It does give you a sense of proportion:
And on July 14, 1846, a young U.S. Army captain was posted from Charleston, S.C., to a new base in Buena Yerba in the Alta California territory. How long do you think it took him to arrive in what we now call San Francisco, as fast as the U.S. Army could muster? The trip took six and a half months.
The captain and his wife wrote letters to each other every day. In April 1847, he finally got his first letter from her; she had written it in October 1846. When this soldier, William Tecumseh Sherman, became famous for his March to the Sea in 1865, his two priorities were to destroy the railroads in the Southeast and cut the telegraph lines. He knew exactly what he was doing.
In three breathtaking years from 1866 to 1869, travel time from the East Coast to California dropped from six months to roughly two weeks?and nearly everyone who crossed the continent survived. Suddenly, food and medicine could traverse immense distances in time to save lives. Suddenly, today's New York Times described what happened in Europe yesterday, instead of what had happened two or three weeks earlier. Suddenly, people could learn that it was a matter of life and death for them to get somewhere immediately; and they could actually get there.
Now how could anyone claim, as one venture capitalist did in early 1999, that the Internet is "the greatest invention in the history of the world?" It's simply an incremental improvement in the high speed at which we already share information by phone and fax and FedEx. It's a big deal, but the telegraph and the railroad were at least as big.
From Jason Zweig's speech to Morningstar Investment Conference in June 2001
Charles' Orwell links is a great George Orwell resource. Over at that website, I read Politics and the English Language. 59 years after Orwell wrote it, it still feels fresh.
Towards the end of this essay, Orwell wrote that all writers should follow the following rules:
"-Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything barbarous".
Now that's hard! I almost wrote 'like a breath of fresh air' at the end of the first paragraph and 'easier said than done' at the beginning of this paragraph ....
David Cay Johnston is the rock star of tax reporting in USA. He recently wrote a book with a provocative title 'Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich--and Cheat Everybody Else'. I havent read it.
But City Pages of Minnesota recently interviewed him:
In ancient Athens there was a flat tax, and when the Athenians had a flat tax, Athens was a tyranny. That?s where we get the word from. When the moral philosophers of Athens reasoned that those people who got the greatest economic benefit from living in Athens had the moral obligation to bear the greatest burden of maintaining the society that made them rich. That is, when they invented taxation based on ability to pay, they also invented democracy."
Good interview - although I should note here that I do not completely share his views and certainly not his opinion of unions.
Harold Meyerson's new column 'A Tale of Two Texans' is the second most e-mailed story in the Washington Post website this morning.
Today, I had a flashback - a conversation I had with KB a few days before the 2004 election. As usual, like other pseudo-Europeans, he was having enormous fun with what he considers the era of 'decline and fall of American power' and found my agonizations over the US election ridiculous. His point of view was - how can it get any worse? The worst is over. The deficit is already huge. Iraq is already a basket case. Europe would not lend any additional troops no matter who becomes the president. Neither would the other middle eastern countries lend a hand. Whoever wins the presidency would have to wade through muck anyway. I feebly countered that if Bush wins, (among other things) there is the threat of war in Iran. Before I could say anything else - he laughed. And after a while, I laughed too. After all, Neocons couldn't be serious about another war in the middle east, right?
Right?
This week, Saymour Hersh has a new article in the New Yorker called The coming wars.
If you feel that it is time to educate yourself about the back story on Iran, check out All the Shah's men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror
Where angels fear to tread ...
This is ONE hornet's nest. It would be really funny watching the left-liberal, Summers admiring bloggers talk or not talk about this.
..I am trying to get my work life back into some sort of control. Once I do that, I hope to blog for often.
On my bookmarks waiting to be read ...
Short short stories by Dave Eggers (via Kingshuk)
Best Russian short stories
Surrounded by Sleep by Akhil Sharma
Hills like White elephant by Ernest Hemingway
Hell Heaven by Jhumpa Lahiri
(The last three links via Another Sub Continent)
Did you know Dante's Divine comedy is available online? (And no, I am not planning to read THAT!)
Last saturday LA Times had an understated, but sobering op-ed on the co-option of doctors in military's administration of torture in Guantanamo Bay and Iraq.
I grew up in a social environment that had an abiding respect for the written word and for doctors. I have known about torture by some practioners of medicine in Nazi concentration camps. But I always felt that it was a complete aberration anyway - that most people who go into medicine and practice medicine maintain some fundamental commitments to morality and ethics.
When I read that alongside this Newsweek story on Pentagon's thoughts about putting assassination squads in the middle east, I start questioning my basic assumptions about democratically elected governments of our times (obviously, we are not talking about Kazakhstan here where the president boils his political opponents or about West Africa where torture and cruelty have lost their power to shock).
I dont see any hope at all of things getting any better anytime soon.
Not away; just very busy at work. 'll probably start posting again by this weekend.