spinoff

Please find below an e-mail exchange between three individuals on the nature of animal cuteness and attractiveness. The exchange was set in motion by a forwarded image of a nice kitten being funny.

 

 

PERSON 1: I'll see your squishy kitten and raise you a panda painted on a human hair - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4836662.stm

 

PERSON 2: This, my friends,

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25689-2099856,00....

shits on all of your rubbish animal links.

 

PERSON 3: So it does. However, when calculating cuteness vs. age, one must look at their respective Animal Attractiveness Quotients(tm):

 

fluff = (no. of paws + (1/age))*(if feline = 10, if other =3)+ cuteness of action[1-10 scale]

 

whereas

 

age = age in years * 0.1 therefore a one year old kitten engaged in something very cute = (4 * 10)+10 = 50, whereas a 255 year old tortoise, which has no fur at all, only has a = 255*>1 = 25.5. Therefore the squishy kitten has twice the AAQ(tm) of Clive of India's tortoise. Though it scores significantly lower on the 'bloody hell that's incredible scale'.

 

PERSON 2: *stunned silence*

 

PERSON 3:I'm on benefits, I'm stuck at home, and my brain's overactive. Need I say more?

 

PERSON 1: I was thinking how an octapus (sic) would do, but then obviously an octopus doesn't have any paws, they'd have to be genetically modified tentacles, or slightly furry tentacles maybe. Im off to a private audience with that giant squid soon.. should be fun, at the opposite end of the spectrum.

 

PERSONS 2 AND 3: *stunned silence*

 

Yours etc.,

 

Spinoff.

Bloomberg reported this week that US military spending in Iraq and Afghanistan now totals $9.8 billion a month. That's around £5.6 billion. A month. The same report notes that Congress has voted $337 billion "for the wars since September 11, 2001" and that the US's fiscal deficit in financial year 2006 will be a record $423 billion.

 

The United States population is, according to the CIA World Factbook (and they ought to know) 295,734,134. You need a big calculator to work out the next bit, but this means that every man, woman and child, whether a tax payer or not, spends $33.14 a month on Iraq and Afghanistan ($397.65 a year). It means that the money spent on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars since September 11, 2001, has cost $1,139.54 per person. And it means that everyone in the United States of America owes $1,430.14 this year.

 

Now, I know, these are raw figures, and in some cases you need to work out taxpayers vs. total population, but this is an op-ed piece and I'm trying to get a point across. We could go on. Spend vs. Gross Domestic Product is increasing, the federal deficit is at an all time high (always is under Republican presidents, somehow: clearly the party of low taxes gets round the problem of raising money by dumping debt on its population rather than, oh I don't know, cutting expenditure); and you have to bear in mind that this is only in what is now laughably called 'defence' - though with this sort of money being spent, surely there's an argument for reconstituting the Ministry of War.

 

In total, US revenues of $2.119 trillion are offset by public expenditure of $2.466 trillion. It's a massive economy, sure, but it's also storing up some pretty huge debts. You'll excuse me for my obsession about these numbers: I'm doing my tax returns this weekend, and the paltry amount I owe, for which I will be pursued until I am backed into a corner and my legs ripped off and sold for parts by the attack dogs of the revenue (or at least that's what I imagine will happen) is likely to be in the order of 0.0000015366% of the US deficit.

 

Which makes me feel a bit better, but is unlikely to blunt the teeth of the attack dogs any. And what's worse, of course, is that this is public money. A mother of one of the many American dead in Iraq, when asked why she was continuing to pressure George W Bush about the US's continued involvement, said 'Because he works for me: he is a public servant'.

 

And this is something that the sheer enormity of these numbers mask. Every dollar that the US government has to spend has come from someone; from duties, from taxation, from levies, sure - but all of this money, all of this $2.119 trillion, comes out of someone else's pocket. We must not be so overwhelmed by the sheer implacable hugeness of the figures that we forget this: it's our money they're spending. And if you can be bothered to do the math, you can reduce it to the personal.

