December 13, 2004

How to find cheap gas prices in your city

GasBuddy.com - Find cheap gas prices in your city "170 gas price information web sites that help consumers find low gasoline prices."

I just found out about this site, and I'm intrigued enough to try it out for a while. It looks to be a grass-roots, non-profit effort to disseminate gas prices on a timely basis.

The first site that had this functionality was MSN, believe it or not. But they never had any information about my area, and as far as I can tell, they still don't have much of a database.

GasBuddy on the other hand has prices listed for 7 gas stations in my hometown alone. The gasbuddy.com site itself seems to just be a gateway and jumping off point for the 170 individual sites (texasgasprices.com, bostongasprices.com, etc.) that actually list the prices in their respective areas.

I'll be keeping an eye out to see if the prices are up to date. As a grass-roots effort with what seems to be a vibrant community, I would assume that they will be.

December 08, 2004

Defense Department Admits Failure of Policies in Iraq

Report of the "Defense Science Board Task Force" on Strategic Communication"American efforts have achieved the opposite of what they intended. American direct intervention in the Muslim World has paradoxically elevated the stature of and support for radical Islamists." -- Department of Defense, "Defense Science Board Report on Strategic Communication", October 2004, pg. 40

It's nice to see the administration finally admit what millions of American citizens and citizens of the world knew back before the Iraq invasion: That the invasion would do more harm than good.

I know I wanted to steer clear of politics, and I said so in an earlier post. I did so mainly because I believe each person should vote their own conscience free of proselytizing and the other media hype that surrounds presidential elections. Now that the election is over, I thought I'd start posting about the reasons why I did not vote Republican for the first time in my life.

And this is the first one. The report I linked to is not a left-leaning blog, not the product of the so-called liberal media, nor of a liberal think tank. It comes straight from the Defense Department. I don't think you can get any clearer than the two sentences at the top of page 40 (page 48 of the PDF file) (and I paraphrase): "Our efforts have failed. The invasion has actually given the terrorists more support in the Muslim World."

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that sending troops into a Muslim country without provocation is not going to win the hearts and minds of the Muslim world. And the argument that possible Weapons of Mass Destruction mandated our preemptive action has been shown to be false. Our military personnel on the ground in Iraq, with task forces whose sole purpose was to find these WMD, has still not been able to find any evidence of WMD for over 18 months.

I've heard the arguments: "Those WMD may still be there, we don't know for sure" and "I didn't see the intelligence, but it must have been persuasive enough to justify the invasion." At some point, you have to call a spade a spade.
1. During the Afghanistan campaign to oust the Taliban (which I fully support), there was initial confusion as to why Iraq was targetted.
2. When so-called "evidence" was presented for the case to go to war, millions in this country and around the world still were not convinced.
3. When we were finally in a position to definitively determine whether there was any evidence WMD, whether or not they were removed, no evidence was to be found.

This sequence of events has removed any moral authority the US had in waging war. You can say "but Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator. The world is better without him." Yes, you can say that, but that's not what this administration advanced as the justification to go to war. The justification was the possibility of WMD. The fact that Saddam was a brutal dictator was a convenience, not the main reason. Colin Powell did not go in front of the United Nations with evidence pointing to Saddam's brutality. He showed evidence that purported the existence of WMD. Now that none have been found, how can you not assume that the rest of the world thinks the war lacks moral authority?

It looks more and more like the evidence was "manipulated" to support the foregone conclusion of the administration that Iraq needed to be invaded. And once people start thinking that, you've lost the war for hearts and minds, which -- in case you've forgotten -- is the real war on terror.

December 01, 2004

Pediatric Medicine of Wallingford

Pediatric Medicine of Wallingford
Here's a plug for a friend's pediatric practice in Wallingford, CT. Hopefully, this will cause Google to crawl the page and include it in its index. Hopefully, it'll also help to increase its PageRank.

Just so you know, the practice is called Pediatric Medicine of Wallingford in Wallingford, CT, which is located in Central Connecticut. They are a group of pediatricians offering services in vaccination, hearing screening, vision screening, physicals.

Yes, you webheads are probably seeing that I'm including many of the site's META keywords to try and increase relevancy ranking.

They also have pages that describe their staff, location, as well as a page of Frequently Asked Questions.