Category: obscure pursuits

I have found Ike to be quotable before now. In the run-up to the 60th anniversary of D-Day, I decided to look up some more information on him.

This quote struck me as germane to the current military adventure (bonus points if you can recall a link between the current White House incumbent and Eisenhower [1]).

Dwight D. Eisenhower – MediaWiki:

“I tell this story to illustrate the truth of the statement I heard long ago in the Army: Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. There is a very great distinction because when you are planning for an emergency you must start with this one thing: the very definition of ’emergency’ is that it is unexpected, therefore it is not going to happen the way you are planning.”
Source: A speech to the National Defense Executive Reserve Conference in Washington, DC on Nov. 14, 1957.

Reading over his achievements — general staff officer to Pershing and Marshall, architect of the D-Day invasion, commander of all Allied forces, desegregation of the armed forces, president of Columbia University, two-term president — he stands pretty tall against anyone we’ve seen lately.
Continue reading “a Republican for all of us”

I won’t quote any of Shelley’s post on how the other half blogs.

I’m not sure I feel as strongly as she does, since my attention was drawn to a different point. I do agree that the blogerati, if I can use so meaningless a neologism, seem to take themselves a little too seriously. Dave Winer says those of us who object to SixApart’s new licensing agreement are just cheapskates: he pays more for taxi rides and dinners than 6A expects for their license. Doesn’t everyone live like that?
Continue reading “when celebrities pay their own way, I’ll listen to them”

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: May 02, 2004 – May 08, 2004 Archives:

What are we looking at here but the fraudulent connection between Iraq and 9/11 suddenly become flesh, as we look into our own faces and see a paler shade of our enemies looking back at us?

Josh Marshall writes about the “corrosive effect our embrace of lawlessness at Guantanamo has had on our conduct.” Apparently, the folks picked up in Baghdad, regardless of their alleged crimes, are being treated as hardened Al Queda operatives, outside the rule of law.

The differences between the liberators and those they depose seem to be blowing away like smoke.

TIME.com: How Kerry Earned His Decorations — May. 10, 2004:

Kerry is one of the Senate’s most decorated veterans — though he has far fewer medals than friend John McCain — and his record is impressive for an officer who spent just 10 months in Vietnam. Each of the medals below came with a matching ribbon.

Time lists each of Senator Kerry’s decorations, explained what each one means, and details how he earned it.

I didn’t realize South Vietnam presented medals to US service personnel: it’s a shame that Texas doesn’t honor the defenders of its skies as handsomely.

I think anyone who seeks to undermine these awards walks a fine line. It’s not like you can lobby or apply for these decorations. You have to be recommended for them and they must be documented: to suggest that they weren’t earned impugns the honor of Kerry’s commanders directly and, indirectly, that of the military.

Michael Ignatieff has a provocative piece in this week’s NYTimes magazine. Ben Franklin’s quote — They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. — is widely cited in the post 9/11 era, but Ignatieff isn’t so sure it makes sense. It’s well understood that the very openness and freedom of American society was a key element in the 9/11 attackers’ success: is there some way of making society more secure without changing it’s very nature?

The risk of becoming a paranoid theocracy is not as great as some would have us believe, but I think even a gnat’s whisker closer to that is too close. The very nature of a deliberative democracy plays into the hands of a shadowy opponent like a non-state terror group: by the time the wheels stop turning, there’s no one to deal with, to retaliate against.

Accordingly, he cites arguments for a tightly constrained latitude for the executive branch, giving the office of the president the freedom to act but with regular checks and reviews by the legislative branch. He argues that being prepared for/accepting the possibility of an attack — something he doesn’t see any evidence of, even now — is essential. How can you have a strategy if you doubt there will be a need for one?

The piece is full of great quotes and ideas to think over: this one jumped out at me:

Armageddon is being privatized, and unless we shut down these markets, doomsday will be for sale.

GooOS, the Google Operating System (kottke.org):

Google isn’t worried about Yahoo! or Microsoft’s search efforts…although the media’s focus on that is probably to their advantage. Their real target is Windows. Who needs Windows when anyone can have free unlimited access to the world’s fastest computer running the smartest operating system?

Hmm, shades of Marc Andreesen wanting to “reduce Windows to a badly debugged set of device drivers” as part of Netscape’s plan to make the OS obsolete.

Jason expands on this article and muses on the notion of Google as an accessible-anywhere information utility that runs on everything, knows everything you do, and is always learning more.

The article he references is worth reading: a former colleague of mine is working on MSFT’s new search effort. If half the stuff in that article is true, it will be interesting to see how things play out.

Microsoft Notebook: In punishing Microsoft, EU hurts its consumers

Just write a column that casts every competitive initiative against MSFT’s dominance as petty, mindless rage, that underscores how MSFT knows best, and that government efforts to correct the monopoly’s behavior can only hurt consumers, and are futile gestures from ignorant busybodies.

And if you don’t get the call, you at least got your column in on deadline.

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | New kids on the blog:

From the mundane to the thrilling, the blogging phenomenon has produced some of today’s most innovative and engaging writing.

But on the other hand,

Last year, a survey of 3,000 blogs by the software company Perseus concluded that in the United States 91 per cent are maintained by those under 30 and ‘the typical blog is written by a teenage girl who uses it twice a month to update her friends and classmates on happenings in her life’. It estimated that by the end of this year there will be a million web logs, although most won’t last a year and, like clasped diaries in the physical world, the majority will be abandoned within a month.

Daring Fireball: Ronco Spray-On Usability

A well-reasoned rant on why freeware interface “design” is so shoddy (if Eric Raymond can’t figure out to print to a shared printer on his home network, what does that suggest?).

Coincidentally, I had a similar problem this week with some installed (and at one time, working) software going south and finding it was going to take the better part of 3 days to resolve it. But when it worked, it’s been flawless.

And there’s a sidenote/reference that suggests it may not get any better: if all the geeks who care about such matters have adopted OS X as their desktop OS, what will happen to KDE, GNOME,et al?

I think John has a valid but by no means new point: I would rank some aspects of the freeware OSes higher than Windows (installing on a bare machine is no easier on Windows and can be less friendly, by a long shot), but for Raymond to claim that Linux et al have overcome their complicated “touch a million config files” roots is ridiculous.