6

Reading about the method for determining the winner in the upcoming US elections, and what a headspin that is. Voting takes place on November 2 but don’t expect that we’ll wake up next day knowing who the President-elect is, and now I read that the Lancet-published and perhaps backed study finding about 100,000 Iraqi deaths since the US invasion is being treated, surprise surprise, as utter tosh, biased, hopelessly flawed, deliberately timed to come out before the election to give the shrub a hard time, and of course you can read chapter and verse of the criticism or demolition job online, all of which just underlines how imperfect such studies naturally are, dealing as they must with extrapolation from samples, necessary assumptions and the like, and all will have their trenchant critics, even assessments made by the American military, who are in the best position of anyone to calculate the human damage they've done but who simply refuse point blank to do such calculations, and this is more than mean-spirited, it’s criminal negligence on the part of an outfit engaging more or less unilaterally in conflict with other nations (okay, sure they’re just obeying orders, so it’s the ones doing the ordering that’re shirking their responsibility), always with a huge imbalance of firepower, and a huge imbalance in human carnage, so we must bring pressure to bear on the Americans to keep figures on this, and to be open at how they arrive at those figures, let’s begin a campaign. Anyway, good to see the focus is back on the cost to the Iraqis, where it belongs, rather than the cost to the Americans, and then of course you must compare all this with life under Saddam, but I’m thinking again about the Vietnam war, and all the publicity we got about America’s scars and so little about the devastation of little Vietnam, the piles of innocent dead and the devastated earth. Anyway methinks the neocons will win, closer though than it was in Oz, and it’s probably true that they’ll be less adventurous over the next four years, tied down as they still are in Iraq and Afghanistan, trying to balance the democratic push and the pro-American push, but who knows what might come up, maybe at last they’ll make an all-out effort to flush out Osama, if it does them any good. Back to the home front and foster-caring, listening to stuff on the lack of research about outcomes for foster-cared kids, one of the problems, and it's a problem in my approach, is the lack of ongoing support after foster-care, how much does the foster-carer provide ongoing parental guidance in the manner of a true parent, in my case so far not at all, I don’t make close bonds easily, and my bonds with these kids are really a bit artificial, I’m just providing a safe haven and many of them don’t want, or say they don’t want, foster-carers to be parents as such, to come on strong with rules and regulations, but they actually do wants bonds, we all do, when the right types come along.