Monday, February 17, 2003

N Korea threatens truce breach North Korea says it may pull out of the armistice that ended the Korean War, accusing the US of breaking the terms of the truce. [BBC News | WORLD] 7:08:35 PM    comment []trackback []

Alas, Salon This was a weird weekend to be a Salon blogger. The Google buying Pyra news was exciting. I can't really imagine what is going to happen with Blogger, but that's what makes this news so interesting. Tying blogs more closely to Google is most likely a good thing; anything that increases the odds of small or new blogs to find larger audiences is going to be great for us all. The news of Salon's financial problems put me into a mini-funk. I really have no idea how accurate the story is--Salon's demise has been predicted before--but it sounds serious. One of the few things that I know a lot about is real estate, and generally speaking, rent is the last bill that a struggling company would want to miss. Landlords are typically less forgiving than employees when it comes to missed payments. By the time that an enterprise has missed two payments, it's generally too late. I assume that if Salon goes under, Userland would move all of the Salon blogs over to radio.weblogs.com, and that the process would be more or less painless. But the end of the Salon blogs community would be depressing. Weblogs.com lists over a thousand blogs; blogs.salon fewer than 100. The Salon blogs, as diverse as they were, at least had Salon in common, and others could browse the listings of Salon blogs to find our blogs. Each day I get 15-20% from the Rankings page of Salon blogs, but only one or two hits each day from Weblogs.com. The hits matter less than the loss of the community that has fostered a broad array of distinctive blogs. I've become addicted to writing this blog. It's not great, but I enjoy it, and it makes a lost of my surfing and thinking less solitary. It feels great to have an audience, even if it is a small one. Still, it's going to bother me a lot to move away from Salon. Good news: the Preacher's blog, at least will go on. He has already made arrangements for a new home at realllivepreacher.com. I'd do what he did, if I had the slightest idea how to do it. 6:51:05 PM    comment []trackback []

When Colin Powell made his speech to the UN last week, I didn't need convincing. I am sufficiently convinced that Saddam Hussein has, or want to acquire weapons that have been forbidden him. I am also certain that left unwatched, he would use these weapons against his own people, and he would likely use them to expand his power in the region. But I do not believe that these are sufficient reasons to go to war. I only know about the horrors of war through written descriptions. But as a historian, I have read many such descriptions, from across twenty-five centuries. From the horror of plague-stalked Athens in the Peloponesian War, to the seige of Jerusalem in AD 70. I know in detail about the bloody marches of Charles V and Napoleon across Europe. I have read descriptions of the battlefields of the American Civil War, and the aftermath of the fire bombing of dresden and Tokyo. War is always an atrocity. Sometimes war is justifiable, but it is still an atrocity. Young men will be maimed or die simply because they has the misfortune of being drafted. Children will die, some only after hours of fear and unspeakable pain; many more children will be crippled or orphaned. The men who caused the war, the ones who lead the slaughter, 1:01:46 PM    comment []trackback []