$500,000

[via Think Progress] The Iraq war is costing roughly half a million dollars a minute at this point. Anybody who doesn't think that there are better ways of spending that money in the service of justice, domestic tranquility, actual security, and general welfare has to be dangerously, certifiably insane. You know, a Republican.

When I think how few seconds' monetary fuel of the bloody-minded war machine's continued operation it would take to pay off the student loans I'll be saddled with for years and years and years (loans I acquired as a student during which I was always working in addition to studying, by the way), it makes my head spin. But quite apart from that, just think of the kinds of sweeping planetary civilization-wide benefits that would have bloomed from a comparable investment in renewable-energy (getting us off this blank endlessly catastrophically reiterated "blood-for-oil" atrocity treadmill in the first place) or education ("impossible! tax and spend! no free lunches!" scream the thought-hating corporate-militarist "free marketeers" as they roll in their blood-soaked tax-paid billions) or planetary projects to provide the "miracle medicine" of clean water to the millions upon millions of people who needlessly die, along with all their potential problem-solving intelligence and creative expressivity, due to malnutrition, unsanitary conditions, cheaply treatable water-borne diseases ("hippy! relativist!" snarl the wingnuts, can't you see "we" are in a "Clash of Civilizations" with the scary nonwhites? more blood, more bullets, more shock, more awe!).

Half a million dollars a minute. Every dollar a waste, a diminishment of the measure of our hope, a derailment of some possible collaboration to address a shared problem, an exacerbation of the world's heartbreak and tension and loss that will demand its due who knows when and how, minute by minute, dollar by dollar, blood drop by blood drop. What a desperate idiotic desolation it all is.