 

That's when it becomes really scary - because, personally, I worked damn hard for that $33.14 a month that Mr Rumsfeld's going to spend on a botched war, and I'd rather he gave it me back if he's going to do something like that with it.

 

Yours etc.,

 

Spinoff.

Modern warfare, such as it is, is considerably more destructive than it seems at first. ‘Controlling the battle space’, a nice clean expression for pulverising the enemy, involves far more than overwhelming force. It involves the implementation of yet another sanitised expression, C3I – Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence – or, more especially, disrupting the other sides’ ability to use any of them.

 

On the surface, this, like so many modern military expressions, seems gloriously clean of death. But it isn’t; in fact, it extends the war deeply into the civil population, causing ‘collateral’ deaths whilst sparing the attacking armed forces the inconvenience of actually having to machine gun bread queues.

 

Disrupting C3I isn’t as simple as bombing railway stations or strafing command vehicles on the battlefield. It means dropping strips of tin foil on power stations to cut off the enemy’s access to electricity: which also, in an industrialised country like Iraq, also cuts off power to hospitals and water pumping stations.

 

It means jamming radios – not the main military command net, which in Iraq was largely conducted, at least from headquarters to headquarters, by fibre optic cables which cannot be jammed – but the radios of, for instance, the fire and ambulance services. Power and long range communications: the two things without which any urban population ceases to operate coherently in very short order.

 

And of course that’s what happened in Iraq. No power equals no clean water, no lights in operating theatres, no incubators, no sterilising equipment, no refrigeration. No radios means that even if there were anyone who could help, they could not be contacted.

 

The spread of civil disorder, of disease and of death, is inevitable: not through the messy, inconvenient and distinctly ‘dumb bomb’ war of old, but just as inevitably and just as effectively. Fixing disruption to the civil infrastructure isn’t as simple as picking the bits of tin foil off the power stations, either: this particular method shorts out not only the stations themselves, but their substations, and sub-substations, right down to the fusebox. Rewiring a house takes long enough. After action like this, the Iraqis have had to rewire the country.

 

The American side in Iraq should have learned this one by now: interdiction of C3I caused numerous civilian casualties in the Bosnian campaigns. That they didn’t is another part of the true crime of the Iraq war – the failure of coherent post war planning.

 

The Americans imagined they’d walk into Baghdad and be met by a ticker tape parade of happy smiling faces, quick change of government, out by dinner time, with a supportive government in place and 10% of the world’s oil reserves safe in the hands of democracy.

 

Apart from hopelessly misjudging the pride of the Iraqi people, it was exactly their assault on the C3I of the Iraqi nation that has led to an extension of a vicious and bloody occupation. Because in interdicting C3I, they didn’t just stop the Iraqi army – they stopped the country working.

 

And it’s difficult to make a tickertape parade when you’ve no light to see by, no clean water to drink, no power in your hospitals. It’s difficult to see these boys from Podunk as liberators when your food’s spoilt in the freezer and you have to fight for handouts, when sewage runs down the streets because the drains have stopped working.

 

Wars haven’t been fought solely on battlefields, leaving civilian areas largely untouched, since the Germans walked into Paris the first time. The Americans especially, whose disastrous war in Vietnam used weapons with ostensibly military aims (Agent Orange was designed to defoliate jungles so troop movements could be seen from above) to devastating civilian effect (birth defects into the, by now, third generation) should be more aware of this than most.

 

That they seem incapable of learning the lesson of their past defeats is not just stupid: it means that even when they have a victory, they can turn it into a defeat seemingly effortlessly. A little more concentration on their own ‘I’ when they are destroying the C3I of their enemies would have helped at the outset. It is now, unfortunately, far too late.

 

Yours etc.,

 

Spinoff.

 

P.S. Quote of the day

“Our Paras company at the embassy witnessed a US tank respond to (harmless) Kalashnikov fire into the air from a block of residential flats by firing three tank rounds into the building." – Blair’s UK envoy to Iraq, John Sawer