Today’s reason: misleading talk about the status of Iraq.
A poll provided by USA Today (including a decsription of the methodology) shows that even before the prison scandal, the Iraqi people are not as supportive as the Bush adminstration was leading us to believe.
The only thing that saves the U.S. image in Iraq from looking abyssmal is the inclusion of Kurdish opinon in the polls. By leaving them off, the stats drop severely. Only a third of respondents thought the invasion had done more good than harm overall, but outside of the Kurdish areas of the country this number is as low as 18%. In Baghdad and the Sunni areas, nearly 75% of respondents felt that Iraq was the same or worse off since the invasion, and even in the Shi’ite areas the number who feel this way is about 60%.
The sections covering disrespect (for women, homes and places of worship) are particularly eye-opening and even the Kurds don’t boost some of the numbers in section 12. “How hard are US forces trying to [restore] basic services like electricity and clean drinking water to Iraqis?” A lot = 11%; “keep ordinary Iaqis from being killed or wounded?” A lot = 11%.
The worst is #14: “Do you think now of Coalition forces mostly as occupiers or mostly as liberators?” Even including the Kurds, 71% of Iraqis see the U.S. as occupiers, up 28 points from the start of the invasion.
The good news is that W rated better in admiration (favorable=25%) than Blair (17%), Chirac (16%) and Saddam (10%) but I bet these numbers have shifted in the last month.
Here’s a nice little 15-minute time waster in the form of a Graphic Adventure Game done all film-noir-style.
Out of the Gene Pool has been one of my favorite finds since I dropped the whopping $4 for an annual subscription to comics.com. (Worth every penny for my selection of strips delivered to my inbox each morning).
Today, they’ve got one that is on the same level as the Math is Hard Barbie of a couple years ago:
I used the quadratic equation last week, for pete’s sake. But it misses the larger point. The formula to figure out the monthly payment on a 30 year fixed rate mortgage is no more complicated than the quadratic; I hammered it out on my own. The problem is that Math should be taken in the same vein as Art or Literature, knowledge for its own sake. My guess is that I could go back and find where Janz had written a strip extolling the virtues of “expressing” ones’ self or some such about art providing an insight into the world. Math is no different. The problem with math education isn’t that it covers obscure stuff, it’s that it misses the bigger point that Math can create just as fine a picture of the world as (insert your favorite artist here).