Sooner or later, you will check your balance...

I'll go through extended periods - up to weeks - where I don't check my bank balance - simply because I don't want to see the bad news. Of course taking the outta-sight-outta-mind tack is a juvenile manner in which to deal with money problems - so sue me. In spite of providing the reading public with a veritable paradigm of mature prose (sic), there's a big immaturity streak in me.

Thank goodness the well-being of millions of people isn't in my care at this particular moment.

We've killed on the order of 100,000 Iraqi civilians - many of them women and children.

We've killed on the order of 1000's of armed Iraqi resistance fighters. (You'll never get me to call people fighting to kick an occupying power out of their country "terrorists"). Just for shits and giggles, let's call the number 10,000 - that's surely more than fair. It's false, in fact, but it'll be good enough to make the point.

After some grueling mathematical gymnastics, we see that only about 9% of the people we killed in Iraq have actually been, um, shooting at us.

Don't let all the hawk-talk about "precision guided munitions" and "smart bombs" and the like fool you. 9% is sure the worst combatant/civilian kill ratio in the history of the world - excepting only those who were specifically bent on genocide.

Sooner or later, either we're going to have look at our bank account, or someone else will be kind enough to show it to us.