Where has all the money gone?

It sounds like the coalition of the willing is the coalition of the paid — they’re willing to be paid.

Henry A. Waxman on US spending in connection with the war in Iraq.

Everybody talks about it, but noone has the precise numbers

The lesser mathematician blogs on how much university drop-outs cost.

Taking exams

Smart and sensitive but still packing a punch, you’d do well in law enforcement. Your sincerely chivalric approach to life and your fetish for uniforms are the stuff from which heroes are made.

Fetish for uniforms? Either way, the Watchmen Profile Inventory (WPI) thinks that the Nite-Owl character fits me best.

As I just found out, in little less than a year, the original Watchmen comic series will appear in movie theaters. Click here for the boring official site and here for a much better fansite.

I read the Watchmen while I was in high school. As it turned out later in retrospective, we had an excellent librarian who picked the best comics for us, but at that age we’d read any comic crossing our paths anyway. That’s how the Watchmen and Akira became the two epic comics I read along the “standard literature” like Spiderman etc.

The thing that makes the superheroes in Watchmen so unique is their lack of any superpower. Because of this lack they are very credible in the reader’s eyes, they are just a bunch of people who try to make the most out of their potential rather than just sit and watch. Except for that they’re not different from anybody else. The only exception is Dr. Manhattan, but he has problems of his own as you’ll find out.

If you’re in for a must read epic comic portraying the fear and hopes of the 1980s, then Watchmen is it. Various editions can still be had, but Absolute Edition (hardcover) the most luxurious though adequate for such a masterpiece. (with its “Search Inside” function, Amazon lets you read the first couple pages taking you directly into the story)

Was it the right war?

For quite a while now, the New York Times feature a blog called Baghdad Bureau featuring intimate background stories/reviews of its local correspondents. As the NY Times has quite a few locals in its salary books by now, one can an interesting insight into Iraq as it’s being seen by Iraqis. Today’s article is an interesting summary of the last three decades leaving the question unanswered what’s worse, be it systematic and organized or random terror.

Victims become victimizers

TED 2008: How Good People Turn Evil, From Stanford to Abu Ghraib