THIS MODERN WORLD

Operation Yellow Elephant is having a contest.

Create signs relating to Operation Yellow Elephant’s mission to expose the hypocrisy of hawkish College Republicans and other young conservatives who are too cowardly to fight in the war they demanded. Post these signs near roadways and pedestrian pathways on or near college campuses. Photograph your work and send it to me. I’ll post them here. In early October, the OYE Contributing Writers and the Freeway Blogger will pick a winner.

They’ve got fabulous prizes, too.

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On a related note, Steve Gilliard is handing out medals, here, here and here.

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And while I’m on the topic…there’s been an attempt lately to counter the ‘chickenhawk’ meme with a fairly obvious straw man — are you saying that only people with military experience are entitled to have opinions? It’s a feeble attempt to deflect attention from the real question: how you can sleep at night if you really and truly believe the war is a necessary thing, as long as it is fought by others? Hell, most of these people would probably scream bloody murder if you even tried to rescind their tax cuts to help offset the expense of this fucking war.

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Finally: that strange image at the top of this post is something I picked up in a souvenir shop in Nashville. It’s also my gift to any blogger looking for an apporopriate graphic on this topic — take it, it’s yours.

BAGHDAD, Iraq – Amal Ramzi Ismail had been up since dawn glancing out the window of her neighbor’s house at the wreckage of her own home, destroyed when American soldiers blew up a munitions cache nearby. Then, at 10:40 a.m., what she had been waiting for all morning finally arrived – an Iraqi television crew pulled up in a blue minivan with a flurry of dust and rushed over to Ms. Ismail’s house.

Laborers were already toiling away, hammering planks, laying bricks and pouring concrete. They had begun their work in early August, when an Iraqi television network hired a contractor to rebuild the house.

“I get chills thinking about this,” said Ms. Ismail, whose father had died from injuries he suffered in the explosion, as she raced across the street in a blue robe toward a cameraman filming the laborers. “Words can’t express how grateful I am.”

So went a recent taping in mid-August of “Materials and Labor,” a homegrown Iraqi show inspired by “This Old House” and “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,” but with a twist of “Apocalypse Now.”

Reality TV could turn out to be the most durable Western import in Iraq. It has taken root with considerably greater ease than American-style democracy. Since spring 2004, when “Materials and Labor” made its debut, a constellation of reality shows has burst onto TV screens across Iraq.

True to the genre, “Materials and Labor” has a simple conceit at its heart – Al Sharqiya, an Iraqi satellite network, offers Baghdad residents the chance to have homes that were destroyed by the war rebuilt at no cost to them.

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“This is the only good thing we’ve acquired from the American occupation,” Majid al-Samarraie, the writer of “Materials and Labor,” said as he watched the reconstruction of Ms. Ismail’s home.

Since its start, the show has financed the repair of six homes. Two of those were destroyed by car bombs, two during the detonation of munitions by American soldiers, one by American armor and the sixth by an American airstrike. (After being rebuilt by Al Sharqiya, one of the homes had its windows blown out again by an explosion.)

Mr. Samarraie said each episode, by showing the ravages of war and the callousness of politicians, serves as a critique of the Americans and the Iraqi government.

“There are hundreds of homes damaged across Iraq,” he said, his voice rising. “Falluja, Najaf, Karbala, Tal Afar, Haditha, Qaim – they’re all asking for compensation, but it’s hopeless. With our show, we’re trying to plant a smile on the lips of those people.”

Full story.

So I’m looking through the hurricane photos on Yahoo, and I notice the little automatically generated ad at the bottom of the page:

My first thought is, well, gosh, that’s tasteless. But then I wonder if there actually are Hurricane Katrina items up on eBay already. So I click through.

It will probably not surprise you to learn that there are, in plentiful quantities. Those of you seeking souvenirs of the destruction and human tragedy left in Katrina’s wake can choose from several versions of “I survived Hurricane Katrina” t-shirts; shirts with the satellite map image which extoll survivors to “Prepare, Endure, Rebuild” (20% of profits donated to relief funds!); numerous Katrina & the Waves items which may or may not have been posted in reaction to the hurricane; several seashells washed up by Katrina; the seemingly ill-conceived “NOReliefFund” .net, .org and .com domain names (10% of selling price donated to the Red Cross!); the HurricaneKatrina.BIZ domain name (no mention of any donated percentages); hurricane photos on CD; containers of real Hurricane Katrina rain; Atlantic Ocean coral from Hurricane Katrina; a keepsake described as “HURRICANE KATRINA ENGRAVED TAG < BLING BLING!!> HOTTT!”; a Segway-knockoff called an Electric Chariot, described as “Fast & strong like HURRICANE KATRINA”; and one apparently genuine offer of shelter from someone in a small house with one spare bedroom.

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It goes without saying that we’re hoping for the best for our friends in New Orleans and other affected areas. If you want to do something tangible, donate to the Red Cross.

Extraordinary:

In what Fox News officials concede was a mistake, John Loftus, a former U.S. prosecutor, gave out the address Aug. 7, saying it was the home of a Middle Eastern man, Iyad K. Hilal, who was the leader of a terrorist group with ties to those responsible for the July 7 bombings in London.

