Sisyphus Understands

So, after a bit of an absence (I blame the Army for imposing too high a workload on us. Maybe we should unionize?), here comes the avalanche.

Let’s start with the whole Mark Foley thing. First, I have to believe that the man is either sick or completely without morals – children (or young adults) are not fair game for old men, sexually. Second, it really sucks to be Denny Hastert right now. Talk about damned if you do and damned if you don’t. He gets slammed for not acting earlier (even though its not entirely clear if he actually had something that he could act on then) – but if he had, just imagine how the left would have cried over the “gay bashing” by the Republicans! Sheesh.

All things considered, however, is anyone really surprised? Not by Foley specifically, but by reprehensible behavior from our elected officials? I’m not – as far as I’m concerned, politician is just a longer word for crook. Let’s face it, even if they initially ran because they wanted to do something good, serve the public, etc., most of them stay because of the power. After a while, the election process weeds out anyone who lacks the most critical skill needed in Congress – selling themselves to the voters. So what we end up with are professional politicians whose only real skill is getting elected.

Could we please have some term limits? That won’t stop them from getting elected, of course – but it would be a hell of a lot easier to get rid of them…

Moving right along, to my next topic of discussion, we come to one of my favorites: the inability of people on the extremes of the political spectrum to comprehend the very liberties that they claim to be expounding.

Case in point: the Minutemen disruption at Columbia. The students who took to the stage claimed that they did it in the name of free speech. Whose? Certainly no one seemed to be infringing on their right to freedom of expression. The Minutemen? Well, they seem to have been denied their opportunity to speak by those same students so hell-bent on defending free expression.

Ah, but we forget – the Minutemen are a “legitimate” part of the discussion. So many these days have the idea that free speech only includes those who agree with their position, it almost boggles the mind. How can there be any exchange of ideas, when opposing ideas are forbidden?

I think there are a large number of supposedly open minded people in this country who really ought to go back to square one and rethink their assumptions.

Normally, I don't like to say bad things about people or companies.

OK, you can stop laughing now, I'm serious.

Let me tell you about a recent customer service experience (and I use that phrase loosely). Household 6 and I purchased a new refrigerator a month after I got home from Iraq (the old one was on its last legs, not to mention looking like it was the one who went to Iraq). Being loyal Sears customers, we trudged over there, and after a little searching, found a fridge that we absolutely loved - it has plenty of room in the refrigerator portion, the freezer is on the bottom (important to the half of the relationship that stands just over 5' tall), and all sorts of features. And it was on sale, too!

Fast forward 11 months. One evening, Household 6 notices that the temperature in the refrigerator section is too high. Being the engineer that I am, I note that the freezer is the correct temperature, so I carefully make sure the door is completely closed and leave it overnight to see if the temperature comes down. It doesn't.

This is where things go pear shaped. You see, we purchased the "Master Protection Agreement" when we bought the fridge - basically covering anything that could possibly happen, up to and including the complete destruction of the fridge itself. So what do I do? I call the customer service hotline. One little hitch - while they were very sympathetic, they were unable to schedule a service call any sooner than 8 days later!

I don't know if you have ever tried to live without a refrigerator, but let me tell you - one day is tough. Eight is impossible. Completely aside from the fact that we would have to eat out every day, one of the clauses in our protection agreement entitles us to reimbursement for loss of food if the fridge fails - but that has to be verified by the service technician! Ever live with rotting food for eight days? Loads of fun...

To make a long story short, after several more phone calls, and tracking down the local service center to contact the technician directly, we were able to get him to the house after only four days. But I am seriously peeved with Sears - for once, someone has managed to irritate me out of my brand loyalty. Oh, I'll still buy the Craftsman tools, but never another appliance at Sears.

I'm sure everyone has heard about the study done by researchers at Johns Hopkins, estimating Iraqi civilian deaths since 2003 at approximately 655,000. Impressive number, all right - but what does it mean?

Well, the folks over at Iraq Body Count have taken exception to the techniques employed by Johns Hopkins. I find this interesting in particular because Iraq Body Count has been fairly critical of the casualty numbers reported by the Pentagon since the war began, charging that the government has consistently underestimated the number of civilians killed (and there is certainly room for debate on this subject - a lot of which hinges on exactly who is a "civilian?" If the insurgent drops his RPG before I shoot him, does he become a civilian again? Hmmm.)

But I digress. If you read the press release from IBQ, they lay out clearly their concerns. Specifically, Johns Hopkins used a very small sampling of the population of Iraq in order to generate their findings - 47 clusters of 40 homes, for a total of approximately 1800 households. From the responses they gathered, they then extrapolated those results to cover all of Iraq. The problem, as noted by IBQ, is that the violence in Iraq is not uniform throughout the country - some areas (such as those surveyed for this report) have had heavy fighting. Other regions have seen little or no fighting, so extrapolating results from one province to the entire country does not give you anything near an accurate picture. Doing that gives you a result that requires approximately 150 unreported attacks every day for the last three years! Surely someone would have noticed?

To put it in perspective, if I were to visit 47 locations in New Orleans, and interview 40 families at each location and ask which families had lost homes in the last three years, I'm sure that a large percentage of them would answer in the affirmative, especially if I focused my survey on the Ninth Ward, for example. Let's then extrapolate our numbers, and we discover that over 200 million people in America are homeless!

This simply points out why I am leery of statistics. By choosing our sample population, the questions we ask, and the sample size, it is possible to prove just about anything.