I don’t know if I agree with this post (and haven’t given it much thought), but it’s worth discussing. I remember shopping for them with my dad in the late fifties, though we never ended up getting one.

That was then, this is now. Do they make sense in the current environment?

[Update a few minutes later]

More thoughts on the subject from Dr. Kurtz.

Michael Yon writes about the state of medical support in the war, which is surely the best in any war, any time in history. But he also writes about some things that never change:

The soldier who had been ambushed by the IED in Iraq was expected to die very soon. I was a few feet away when a call came in from a close family member. The family member did not inquire about his condition or what happened. This family member only wanted to know when the soldier would die, and who would receive his death benefit. In less civilized times, people like that roamed the battlefield with tools to pry gold teeth from the jaws of fallen soldiers, but it was distressing to imagine that a family member would do the same.

Yes, distressing, but sadly, not surprising, for anyone who watches the freak shows on daytime television.

Let’s hope so.

The Democrats, meanwhile, held a convention in late August, nominating without serious controversy George B. McClellan, the general whom Lincoln had dismissed as head of the Union forces in Virginia because he would not fight. The Democratic platform denounced “four years of failure” in the war effort and the destruction of “public liberty and private right.” It called for the restoration of the rights of the states unimpaired, and a settlement of the issues central to the war