Windmills

So I'm reading the hour-by-hour of the Petraeus report just thinking how fucking pointless this all is, who cares how many benchmarks he says we hit vs. the GAO says, it won't make a solitary whit of difference (what is a whit? Can I have a solitary one? Whatever, I do) with what our policy is going to be, and everybody knows this, and everybody says this in advance, and is still just breathlessly blogging everything, and I really just don't care, even though Obama sounds a bit like a tool and I did like this exchange from yesterday:

Petraeus: "For what it's worth, al-Qaida believes that Iraq is the central front for the war on terrorism."
(California Democratic Rep. Brad) Sherman: "Well, al-Qaida is telling us that they think it's the central front. They might be lying. They've been known to do so, General. And if we allow Ahmadinejad and bin Laden to tell us where to fight them, they may not give us their best advice."


Good point! But anyway, so like, why can't we just leave right now, leave the embassy, leave everything, let them fight their civil war by themselves? Oil, right? It's always oil? So I was just wondering, how much do windmills cost? And of course if you type that into your Google search bar that exact question comes up as a suggestion, which got me to this page, which suggests that you can buy a 10 kilowatt windmill for $40,000, although if you go look up that model it suggests it's more like 28-30k, but let's round up. The average American household (not person) used about 10,000 kWh a year, and this windmill will produce 10,000 – 18,000 kWh. And it just so randomly happens that the last figure I saw for how much the war in Iraq had cost us (back in January, like forever ago) was 1.2 trillion. And guess what 1.2 trillion divided by 40,000 is? It is exactly 300 million!

With me? For the price of the war to date, we could have bought a windmill for every single motherfucking person in America that would give them all the electricity an entire household needs each year for the 25-30 year life of the windmill.

Weird, huh?