Americans killed in Vietnam: 58,193.

Americans killed in Iraq: 4,400.

Americans killed in Afghanistan: 1,087.

Civilians killed: Let’s not go there.

Substantive achievements: None.

On this day we honor our fallen, who sacrificed their lives to the hubris of the American political class.

iCasualties

Joshua Green, a senior editor for The Atlantic since 2003 and named one of ten young writers on the rise by the Columbia Journalism Review, last Friday, ignoring that the Louisville Courier-Journal originally broke the Rand Paul civil-rights story he’s writing about:

The second point, which gets directly to why Rand Paul is suddenly flailing, is that the local Kentucky media — in particular the newspapers, and especially the flagship Louisville Courier-Journal — has been decimated by job cuts, as has happened across the country. This came up several times in discussions with Kentucky politicos and local journalists. The reason it matters is that because there is no longer a healthy, aggressive press corps — and no David Yepsen-type dean of political journalists — candidates don’t run the same kind of gauntlet they once did. They’re not challenged by journalists.

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1. Meet the New Neighbor.

Yes, Talibunny didn’t lose a moment yet again nailing herself to a cross over it, but Joe McGinniss moving in next door to write a book about her is a little creepy.

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Back before America went batshit crazy, there was an organization on the University of Oregon campus called (if memory serves) the “Drug Information Center” — which was exactly that: You could drop off a sample of drugs at their door in the dead of night, and a week later they’d publish a report of what it contained.

The idea was genius: No need to scold you about your nasty, illegal habit — just coldly inform you that the acid you scored was really Borax.

Of course it didn’t last. It made too much sense. We can’t handle the truth.

Sometime in the following decade, we knew a guy who was involved in Eugene’s recycling community. (Eugene had one of those; Eugene was one of those towns.) He showed us around a giant warehouse with mountains of plastic milk jugs. The jugs were destined for a ship, which was destined for China. The energy cost in transporting the jugs, he told us, pretty much eliminated any recycling value. You can’t really recycle Dirty Plastic, but at least you can pretend you’re doing your part for the Earth.

That, like the DIC, was very Eugene: Cynical utopianism. We’ll do what we can, but let’s not kid ourselves.

We appreciate that. Facts are wonderful things. They help tether you to reality, if you’re into that. Most Americans, as we all know, aren’t.

So it caught our attention that there was a curious consequence of the recent Hot Volcano Action in Iceland — England almost starved to death:

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NINOxRxze9k

So we’re watching the 24 finale last night, because even if we did break up with the show last year, we had some good times together in Season 5, when President Allstate was knocked off in the first five minutes, and we figured we owed it a final fling to see it off, and after it was over we visited Dave Barry’s blog for the recap (Dave Barry having named President Allstate for us, even if as a rule we’re not a Dave Barry fan), and aside from the regular “Edgar is still dead” joke (Edgar having bit it in Season 5, so we enjoy the callback), we notice that below the post is a seven-minute tracking shot of Seattle high schoolers dancing to a popular song film taken on Market Street from a San Francisco cable car in 1905 before the earthquake (and before the fire, if you’re one of those assholes who just won’t let it go), and we decide that it’s, well, fucking awesome.

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8:25 pm. When we got our iPad, one of the first things we tested was the streaming-video Netflix app, and we decided to test that with the Lost pilot. We’ve never seen the Lost pilot. We heard it was really good. But as they say, hearing is the second thing to go.

At some point over the past six or seven or eleventy years, we must have seen an episode. It was so padded with filler and flashbacks, we never watched another. Until tonight.

Why tonight? We don’t want to write about Rand Paul again, so we need some gimmick.

Also, we grew up on television. Among our earliest memories is watching the Fugitive finale at our aunt’s house. The Fugitive finale was stunning. He caught the One-Armed Man. The End.

Everyone was shocked. There had never been a The End on an American television series. There wouldn’t be another until Mary Tyler Moore’s Traveling Group Hug. These days, of course, we get 150-minute specials.

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Thursday saw the demise of the original server for Usenet, itself the original go-to Internet source for unlimited free porn before employers had a clue why you were skipping all your coffee breaks.

Er, so we’ve been told. We do a lot of technical research in our line of work.

So it’s fitting that Australia celebrates the end of an era by ignoring the fact that the era ever existed:

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