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Benjamin Espen

Engineering Design

The way in which you design is probably driven by personality and circumstance. Personality shapes what you like, and circumstance shapes who your teachers and mentors are. With those limitations in mind, I like to explore what is possible in engineering design, what works and what doesn't. I

The Long View 2005-12-12: Peace on Earth. Or Else.

The Boeing YAL-1 Airborne Laser John Reilly mentions here is another zombie boondoggle that survived the end of the Cold War, probably by being relatively cheap. According to Aviation Week, the final cost was around $5B USD. Good work if you can get it. The similar General Atomics HELLADS is

The Long View 2005-12-08: Coulter, Warren, Rice, Brooks, Noonan & That Spengler

Monty Python's The Life of Brian came up in response to John Reilly's review of Anne Rice's Out of Egypt. It never gets old. Coulter, Warren, Rice, Brooks, Noonan & That Spengler Students Against Hate seem to have not so much shouted down Ann

The Long View: Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt

Five years after this review was written, Anne Rice found herself unable to really embrace the doctrines of Catholicism, or at least the way she felt they were being applied. Which makes John Reilly's comment apposite: It is quite possible to accept an early date and high historical

The Long View 2005-12-02: Tradition, Optimism & Cartography

It is rather sad that John didn't live to see the rise of the tradinistas. He would have enjoyed pointing out they make the same arguments as Tradition. Tradition, Optimism & Cartography Over at First Things, Fr. Neuhaus has noted that there may be a contradiction between the

The Long View 2005-11-30: Won Wars; Lost Films & Doctrines

Here is a prediction that did not pan out: There is also this: Post-911 veterans are not Vietnam veterans. Their numbers are smaller, of course, but they are already an admired and self-confident minority. They will transform the military and, one suspects, domestic politics. At this point, it seems that

The Long View 2005-11-25: Defeatism, Exopolitics, Multicult, Gaudete

Douglas MacArthur was a war-monger. Admittedly, a fairly skilled one. Defeatism, Exopolitics, Multicult, Gaudete Anyone who is getting spooked by the defeatist talk about Iraq can take comfort, after a fashion, from the views that General MacArthur held in 1944 about the progress of the Second World War. Thanks to