Friday musings.

As a result of the majority of U.S. troops in Iraq being killed by improvised explosive devices when juxtaposed with the fuel tanks of their vehicles, there comes good news. The army will be receiving 160,000 combat uniforms made with a flame retardant fabric, NOMEX, manufactured by Dupont.

I swear, if I had known four years ago this war was going to last longer than two or three weeks, a month at most, I would have found some vehicle for investing in the military industrial complex. But oh no, I didn't learn a god-damn thing when Country Joe told me 35 years ago, "there's plenty good money to be made, supplying the Army with the tools of the trade."

(I was going to expound on surviving a fire bombing in war, but it's just too gruesome to talk about here and, as we all know, in America we'd really rather not see, hear or have to think about such things as what a war can do to a body. It's just too gory, sorry.)
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But it still may not be too late to profit from Iraq as evidenced by the testimony yesterday of the army's chief of staff. Warning that the army will "break" if its numbers are not increased by more than the 30,000 it's been authorized to grow by, general Peter Schoomaker wants to form two new brigades next year that could be sent to Iraq in 2008! (Yeh, yeh, I know, fuck all you people who voted for an end to the insanity. That's for sissies who live in real foo-foo democracies where their governments care what the people think.)

But at a cost of $1.2 billion dollars for every 10,000 men and women the army adds (I'm not sure if that's a one-time cost, an annual figure, or per-week expense), and Iraq deployments now being prepared for into the next decade or two, maybe there's still time to get in on the action and make some good money. After all, as we were reminded here a couple days ago, if you plan to retire in America, you'll need around a cool $1 million to do it. Better start growing the green now if you want to avoid retiring under a Florida freeway down the road.
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Finally, like most folks, I'm sure, I'm following with much interest the unfolding story of South Dakota senator Tim Johnson, aka The 51st Democrat, now in a hospital post-op condition, future unknown. It would have been far more intriguing had he suffered from polonium-210 radiation poisoning, ala Alexander Valterovich Litvinenko, rather than intracerebral bleeding, but it does leave one to ponder if god isn't playing games with us by tipping the political balance into stalemate should Johnson fail to return, leaving 'Big Dick' Cheney with the power to decide all things senatorial.

Oh well, not to fret. I suspect I was placing way, way too much faith in a democratic congress to really change things as relates to the U.S. international modus operandi anyway.

And maybe instead of just toying with us, this senator Johnson story is simply god hinting to us he is really diabolical? Or maybe god's just a republican? Oh wait, I'm being redundant aren't I?