An amazing story of a wake held for a Green Beret.

Excerpt:

On Nov. 3, a string of Blackhawk helicopters had been roaring across the desert on a nighttime counterinsurgency raid, carrying Special Forces soldiers to hunt high-value targets who had been making improvised explosive devices.

Flying over the desert at night is disorienting. Toz apparently believed the helicopter had touched down. He stepped out. It was more than 100 feet off the ground and thundering ahead at 100 mph.

His mother was impressed with the professionalism of the Army's presentation and took comfort in learning that the mission had been a success. Her son's e-mail precluded any resentment.

"Don't ever think that you are defending me by slamming the Global War on Terrorism or the U.S. goals in that war," Jeffrey Toczylowski wrote. "As far as I am concerned, we can send guys like me to go after them or we can wait for them to come back to us again. I died doing something I believed in and have no regrets except that I couldn't do more."

Toczylowski had gone through the Reserve Officers' Training Corps at Pennsylvania's Valley Forge Military College and then turned his Texas A&M criminal-justice degree into an assignment as platoon leader with the military police. He had completed the Special Forces training course in 2003.

After a sergeant in his company died of a heart attack, Toczylowski got serious about his mortality, fellow soldiers said. He earmarked money from his savings and insurance policies to assist friends and help cousins with college tuition and to fund a scholarship at Valley Forge, his mother said.

Honoring his wishes

The party was the challenge for the family. But Peggy and Pam say Toczylowski was wise, and they're convinced he knew that assigning them planning duties would keep their minds off losing a son and brother.

With the sadness that comes with the passing of Milton Friedman comes pleasure at reading tributes to him from those who knew him and from reading articles written by the great man himself.

It's unfair to excerpt from the second article since it is already an abridgment of longer works by Friedman. Still, this excerpt is among my favorites:

"The company town has been revived in one major area: medical care. It is taken for granted that workers should receive their pay partly in kind, in the form of medical care provided by the employer. How come? Why single out medical care? Surely food is no less essential to life than medical care. Why is it not at least as logical for workers to be required to buy their food at the company store as to be required to buy their medical care at the company store?"

--from "Pricing Health Care: The Folly of Buying Health Care at the Company Store," Feb. 13, 1993

A very interesting criticism of foreign policy during the administration of President George H. W. Bush (41) appears in the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal section.

Wow! The Israelis may have a process to convert oil shale into refinable oil at the equivalent of $17 per barrel.

The reaction of the environmentalists:

Amid various presentations on the nature of the fuel resource, problems unique to processing this fuel, emerging technologies, economic issues, etc. was a presentation by an attorney representing the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance that could be summed up in one sentence: "It is really bad - don't do it."

And of the wildlife advocates:

the observation of a Mexican Spotted Owl in a canyon nearby one of the reserves, which therefore qualified the area as a habitat for an endangered species.

The Israelis appear to be a couple of years ahead of the US in this field. Hopefully we will learn enough from their experience to alleviate these concerns by those who want alternatives to foreign oil as long as they're alternatives that are ineffective and don't address the actual need.

Global Warming: it's worse than we thought--even other planets are affected.

H/T: Jerry Pournelle

Tim O'Reilly considers the hardware costs of the PS3 and the subsidization of hardware by long term commitment to software and services:

I forget who I heard ask me a year or two ago, "how long will it be before we can give away cars for a multi-year commitment to the information services embedded in them?" That question is increasingly on the horizon.

James Lileks points to an editorial cartoon that shows that Europe thought Camelot was not such a pretty place after all .

The National Center for Public Policy Research documents the distribution of "Kyoto Protocol Survival Kits" at a United Nations Global Warming Conference.

More examples of "environmentalists" following a "do what I say, not what I do" credo .

Google marches on. I am sure that I am late to the party, but I think that enabling Google Docs & Spreadsheets to be used as a blogging editor is very, very cool. This post is the first test of that capability.

OK, I've tried at least 4 times to input my blogger beta settings in order to post to my blog --no joy.


OK, I've tried another 3-4 times with the same result. At least I learned about advances in bulking up mice--and perhaps mankind to follow soon .

Finally, success. I signed out on my primary machine and signed into Google Docs on my test machine using IE 7. The blogger beta settings are saved, and I'm in business.

Apparently, all I need to do is copy my set of labels for my posts into Google Docs, and I won't need to use the old blogger editor any longer.

I enjoy these little quizzes.

Which South Park kid are you most like? Kyle You are clever, and often come up with intelligent and funny comebacks to other people's stupid remarks.

Click Here to Take This Quiz Brought to you by YouThink.com quizzes and personality tests.