Doug R - the problem with your "friend with cancer" death pool analogy is that (I presume) the cancer is incurable and death inevitable. This war does not need to be inevitable.

On negativity -- if Donuel's admittedly black war pool could get everyone to (as Daylia put it) "imagine the worst", maybe the war wouldn't happen at all! I am a hugely positive person -- regularly accused of being relentlessly optimistic, so nobody can begin to accuse me of negativity, but I think we should all fill our minds with pictures of the horror of war. Let's ALL imagine charred and dismembered children (are you squirming yet?), black smoke poisoning the air, widespread radiation contamination from depleted uranium armor piercing shell tips... We need to see these things in our minds and transmit them to our children, not to make sure thay happen through some daffy "hundredth monkey" mystery, but to make sure they DON'T happen because we remember the horror.