I just read an article at nytimes.com on how building your dream home in the woodlands of the Northeast can bring a really high risk of getting Lyme disease, which sucks. Apparently, small cleared plots of woodland have three times as many infected ticks; one three-acre plot has 600 ticks per acre, and 75% of them were infected with Lyme disease. Well there goes my dream of building myself a really comfy lodge up north someday. I think I'll just build it in the Pacific Northwest instead. They'ev got mountains and woods over there, and apparently the mice that carry Lyme disease are less populous in that part of the nation.

In other news, the Iraqi Minister of Information is still denying the fact that any Americans have entered Baghdad, despite the fact that several news sources have taken photos of soldiers storming Saddam's palaces and walking through the streets. This guy is still claiming that the dirty Americans haven't even gotten near the city. I wonder how many Iraqis believe him? They showed pictures in the Courant of Iraqis cheering the British soldiers who are taking over Basra. Obviously they can't speak for the entire nation of Iraq, but it supports the idea that at least some of them are happy with what we are doing. Some people are of the opinion that we're not liberating them, we're murdering them and going to war with a peaceful people. Hello, we're not at war with the Iraqi people! We're at war with a crazy dictator who has for decades controlled the lives of his people absolutely. He has murdered every dissenter, crushed every revolt, and determined what his people can wear, watch, hear and eat. He massacred the Kurds in the northern part of the country and used chemical weapons against his own people. He developed weapons of mass destruction with the full intent of using them on innocent people. He attacked a peaceful neighboring country with no provocation, merely out of greed and ambition, and when the UN stepped in to stop him, he turned those weapons on the soldiers. Saddam Hussein is not "good people", and his continued health and well-being posed a distinct threat to the rest of the free world. Ten years of disregarding UN sanctions and a total lack of respect for weapons inspectors show that this man never had any intention of relinquishing any sort of power. The people of Iraq were suffering and dying under those sanctions--should we have waited for Saddam to die, only so another dictator could take his place? I'm not saying that Iraqi civilian casualties are acceptable; they're not. It's terrible that those people were killed. But it's my belief that when the Iraqi people have a taste of true freedom, they will prefer a new existence to the tyranny of the old days.