Stephen Ambrose’s excellent biography of Eisenhower’s war years. The Supreme Commander.
This marks the third World War II book in a row I’ve read – beginning with An Army at Dawn and continuing with Omar Bradley’s memoirs of World War II.
Such a fascinating time in our history.
Cyrus Jones 1810-1913,
Made his great grandchildren believe you could live to 103
103 is forever when you’re just a little kid
So, Cyrus Jones lived forever.
Gravedigger.
When you dig my grave
Could you make it shallow
So that I can feel the rain
Gravedigger
Muriel Stonewall 1903 – 1954
She lost of her babies in the second great war
Now you should never have to watch as your only children are lowered in the ground
I mean, never have to bury your own babies.
Gravedigger
When you dig my grave
Could you make it shallow?
So that I feel the rain.
Gravedigger
Ring around the rosey
Pocket full of posies
Ashes to ashes
We all fall down.
Gravedigger
When you dig my grave
Could you make it shallow?
So that I can feel the rain….
– Dave Matthews
Found this outstanding site, To the Limits of the Soul’s Ideal – an online monument to Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain.
Haven’t blogged a whole lot lately, had alot going on.
Spent six days away from home – two days in Providence, Rhode Island teaching a class, and then three days in Minneapolis for some interviews,meetings, and fun.
Unfortunately, those interviews didn’t turn out quite the way that I had hoped, so no promotion for me in the near future. But that’s ok, pretty happy doing what I’m doing.
Came back for a week’s vacation – and ended up spending that entire vacation sick.
I did work on a new personal programming project – EzyRank which is now up and running. Seems to be doing well at around 200,000 pageviews daily, so I certainly can’t complain about that.
Started raking leaves today until my throat started hurting, will go back out and do that in a bit.
Bought Command and Conquer Generals: Zero Hour and have enjoyed that so far.
Having some friends over for dinner.
Hmm, that’s a good update for now 🙂
Ed Cone questions whether Bush’s “build democracies” speech will be remembered in the same light as Reagan’s “tear down this wall” speech. First, I think a better comparison is with Reagan’s “evil empire” speech, as Bush mentioned himself. Both are calls to action. However, the similarities end there. Reagan proposed active and relatively bloodless (at least for us) engagement against a totalitarian empire that was poised at the edge of collapse. Reagan only helped accelerate the inevitable in his years as president by growing the economies of the world in peace. The active confrontations with the dying Soviet Empire was limited to a spending war in defense and support for groups that opposed Soviet military encroachment (Afghanistan). In contrast, while Bush’s call to action does identify the appropriate trend to support, his strategy for doing so is fatally flawed. The invasion of Iraq threw a bomb into the process of democratization in the ME and elsewhere. It created an unstable soil for the growth of democracy. The contrast in vision is most evident in Reagan’s reference to Winston Churchill: Sir Winston Churchill refused to accept the inevitability of war or even that it was imminent. He said, “I do not believe that Soviet Russia desires war. What they desire is the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines. But what we have to consider here today while time remains is the permanent prevention of war and the establishment of conditions of freedom and democracy as rapidly as possible in all countries.”Well, this is precisely our mission today: to preserve freedom as well as peace. It may not be easy to see; but I believe we live now at a turning point.
[John Robb’s Weblog]
I can’t recall being as excited about a piece of software since I was working on Manila in 1999. Part of the puzzle is finished. The items in the RSS feed for this weblog can be routed to categories. Now to the back-end. As the page is published, we watch for items with categories, and route them to the appropriate place. So if you want to get caught up on all the news from the Edwards campaign, there will be a place for that. Now of course a grad student could be working specifically on news of Edwards, maybe even on the press bus with Edwards. Maybe two grad students. Maybe thirty-two. And maybe the student who’s working on Boston weather comes across something relevant to Edwards-watchers. This shouldn’t be a problem. I told my friend Adam Curry in an email, the idea is that I can write for 100 weblogs, and 100 people can write for a specific weblog. We can get the overhead very low. This is how we’re going to scale up to cover the 2004 election. It’s a moon mission. Each user will get some new software and an assignment. It’ll be a project like 24 Hours of Democracy in 1996, a demo of neat net tricks and a way for people with weblog skills to make a difference. And of course if an event like 9/11 comes along, we’ll be that much better prepared to cover it. [Scripting News]
I expect this to be a huge issue as the election approaches, especially if any of these documents come to light.
As American soldiers massed on the Iraqi border in March and diplomats argued about war, an influential adviser to the Pentagon received a secret message from a Lebanese-American businessman: Saddam Hussein wanted to make a deal. Iraqi officials, including the… [Gulf War Online]