Tuesday, December 3, 2002

Did They Think No One Would Notice? Yesterday, we learned that senior management at AOL Time Warner refused to entertain offers for its AOL unit because they believed that they had found synergy to exploit. Today, they revealed that this "synergy" will consist of selling Time Warner content through AOL, rather than through existing Time Warner distribution channels. Wall Street, which knows the difference between synergy and revenue-shifting, responded quickly, knocking 14% off of the value of AOL Time Warner, and knocking 1.4% off of the value of the Dow Jones Industrial Average for good measure. 8:42:57 PM     What do you think? ()

What Do You Want From Santa? Chris Moyles, plump and jolly though he may be, is easily the most frightening Santa I've ever seen. 8:00:25 PM     What do you think? ()

How Would Current Events Look to Marcel Proust? I've reached the final volume of In Search of Lost Time, "Finding Time Again," which is set in Paris during World War I. It sounds so familiar, from its description of patriotism: The detachment of M. de Charlus was total. And, seeing that he was merely a spectator, everything was bound to make him pro-German from the moment when, although not truly French, he started living in France. He was very intelligent, and in all countries most of the people are silly; no doubt if he had been living in Germany he would have been equally irritated by the way the German fools defended, passoinately and foolishly, an unjust cause; but living in France, he was no less irritated by the passionate and foolish defence of a cause that was just. The logic of passion, even if it is in the service of the right, is never irrefutable for somebody who is not passionately committed to it. To the hypocrisy of so much diplomacy (reminiscent of the sudden American and British interest in human rights): '...I do not doubt that M. Venizelos is a very capable statesman, but how do we know that the Greeks want him as much as all that? We are told that he wanted Greece to honour her commitments to Serbia. Yet we still ought to know what these commitments were and whether they were more extensive than those that Italy and Romania believed that they could violate. We exhibit a concern for the way in which Greece implements its treaties and respects its constitution which we would certainly not feel if it were not in our own interest...' To the pervasive and often undetected influence of the media: 'The astonishing thing, he said, is that the public that thus judges men and the events of the war solely on the basis of newspaper reports is convinced that it is forming its own judgements.' In that M. de Charlus was right. I have been told that one really had to see the moments of silence and hesitation that Mme de Forcheville used to have, just like those necessary not simply to the expression but to the very formation of a personal opinion, before saying, in the tone of voice appropriate to a deeply private feeling: 'No, I don't think they will take Warsaw'; 'I don't feel they can last a second winter'; 'what I don't want is a botched-up peace'; 'the thing that scares me, if you want to know, is the Chamber'; 'yes, I still believe we'll be able to break through.' 8:37:38 AM     What do you think? ()

© Copyright 2003 Morgan N. Sandquist. Last update: 11/2/03; 10:32:04 AM.

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