20060726

a little closer to reality, perhaps?

Usually, my posts titled "Idea number xxx" are flights of fancy, if-wishes-were-horses proposals. If I could finance them, I suppose they would be feasible, technologically, but they'd need someone with completely different skillsets to find the willing market and make the sale.

It pleases me that STOL airships are far closer to reality. Of course Dynalifter does not list medium-haul domestic passenger airlift as a potential market, as I had wished. By the time such craft and services are available, if ever, I will have little need to go to the East Coast anymore.



But that's not the point. Maybe I'd buy stock in it.

20060723

at VC

An interesting post by Ilya Somin, about the divide among libertarians on the US occupation of Iraq. Milton and Rose Friedman are quoted.

Please don't challenge me on the choice of "occupation" for what the US is doing in Iraq. By plain-English definition, that's what we are doing, and I use it with no intent to challenge the intent or wisdom of it.

I left a comment there, after wading through mounds of libertarian blather about abstraction versus the concrete, moralism versus consequentialism or utilitiarianism, and walls of flame. Plus some gems. It deserves the rare, vaunted Second Reading.

It isn't enough to simply oppose or support this conflict. Slogans such as "oppose the war but support the troops" and "regardless of how we got involved, we still have to win" don't even scratch the surface. In a way that transcends foreign policy or the face Uncle Sugar puts on diplomacy, regardless of whether American boots marked Saudi soil, this war was coming to us one way or another. Why we fight it predicates how we fight it, and how we fight it determines whether we will win it. If we are not fighting for the right reasons, we will lose.