When
· Naughties
· · 2005
· · · November
· · · · 11 (4 entries)
FSS: Chipmunk and Lacy Dress · Friday Slide Scan #13 is a picture of a squirrel cadging food from Lynne, who was a good friend for a long time but we’ve lost touch with; you can’t see her face, but her summer dress is remarkably pretty. This was shot sometime around 1990, on vacation by the waters of Georgian Bay, near Parry Sound. ...
Greg on Gordon · Go check out Greg Papadopoulos’ latest, Don’t Become Moore Confused, who covers the same Moore’s-law-is-over-no-it-sn’t territory that’s been getting a lot of heat, but does so in lots more detail with actual real numbers; then branches off into predictions for what this means. It’ll help you to know that the plural of “die” is “dice”. Oh, and of course Greg skips over the software angle, but maybe that’s been covered enough.
War Marketing · Today Mr. Bush has excoriated his opponents for claiming that he lied them into war. The President said: “Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war.” Well I’m neither a Democrat nor really anti-war, but yep, that’s the claim. (By the way, he’s being fact-checked.) That claim is pretty convincing, particularly to anyone who’s actually read the 521-page Senate Report on Intelligence Failures (highlights here), or the Downing Street Memo. If you want a more scholarly version of Mr. Bush’s complaint, check out Norman Podhoretz in Commentary; he is convincingly demolished by Kevin Drum. Why am I so upset about this? Because I thought that taking out Saddam was a moral act, something worth doing for its own sake, a chance to prove that Arabs don’t have to live in dictatorships where there are torturers in the jails, that Western Civilization is capable of moral action. Instead, the war was sold based on conventional marketing wisdom: pick a couple of simple messages and stay on them. I was watching TV and reading the papers, and all the war marketers were saying, over and over, was “He’ll have nukes soon!” and “He’s Osama’s buddy!” Both false; and there are still torturers in the jails. I’m sufficiently irritated that I don’t mind saying “I told you so”, which I did in February and March of 2003. Feh. I hate lies.
Remembrancing · Across the English-speaking world today is Remembrance Day (except in the US, where it’s Veteran’s Day); on 1918/11/11 the armistice ending the Great War was signed. We wear poppies on our lapels, and my little guy came home yesterday and told us about the Assembly they’d had at school, where they learned about the war, and it was sad, there were tears in his eyes. Good. In Flanders Fields was written by a Canadian; my Mother is the youngest of six and the second-oldest, Allan Scott, died among the fields of Flanders near the end of WW2, and is buried in Bergen op Zoom. There are some fine remembrances here on the Web: Libération is running a remarkable audio interview with Lazar Ponticelli, one of the last six living Poilus, born in 1897: he’s a little hard to understand, but it’s a living voice coming from way back in History. Also, check out The Heritage of the Great War, a Dutch site that includes a remarkable collection of color photographs, some hand-colored (many of them postcards), some using the old Autochrome process. They even have a picture of the real dogs of war.
