After this, I'll stop trying to make content contributions and stick to grammar and mechanics.
Blinkadyblink
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Me
Hi, my pseudonym is Blinkadyblink. Actually Blinkadyblink is the greater and medium deific entity of HypotheticalBunnyLand, but because he is my alter ego, I borrow his name occassionally. I live in Davis, CA, a small university town outside of Sacramento. We have about 60,000 people, roughly a quarter of which work at or attend UC Davis. I enjoy reading just about anything (especially the humor genre) and playing dino puzzle on my graphing calculator. I loathe attending school, but I do like my math and PE classes. Like many Davis students, I am a perfectionist (although I am less concered with turning in perfect assignments than getting perfect grades.)
I have numerous intrests, but chief among them is my interest in anything having to do with US history, especially history involving wars or occuring before 1900. I find it incredible how our founding fathers were able to lead a successful revolt and then, instead of using their political influence and power to gain personal wealth and advance their own agendas, they used it to help other people and establish the world's first modern democracy. I think certain current politicians could learn quite a bit from them. I am also interested in law, the art of shooting rubber bands, and why the heck teachers assign so much more homework than is necessary for students to learn the material. I occasionally write in my Bible which reflects my skeptical autothiestic religion.
Why The Iraq War Cannot Be Justified On The Grounds That It Protected Lives
(unless American lives are more valuable than others')
According to Just Foreign Policy, 1,185,000 Iraqis have been killed by the war in Iraq [1], but, to ensure that the figure is, if anything, lower than reality and to account for people who Saddam Hussein would have killed, we will cut it in half and use 592,500 as the number of Iraqi victims. We will then add 4294, the total number of coalition deaths according to CNN [2] to get 596,794, the total number of deaths directly caused by the Iraq war. Next we will divide that by the number of deaths in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, 2996 as reported by september11victims.com [3], and find that the Iraq war has killed as many people as 199 9/11's. Because the Iraq War has lasted for about 5 years, we can divide 199 by 5 to come up with 40 9/11's per year. Dividing that by 12 yields the number of 9/11's per month: slightly over 3. Thus in order for the Iraq War to cause a net loss in deaths, it would have to prevent the equivalent of a 9/11 attack 3 times a month or once every 10 days. A tough assignment considering Saudi Arabia was far more connected to the attacks.
McCain
Here's a cool link about John McCain's Iraq stance. http://www.dnc.org/page/content/FlipperTV/ The section on Iraq is called "John McCain's Day at the Beach" The video quality isn't great, but the content more than makes up for it.