First: 85 percent of US troops in Iraq say that the war is mainly to retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9/11 attacks. There are no words.
DeLong quotes Krugman’s pay-only column about how Bush and his lackeys equate disagreement and warnings as disloyalty, and how that’s lead to bad programs badly implemented, and thence to the predicted bad results.
What hurts me the most is that this kind of incompetence, even though it hurts and kills people, is not a crime.
I often run into people I haven’t seen in awhile, and they say to me, “You weren’t kidding about that mustache.”
No, I was not. Nor am I kidding about the existence of a store called “Lucky Wang.”
But check out this live-action Simpsons video on YouTube. If you hadn’t noticed already, YouTube is rapidly becoming a major time-sink.
Went to a wedding in NYC this weekend. Reception at the University Club, a place so far uptown it seems, as they say, like Boston. They don’t allow sneakers in the lobby– if you’re casually dressed you have to use the service entrance/exit. There are some concessions to modernity, though: they have admitted women since 1987, and of course there is an up-to-date globe in the library, next to the one which still lists Prussia and Siam.
This afternoon, the American Museum of Natural History. The first floor still has the dusty dioramas, but the fourth floor is incredible: plenty of emphasis on evolutionary theory and the development of paleontological science.
Bookdwarf and I, along with her sister and brother-in-law, will be insulting the Oscars for the remainder of the evening. I’ll be talking, she’ll be talking and blogging.
Erin Flynn is a Cambridge-based illustrator and artist. Incredibly interesting drawings.
My first thought was “oooh, job opportunity in the biotech industry!” But GenAid Cloning Services is not exactly hiring.
I should note that I’ve picked up two freelance projects this week: I’ll be writing about one day a week for blog guide TopTenSources, and I’m doing some assorted content for Directory M, which does a number of business directories, including one for the Wall Street Journal.
I had one of those moments today that made me realize I’m living in the future. I sat down to write for this freelance project I’ve picked up, and realized that my audience consisted of people in need of particular business services (asset-backed financing, bridge loans, business process management consultants) and search engine crawlers looking for relevant content.
That is, my writing is designed for the reading pleasure of machines. Apparently this machine audience enjoys the frequent repitition of keywords.
Peter Hessler’s forthcoming book Oracle Bones begins with a story that might as well be a historical footnote. During the US campaign in Yugoslavia, US bombs hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing three. The US claimed it was an accident caused by the use of an outdated map. China claimed it was deliberate. There were protests and marches. Then, slowly, it all blew over. Later, stories leaked out that the embassy was the only target selected by the CIA rather than the Pentagon, that the three people killed were probable intelligence officers, that the Chinese embassy had been assisting the Serbs.
What was really happening? Hard to say. The rest of the book ranges from the earliest archeological findings to special economic zones and Falun Gong, but I think that first anecdote really captures Hessler’s method. He attempts to understand what’s happened, but he acknowledges his limitations, and the limitations of his methods and sources.
In many ways, he seems to say, our efforts to understand the present and the past are as incomplete as the predictions of the future that ancient Chinese made with the oracle bones that give the book its title. They give us some kind of reassurance that we know and control our environment– but it’s not complete by any means.
Hessler’s details and adventures are sometimes touching and sometimes hilarious, but always fascinating.
I’ve added about a half-dozen new blogs to my feed list at Bloglines. There’s lots of great stuff out there. On the other hand, if I am lucky I will soon be too busy to read this many blogs every day: I have two interviews this week!
Secretly Ironic 