to it that males are the weaker sex.

As people age, as you can see from the chart the ratio of males/females evens out until age 25 when females start to outnumber males.

What is the main reason for this?

As River mentions, war casualties have some effect...But other than physiological reasons which I don't know anything about...Boys and men generally take more risks than women.

For example, boys are more likely to fall out of trees, participate in contact sports...As boys get older they are more likely to join gangs, hunt, drink alcohol and commit crimes. Men are more likely to have high risk jobs, although the gap is less than it was many years ago. The majority of construction workers, police officers, firefighters, ranchers/farmers etc...

Also, US men are more likely to marry a woman who is foreign born vs. US women marrying foreign born men.

I just checked the death rates for those occupations and some others that are listed under high risk jobs...The death rates are not as high as I thought...So perhaps River is right and perhaps there is some physiological reason that the gender imbalance is so high...Guess there are many contributing factors.

[New-born baby]

I long for the day when I have a $1,000,000 tax bill...Don't hear that from too many Republicans...Do You?...But the way I figure it is that if my tax bill is that high I must be doin' sumthin' right

Nah. Inflation, Doug.

[IIC]

I long for the day when I have a $1,000,000 tax bill...Don't hear that from too many Republicans...Do You?...But the way I figure it is that if my tax bill is that high I must be doin' sumthin' right

[scifos]

There's a guy that's already got all these issues covered and he's running for President.


Judge Napolitano on Ron Paul - watch the series

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8QwTKKSvR8

www.ronpaul2008.com

Check the issues

http://www.ronpaullibrary.org/

Ron Paul is the man. Then again, I've voted libertarian as much as possible.

[IIC]

I am going to bring up a point here that can only come from a woman's perspective. So many men (fewer women) are being killed in Iraq/Afghanistan. So many men (many fewer women) were killed in Vietnam. So many men (almost no women) were killed in WWII and, earlier in WWI.

Think about that. So many men gone that will never be mates for the women back home. Do any of you remember how many aunts you had who never got married? Do any of you realize the prospects of finding a good man for those of us women of the ages of these lost men? We are alone because all those good men were killed or maimed in all those wars. Wars like these mess up the gender balance. The women left behind and alone suffer also. It is a hidden collateral damage that no one ever talks about and few recognize. Riverbabe

River...I can empathize with what you are saying...It is a total waste of life IMO what happened in Vietnam and what is happening in the Middle East.

If a woman's boyfriend or husband never comes back alive I see what you are saying...And of course that is cruel.

But I never remember an Aunt not having a husband and I don't know of any woman in the USA today that cannot find a decent husband.

However bad War and Killing is...I sincerely doubt that the gender balance is all out of whack...At this point anyway.

I may sound harsh and I may sound like a Hawk...But I'm really not...I'm simply responding to your point that good men are not available...I disagree with that

[riverbabe]

http://select.nytimes.com/2007/07/21/opinion/21warner.html?th&emc=th

Guest Columnist
A Crack in Team Bush

By JUDITH WARNER
Published: July 21, 2007
It was a shock to see Defense Secretary Robert Gates battling tears Wednesday evening as he spoke about Maj. Douglas Zembiec, a Marine and father of a 1-year-old daughter, who was killed in May after requesting a second tour of duty in Iraq. Shocking and yet somehow profoundly validating and cathartic.

Choking, pausing, visibly suffering and clearly fighting off an onslaught of unwelcome emotion as he addressed the Marine Corps Association’s annual dinner, Gates seemed, for a moment, to tap into national sentiment in a way that the Bush team has never before done.

Sure, they tapped into our anger, fear and hatred in the days and months after 9/11. Sure, their swagger stoked our desires for vengeance and soothed some of the terror that took up residence in our guts in the weeks following the attacks.

But here was something new: an acknowledgment, however unbidden, of the complex range of negative emotions — sadness and frustration and, yes, I think, guilt — that’s now weighing upon the nation’s soul after four disastrous years in Iraq.

We’d never seen anything like it in the “Henny Penny” brush-offs of Gates’s predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld. We probably never will discern any inkling of it in Condoleezza Rice’s robotic equanimity. President Bush is known to meet privately with wounded soldiers and families of the fallen and is said, at those times, to become emotional, but little of that softness seeps into his often cocky — and defensive — public demeanor.

