Now that the Iraq War is over...

I'm not interested in debating the success of the mission: goodness knows I did a ton of that back in 2003.  And I know there are a lot of people, particularly servicemen for whom I have the utmost respect & admiration, who feel very passionately about its importance.

I will just say this:

Think of what else we could have done with $800 BILLION (with a B) dollars over the last ten years.

We could have bought a year's worth of good American-sized groceries for 86 million families.

We could have paid four years worth of tuition & expenses at Princeton for 4 million kids.

We could have bought Exxon Mobile.  Twice.

We could have bought the entire population of Dakar, Senegal a single family home in the suburbs of Santa Cruz, CA.

I'm just sayin'.

Glad it's finally over.

One war down.  One more to go.

A thought on Occupy Wall Street

A few weeks ago I was playing Monopoly with my better half and some friends.  I usually play with my family back in Baltimore, and I usually make a respectable showing but typically lose to the sharks like my brother and my cousin. 

But this time, I was the shark. 

I got super-lucky, landing on Free Parking, Park Place, and Boardwalk.  I had other properties, but I quickly realized that, as long as I didn't trade with anyone else, I could keep them all from building houses while I just bled them dry.

So I did.  And I won.  It took a while, but I ended up with over $12,000 in cash.

It was pretty obvious I was going to win, but I choose to really pour on the gas.  Which made for a really rotten game for everyone else but me.

Somewhere along the way, I had the thought: "Is this what it's like to be in the 1%?"

Luckily, it was only a game.