Current Events

Of course it’s about oil (Jim Holt in the London Review of Books):

It has been estim­ated, by the Council on Foreign Relations, that Iraq may have a fur­ther 220 bil­lion bar­rels of undis­covered oil; anoth­er study puts the fig­ure at 300 bil­lion. If these estim­ates are any­where close to the mark, US forces are now sit­ting on one quarter of the world’s oil resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low pro­duc­tion costs, would be of the order of $30 tril­lion at today’s prices. For pur­poses of com­par­is­on, the pro­jec­ted total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion.

The Great Iraq Swindle: How Bush Allowed an Army of For-Profit Contractors to Invade the U.S. Treasury (from Rolling Stone)

In a much-ballyhooed example of favor­it­ism, the White House ori­gin­ally installed a clown named Jim O’Beirne at the rel­ev­ant eval­u­ation desk in the Department of Defense. O’Beirne proved to be a clas­sic Bush vil­lain, a mor­on’s mor­on who judged applic­ants not on their Arabic skills or their rel­ev­ant expert­ise but on their Republican bona fides; he sent a twenty-four-year-old who had nev­er worked in fin­ance to man­age the reopen­ing of the Iraqi stock exchange, and appoin­ted a recent gradu­ate of an evan­gel­ic­al uni­ver­sity for home-schooled kids who had no account­ing exper­i­ence to man­age Iraq’s $13 bil­lion budget. James K. Haveman, who had served as Michigan’s community-health dir­ect­or under a GOP gov­ernor, was put in charge of rehab­il­it­at­ing Iraq’s health-care sys­tem and decided that what this war-ravaged, mal­nour­ished, sanitation-deficient coun­try most urgently needed was … an anti-smoking campaign.

More from the ever-growing annals of cor­por­ate stupidity:

Johnson & Johnson (foun­ded 1886) sues the Red Cross (foun­ded 1881) for appro­pri­at­ing their red cross trademark.

from Wonkette (and CNN)