Pete Garza was telling me, “this is where we were ambushed a couple weeks ago” when the automatic weapons opened up on us from the summit of the hill just ahead. We were in a saddle between that hill and the one we had just left, and there was a fairly fresh shell crater to our right. We dove into it, as did the Pathfinder who was with us.

It was early evening and overcast, and darkness was coming on fast, as it always does in Vietnam and everywhere else in the tropics. We were facing a serious problem, because the hill from which we were receiving heavy fire was the one where the two platoons were planning to spend the night. We should have known there were enemy there.

The Pathfinder, whose name I no longer recall, got on his radio, switched to the company frequency, and learned there were casualties. For Garza, the senior medic with the unit, this meant it was time to go to work. He wrestled out of his ruck sack and other gear and, armed with just his medical bag and pistol, crawled out of our sanctuary to go care for the wounded. Read more »

Back in the mid-1990s I interviewed for an information technology position with one of the nation’s largest home builders. In the course of the interviews, one of the company’s executives told me — almost as a boast — that the company didn’t own so much as a single hammer. The company had positioned itself as a project management firm, he said. All the actual work was performed by subcontractors.

Actually, it went beyond that. Some of the subcontractors in turn engaged sub-subcontractors to perform work for their part of the project.

There is, of course, nothing new in using subcontractors in construction projects. Home builders have always subcontracted specialized work, like plumbing and electrical, to firms that have the requisite licenses and skills. But subcontracting all the work is a relatively recent development.

For a big company operating in a free labor market this would not seem to make a lot of economic sense. Why not hire the workers directly and cut out the middleman? Read more »

Okay, I admit it. I was hooked on Lost.

Last night ABC aired the final episode in the series about the survivors of an airplane crash on a mysterious island in the South Pacific. All season long the teasers had been telling us that we would finally get the answers we’ve been waiting for. What I got out of it was more questions.

My biggest question is, just what the hell is the “flash sideways”? At the end of Season 5/beginning of Season 6, Juliet gets sucked into the pit at the Swan Station where Jack had dropped the hydrogen bomb. The bomb had failed to detonate, so Juliet, with her last ounce of strength, bangs on it with a rock until it explodes. The next scene we see is Jack back on Oceanic 815. The plane hits some turbulence, just like it did in the pilot episode six years ago, but this time it stays in the air. Jack goes to the restroom and, when he comes back, Desmond is sitting in the seat next to him, which is strange, since he was not on the original Flight 815. The camera then pans down from the plane and we see that the island is underwater. Read more »

In yesterday’s post on Rand Paul I mentioned that his comments about the public accommodation provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 evoked comparisons with the late Barry Goldwater, the 1964 Republican Presidential candidate, who, after voting against the Act, went on to lose the election in a landslide.

I was somewhat dismissive of this line of reasoning, and noted that Goldwater lost, not because of his vote on the Civil Rights Act, but because the Democrats “successfully convinced voters that he would blow up the world”.

Now I’m having a few second thoughts.

It is true that Democrats successfully labeled Goldwater a warmonger. But they also were successful in painting him as an extremist. And, in that, they had a lot of help from the candidate himself. Read more »

Floyd Landis, the American cyclist who was stripped of his 2006 Tour de France victory after failing a urine test, has accused his former teammate, cycling legend and seven-time Tour winner Lance Armstrong, of blood doping. According to yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, Landis, who has long denied the use of performance-enhancers, admitted to blood doping in a series of emails to his sponsors and USA Cycling. The emails also implicated Armstrong and other top U. S. cyclists.

Armstrong was told of the allegations while competing in the Tour of California. He immediately called a press conference to deny the charges — and then went out and crashed his bike, which forced him to abandon the race.

This was not the first time Armstrong has had to deal with doping charges, and it was not the first press conference he has held to deny them.

The question remains, though: did he do it? Read more »