My dear Glen, it's all in perception. Obviously your perception is very provincial, i.e. tax dollars need to be spent close to home, and on your pet projects, to get bang for the buck. Unfortunately, such an attitude is all too common lately. And, as the mother of a former Captain in the Army Corps of Engineers who served 9 months in Saudi Arabia in the First Gulf War, your cavalier attitude (quote: "I could care less about Iraq") about our all-volunteer military's sacrifices to protect your right to stay at home and research earthquakes bothers me even more.

Ah, wouldn't it be nice if the government would give each citizen a laundry list of budget items and we could all vote on how "X" number of dollars would be spent -- $20M here for this line item, $50M there for that line item? That would be true democracy. But the reality is that we vote for leaders and we entrust them to spend the money in the citizens' best interests. Whether you agree or not, the majority of our elected politicians feel that protecting our national security is of far greater concern right now than a rupture on the SAF; in other words, the threat of a man-made disaster is a far greater threat to our citizenry than a natural disaster.

You and I may never know what man-made disaster might already have been prevented by the military action that our country has undertaken -- we are not privy to that information at this time.

Nobody denies that a devastating earthquake will someday occur on the SAF -- that is a given. Natural disasters will always be with us and they will always be costly, in terms of both loss of life and loss of property. Even when they can be forecasted days ahead of time, they can still result in unimaginable loss of life and property -- witness the Gulf Coast after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

And, speaking about same, why not blame Hurricane Relief emergency funding and FEMA for the lack of funding for USGS? Why point the finger of blame at Iraq?