Hilal, whom Loftus identified by name during the broadcast, moved out of the house about three years ago. But the consequences were immediate for the Voricks.

Satellite photos of the house and directions to the residence were posted online. The Voricks told police, who arranged for the content to be taken down. Someone even removed the street sign where the Voricks live to provide some protection.

Still, it has not been easy.

A driver yelled a profanity at the family and called them terrorists as they barbecued on their patio Aug. 14. Some drivers have stopped and photographed the house, Randy Vorick said.

Last weekend, someone spray-painted “Terrist” on their home. Police, who have regularly patrolled their house since the day after the broadcast, now station a squad car across the street.

Randy, a restaurant manager, and Ronnell, a manager at a staffing agency, have been married 19 years and met as teenagers when they worked at a local McDonald’s.

They grew up in La Habra and bought the house three years ago after Hilal moved out so they could be close to Ronnell Vorick’s parents.

La Habra Police Capt. John Rees said the department was “giving special attention to the family to make sure they’re safe,” but declined to elaborate.

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Loftus said he gave out the address to help local police, and insisted that Hilal, a Garden Grove grocery store owner, was a terrorist.

“I thought it might help police in that area now that we have positively identified a terrorist living in [Orange County],” he said.

Tip for former prosecutor Loftus: if you want to help the police, call the police.

“Terrist.” That pretty much sums up what you need to know about the Fox News audience, doesn’t it?

From the current New Yorker. Read it and weep:

Tooth decay begins, typically, when debris becomes trapped between the teeth and along the ridges and in the grooves of the molars. The food rots. It becomes colonized with bacteria. The bacteria feeds off sugars in the mouth and forms an acid that begins to eat away at the enamel of the teeth. Slowly, the bacteria works its way through to the dentin, the inner structure, and from there the cavity begins to blossom three-dimensionally, spreading inward and sideways. When the decay reaches the pulp tissue, the blood vessels, and the nerves that serve the tooth, the pain starts — an insistent throbbing. The tooth turns brown. It begins to lose its hard structure, to the point where a dentist can reach into a cavity with a hand instrument and scoop out the decay. At the base of the tooth, the bacteria mineralizes into tartar, which begins to irritate the gums. They become puffy and bright red and start to recede, leaving more and more of the tooth’s root exposed. When the infection works its way down to the bone, the structure holding the tooth in begins to collapse altogether.

Several years ago, two Harvard researchers, Susan Starr Sered and Rushika Fernandopulle, set out to interview people without health-care coverage for a book they were writing, “Uninsured in America.” They talked to as many kinds of people as they could find, collecting stories of untreated depression and struggling single mothers and chronically injured laborers — and the most common complaint they heard was about teeth. Gina, a hairdresser in Idaho, whose husband worked as a freight manager at a chain store, had “a peculiar mannerism of keeping her mouth closed even when speaking.” It turned out that she hadn’t been able to afford dental care for three years, and one of her front teeth was rotting. Daniel, a construction worker, pulled out his bad teeth with pliers. Then, there was Loretta, who worked nights at a university research center in Mississippi, and was missing most of her teeth. “They’ll break off after a while, and then you just grab a hold of them, and they work their way out,” she explained to Sered and Fernandopulle. “It hurts so bad, because the tooth aches. Then it’s a relief just to get it out of there. The hole closes up itself anyway. So it’s so much better.”

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One of the great mysteries of political life in the United States is why Americans are so devoted to their health-care system. Six times in the past century — during the First World War, during the Depression, during the Truman and Johnson Administrations, in the Senate in the nineteen-seventies, and during the Clinton years — efforts have been made to introduce some kind of universal health insurance, and each time the efforts have been rejected. Instead, the United States has opted for a makeshift system of increasing complexity and dysfunction. Americans spend $5,267 per capita on health care every year, almost two and half times the industrialized world’s median of $2,193; the extra spending comes to hundreds of billions of dollars a year. What does that extra spending buy us? Americans have fewer doctors per capita than most Western countries. We go to the doctor less than people in other Western countries. We get admitted to the hospital less frequently than people in other Western countries. We are less satisfied with our health care than our counterparts in other countries. American life expectancy is lower than the Western average. Childhood-immunization rates in the United States are lower than average. Infant-mortality rates are in the nineteenth percentile of industrialized nations. Doctors here perform more high-end medical procedures, such as coronary angioplasties, than in other countries, but most of the wealthier Western countries have more CT scanners than the United States does, and Switzerland, Japan, Austria, and Finland all have more MRI machines per capita. Nor is our system more efficient. The United States spends more than a thousand dollars per capita per year — or close to four hundred billion dollars — on health-care-related paperwork and administration, whereas Canada, for example, spends only about three hundred dollars per capita. And, of course, every other country in the industrialized world insures all its citizens; despite those extra hundreds of billions of dollars we spend each year, we leave forty-five million people without any insurance. A country that displays an almost ruthless commitment to efficiency and performance in every aspect of its economy — a country that switched to Japanese cars the moment they were more reliable, and to Chinese T-shirts the moment they were five cents cheaper — has loyally stuck with a health-care system that leaves its citizenry pulling out their teeth with pliers.