Linky Links

Stuff I found interesting or amusing and thought I'd share.

- Shane Parrish and "The Best Summary of Atlas Shrugged." I'm at the point where I just re-read John Gault's speech near the end of the book.

- Don Surber: Lindsey Graham, a profile in courage. A little over the top but Lindsey Graham was a good man.

- How Ukraine built a war fighting state. Did he mean "rationalization" or was that supposed to be "nationalization?" I like "rationalization."

- The Mitch McConnell situation keeps getting weirder and weirder.

Linky Links

Stuff I found interesting or amusing and thought I'd share.

- The next frontier is under your feet.

- Jonathan Turley on the passing of Lindsey Graham.

- From the archives: Paul Graham and the right kind of stubborn.

- Medicine is moving from calendars to clocks.

Flotsam and Jetsam

Miscellaneous thoughts and observations.

Enjoying the new Marvel series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier but one small thing keeps bothering me. It's a super hero series so you're supposed to suspend disbelief going in but all of the action seems to happen outside the US and I keep asking myself, "Why are we interfering in this foreign country?"  I mean we even had "agents" outside a Swiss bank that was being robbed. Pretty sure the Swiss didn't authorize us to be on their sovereign soil... This made me laugh. We live in the crazy years... Prior to the US invasion of Iraq - UNICEF had estimated that between the UN sanctions that created shortages and the outright brutality and cruelty of Saddam Hussein - roughly 5,000 Iraqi babies (children under 5-years of age) died or were killed every month. That's 60,000 plus children every year that were saved by our actions... You may seriously need to update your iPhone right away... Heh heh - now even Lindsey Graham is making the Baghdad Bob on the Southern border comparisons. I just might have been first in this trend... 

Linky Links

Stuff I found interesting or amusing and thought I'd share.

- Howard Cosell and John Lennon - such a cool photo

- Interesting read on Alexander Hamilton's early years.

- First they're installing drywall for us next they'll be using us as human batteries.

- Good for you Lindsey Graham

- Interesting - why there's a good case for sanctioning Christine Blasey Ford's lawyers

- How the Internet gave all of us superpowers

- George Gilder: Forget cloud computing, Blockchain is the future

Iraq and Its Costs

An article in The Wall Street Journal by Senators Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham - well worth the read.

Today's antiwar politicians have effectively turned John F. Kennedy's inaugural address on its head, urging Americans to refuse to pay any price, or bear any burden, to assure the survival of liberty. This is wrong. The fact is that America's prosperity at home and security abroad are bound together. We will not fare well in a world in which al Qaeda and Iran can claim that they have defeated us in Iraq and are ascendant.

There is no question the war in Iraq – like the Cold War, World War II and every other conflict we have fought in our history – costs money. But as great as the costs of this struggle have been, so too are the dividends to our national security from a successful outcome, with a functioning, representative Iraqi government and a stabilized Middle East. The costs of abandoning Iraq to our enemies, conversely, would be enormous, not only in dollars, but in human lives and in the security and freedom of our nation.