It’s hard to imagine much sympathy emanating from a man who admits to no soul-searching on Iraq, who vacationed through the panic and devastation of Hurricane Katrina and who recently shrugged off the issue of health care reform with the line, “I mean, people have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room.”

Rice, I read in the recent biography, “Twice as Good,” is so incapable of empathy that, in her late teens, and after years of assiduous and ambitious practice, she was forced to give up her dreams of becoming a concert pianist because her teacher felt she didn’t have the “interest or inclination” to “make someone else’s thoughts and emotions [her] own.”

We’ve all seen by now where such emotional sterility, coupled with a ferocious attachment to ideology, leads. And I think, as a nation — as Gates just did so publicly — we’re starting to show cracks from the strain.

I kept waiting yesterday for signs that, after his almost tearful performance, Gates would be labeled a “nut” or a “wimp” or some kind of national disgrace.

They didn’t come.

Instead, on a discussion board at Military.com, an online organization for active members of the military and veterans, I found Gates referred to as “a man of honor and integrity” by a former Marine Corps officer, who admitted that he himself, hearing Zembiec’s story, had broken down and cried, for the first time, before his 9- and 11-year-old children.

“He is obviously a man who tries his best to serve his country as best he possibly can, and he isn’t afraid to show his emotions,” wrote another poster.

Another wrote of being moved to tears nightly by the evening news: “I ache when I think of America’s sons and daughters being killed in a distant land. I am so relieved that Robert Gates is the decent, caring man he is proving to be.”

I pictured Vice President Dick Cheney miming, “Gag me,” and Rumsfeld swaying with the motions of playing an imaginary violin. And I thought: how wonderful it is that someone, on high, has had the strength to own the pain that’s been caused by our disastrous course in Iraq.

One has to wonder, of course, what public opinion would have been if the first cabinet official to lose it — just a bit — had been not the stoic bureaucrat Gates but instead our female secretary of state. Had it been Rice up on that podium, and were she constitutionally capable of that degree of non-Bush-centered feeling, would she have been denounced? Would she have been belittled, punished politically, dismissed as too irrational and emotional — too girly — to deal with the ugly realities of war?

We’ll never know, because she — like all powerful women in politics — will never let us find out. They can’t afford to. Not unless much more of official Washington decides it’s man enough to truly feel our nation’s inner disarray.

Judith Warner is the author of “Perfect Madness” and a contributing columnist for TimesSelect. She is a guest Op-Ed columnist.

[MEA_1956]

Thank God

When ever I read about this topic, it makes me thankful that both my children made it home safe and are both enjoying life in the USA. Marlin

And many of those returning have physical or mental wounds that effect their families in disastrous ways.

-------------billyjoe

[billyjoe]

And many of those returning have physical or mental wounds that effect their families in disastrous ways.

-------------billyjoe

[riverbabe]

Collateral Damage

I am going to bring up a point here that can only come from a woman's perspective. So many men (fewer women) are being killed in Iraq/Afghanistan. So many men (many fewer women) were killed in Vietnam. So many men (almost no women) were killed in WWII and, earlier in WWI.

Think about that. So many men gone that will never be mates for the women back home. Do any of you remember how many aunts you had who never got married? Do any of you realize the prospects of finding a good man for those of us women of the ages of these lost men? We are alone because all those good men were killed or maimed in all those wars. Wars like these mess up the gender balance. The women left behind and alone suffer also. It is a hidden collateral damage that no one ever talks about and few recognize. Riverbabe

[mrmarket]

Don't you remember that some of guys in the terrorists' cell had spent time in Las Vegas? I think a good number of them used their Bin Laden Memorial Pilot Training Scholarship money to stay. You can live real cheap out in the desert down toward Searchlight and Laughlin. Looks just like back home (Saudi Arabia and Iraq), too!

They also spent time at Olympic Garden and Sapphire as I recall.

Does anyone ever wonder why on September 11th that 100 planes weren't hijacked? I mean it seemed like a very diabolical plan and that the only way to ever make it work would have been that one time.

If there are so many terrorists, how come they only took 4 planes? I'm not trying to minimize what happened, it just seems like if there were really a million terrorists, it probably would have been pretty easy to have hijacked 100 planes.

Don't you remember that some of guys in the terrorists' cell had spent time in Las Vegas? I think a good number of them used their Bin Laden Memorial Pilot Training Scholarship money to stay. You can live real cheap out in the desert down toward Searchlight and Laughlin. Looks just like back home (Saudi Arabia and Iraq), too!