US Losing Ground

I started out to quote an article in the Seattle Times yesterday about the US losing ground in Iraq. I didn't link to the article (like everybody else they want me to create an account, and the more times I give away my personal info, the more spam I get and the higher the risk of identity theft - why isn't the news free? More importantly, why don't I have some secure way to log into everywhere are be recognized? Different subject). The article starts out "The United States is is steadily losing ground to the Iraqi insurgency, according to every key military yardstick." It goes on to suggest that we are creating more insurgents than we're killing, which is a point I made in an article on Futurist.com a few weeks ago.

But here's the observation - I decided to see if the Seattle Times article had been picked up by someone who would make it free. I googled "US Losing ground." It returned "Results 1 - 10 of about 3,130,000." That's a lot of losing ground. So I decided to see how much ground we were gaining. About half as much as we're losing. "Results 1 - 10 of about 1,700,000 for US gaining ground."

It was even more interesting to learn how we're losing ground vs. how we're gaining ground. Of course, there is no real information in this odd result - but it struck me as interesting anyway.

This is an experiment I suggest you do try at home.