Quotations #054

"My father used to say that truth was like a rabbit in a bramble patch. You can point to it and say 'its somewhere in there' but you can't lay your hand on it." -- Pete Seeger, "Well May the World Go" with Larry Long.

"I think the world is going to be saved by people who fight for their homes. This is the lesson of the American Revolution." -- Pete Seeger, "Well May the World Go" with Larry Long.

"It's not enough merely to list x number of causes. It is the task of the historian to reduce a given list of causes to order by establishing a causal hierarchy, and to relate the items in this hierarchy to one another." -- Fredrik Logevall, H-NET (H-Diplo, H-Asia).

"At times history is so illogical that only tautologies are completely true." Albert Craig, Choshu in the Meiji Restoration, p. 20, n. 4.

"History, which is largely a record of the melting of minorities into majorities, records no instance of the survival of a group not segregated in space or not protected by a burning faith as by a frontier of fire." -- Zangwill, cited in Abraham Cohen, Everyman's Talmud, p. xxxv.

Ahistorical Guestbook

This was the original message here:

I've been doing this blog for almost six months now, and am quite curious as to who my readers are. So I invite you to de-lurk long enough to post a comment here.

That was almost a year ago. I want to put a little chart here with landmark visitor counts, instead of sticking myself in my own guestbook as I had been doing, and thank everyone who's signed in.

I don't do this for the traffic, but I'm too neurotic to ignore it....

Month	Unique Visitors
2004 November	Blog Launch
2005 January	StatCounter installed
2005 June	3000
2005 October	5000
2005 November	6000
2006 January	9000
2006 February	12000
2006 March	15000
2006 April	17000
2006 July (hiatus begins)	23000
2006 October	28,000
2007 May	41,000
2008 August	71,000

Why be Overqualified when you can be Entirely Uninterested?

[via Media Matters]
So, the acting head of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting doesn't care for PBS or NPR. OK. Apparently my own job searches have been way too limited and literal....

Bipartisanship is dead: No Quarter!

[via Sideshow]
Republican leaders cannot be trusted with power, authority or responsibility. They have no scruples, no checks, no conscience to speak of. As Anne Zook said, "Every time I think I can't be more appalled by the Right's behavior, something happens or is revealed that proves I was wrong. ... I'm beginning to wonder if there is any bottom to the Republican barrel."

Four New Questions: Journalism and Business

Asking the right questions, and seeing the true questions under the questions we ask, is a great service.

20th Century Baby Name Tracking

As Eric Muller says, this is a cool site. The design is really ... if I say nifty, does that mean I'm obsolete?

What Obsolete Skill am I? QBASIC, of course

You are 'programming in QBASIC'. This programming language (of which the acronym stands for 'Quick Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code'), which is so primitive that it cannot easily be used for any purpose involving the Internet nor even sound, was current more than a decade ago.

You are independent, in a good way. When something which you need cannot be found, you make it yourself. In writing and in talking with people, you value clarity and precision; your friends may not realize how important that is. When necessary, you are prepared to be a mediator in conflicts between your friends. You are very rational, and you think of things in terms of logic and common sense. Unfortunately, your emotionally unstable friends may be put off by your devotion to logic; they may even accuse you of pedantry and insensitivity. Your problem is that programming in QBASIC has been obsolete for a long time.

What obsolete skill are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

What's remarkable about this, aside from the fact that the description is pretty much dead on, is that I do remember an awful lot about programing in BASIC (mostly Apple Basic) and PASCAL (another dead language) and never got the hang of C++....

Heart Attack Option....

We are so lame:

North Korea is the most odious country in the world today. It has been caught counterfeiting U.S. dollars and smuggling drugs, and prisoners have been led along with wire threaded through their collarbones so they can't run away. While some two million North Koreans were starving to death in the late 1990's, Mr. Kim spent $2.6 million on Swiss watches. He's the kind of man who, when he didn't like a haircut once, executed the barber.

But Mr. Bush seems frozen in the headlights, unable to take any action at all toward North Korea. American policy now is to hope that Mr. Kim has a heart attack.

I still think that the Bush administration's withholding of information about the North Korean problems until after the Iraq war authorization vote would have gotten a special prosecutor if Congress had any guts at all. Or a few more gutless Democrats would do the trick, too....

Sad, sad thing

People are dying, dozens of people, as a result of the traditional Jewish practice of keeping a stove fire burning throughout Sabbath and festivals; the fire itself is not a tradition, but a way around the traditional prohibition againt kindling new fires. We have got to have technological fixes for these problems: the stoves themselves, for the fire alarm and suppression systems, for the fire escapes for crying out loud. Even if we're going to enact ancient customs, can't we take some advantage of our advances in engineering and science? That's allowed, I know it is.

Quotations #053

"Learning preserves the errors of the past as well as its wisdom. For this reason dictionaries are public dangers, although they are necessities." -- Alfred North Whitehead

"To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization." -- Arnold Toynbee

"History is only a confused heap of facts." -- Earl of Chesterfield (1699-1773)

"History's lessons are no more enlightening than the wisdom of those who interpret them." --David Schoenbrun

"All that is necessary is that we recognize the contingency of any and all historical outcomes and, in response, that we robustly bracket our sense of already knowing the trajectory of human existence. ... [Lee and DeVore] observed that whether industrialization will 'end up' being a long-term trend in human existence or a momentary exception is not something we can know in advance of a future that has yet to be made." Daniel A. Segal, "'Western Civ' and the Staging of History," AHR, v105, n3 (June 2000), p. 802.