Some nice royalty-free photos from another Zacharzewski here.
Month: February 2008
Isn’t history long?
Just reading a history of the end of the Roman Empire (by Peter Heather, very good), and in a discussion of Attila’s campaigns in Greece, he says that raiding parties went as far south as
Thermopylae, where Leonidas’s troops had fought the Persians almost a thousand years before
and I was stunned by the sudden realisation of the passage of historical time – that Leonidas and the Persian wars were farther away from Attila and the last days of Western Roman Empire than the Norman Conquest is from us today.
And the Eastern Empire had a further thousand years to run. Sudden perspective. Whoa.
Well, you can always hope, I guess
How are the right-wing headbangers at Free Republic reacting to John McCain’s presumptive nomination as Republican candidate? Not well. Here’s a hopeful soul elsewhere on the site answering the question ‘what now?’:
For me, since I’m an Arizona resident, it’s pretty simple. I start agitating for Senator McCain to drop out and endorse a strong conservative dark horse candidate at the convention. I will continually remind him that he himself said that it is critical to the good of the country that the Dems not get in the White House and that he must ensure that by making sure a true conservative option is available to the country.
Refusing to do so is putting his own ambition above the good of the country. The country deserves his sacrifice again. I hope that his honor reminds him of this.
Also, some Freepers are still using GWOT unironically. Welcome to 2008, guys! Tired martial rhetoric goes in the corner over there.
Is it only sixteen years since Maastricht
It gave us the Euro, the European Union (rather than the European Communities) and common foreign and security policies, and all without a referendum. Thanks, Conservative party! BBC article.
French referendum campaigners are different
Le Monde reports on a pro-referendum demonstration coming up tomorrow near Paris, and it’s interesting that the people calling for a referendum in France are the anti-business, pro-regulation brigade. Yes, the treaty is just too Anglo-Saxon and too liberalising, so there has to be a referendum, say the protesters (because of their deep personal commitment to direct democracy, of course).