Multiple Twitter personality disorder

Okay, I’ve said it before, but the Twitter-dot-com is a strange, strange place.

As I’ve mentioned, I have two Twitter accounts. First is a “professional” one, where I follow people who…well, look—I’m trying to get in with the Agile, SaaS, interesting enterprise software crowd, okay? In general I follow people who are high tech subject matter experts (SMEs) in Big Data, Enterprise Social and specific companies I’m interested in working for. About 98% of my tweets there are to do with Big Data, Enterprise social and specific companies I’m interested in working for. Occasionally I’ll toss in a human-interest comment; but usually that’s directed at a SME or someone working for a company I’m…well, you get the drift.

The other is the one I associate with this blog. The people I follow there are ones I think are going to be just plain interesting—writers, performers, smart-asses, publishers, journalists, whack-jobs; people who’ve tweeted something that gets me thinking, people who make me laugh, people who piss me off. I’m more inclined to reply than to retweet this crowd; which is the opposite of my nothin’-but-SaaS account.

So—with maybe five or six as overlap—two essentially and entirely different subsets of the Twitterverse.

And at no time has this divide been more in evidence than this afternoon, after the Asiana Airlines plane crash at SFO.

My blog account lit up with tweets about the crash—the fragmentary bits sent out by a few passengers on the plane (it was apparently carrying people bound for the Silicon Valley; of course they were taking pix and tweeting even as they were being evacuated), tweeted & retweeted, augmented by dribs and drabs of speculation, until it was a complete tsunami of mixed information and misinformation.

But it was totally vibrating with the event.

Meanwhile, back at the Big Data ranch, the SMEs have been spewing out their same auto-tweets of “sage” Big Data/Social advice, along with the usual “inspirational” quote nonsense. Exactly as they do every other minute of every other day. There was a brief spurt of maybe three tweets about the crash for every 100 SME chirps (mostly from the news outlets) and then back to business as usual. Literally.

It’s like there are two different Twitter planets, and I’m caught in some bizarre vortex of Interwebs cognitive dissonance.

Just give it a damn rest, will ya?

Oh, Lord—this is making the rounds again. You know—that “ha-ha-you-Americans-can’t-organize-your-way-out-of-a-paper-bag-so-we-Brits—who-have-a-much-better-record-at-this-sort-of-thing—are-assimilating-you-back-into-the-uh-well-it-used-to-be-the-empire-but…” thing.

It first struck back in 2000, when we had the whole hoo-ha about the Gore-Bush election, And it was apt and amusing. The first six or fifteen times someone sent it to me. (I was in the UK at the time.)

Well, snorfle, yes; we definitely screwed the pooch on that one and opened ourselves to any kind of snook-cocking anyone wanted to engage in. But, really, people—we’ve moved beyond it; surely you should, too.

However, before we do, I’d like to address a few points:

1) Back when it first came out, it was Utah that HM did not fancy. But I can see the case for North Dakota, too, so this gets a pass.

2) David Cameron appointing anyone to anything? Seriously? Bwahaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhh!

3) Uh—“Congress” includes the Senate, dimwit. (Imagine if you said “Parliament and the House of Commons will be disbanded”, or do I need to get down to words of one syllable?) If you want to skewer, best to actually do a bit of research so you don’t look like an ignorant yahoo in the process. Just sayin’…

4) Your points 1 and 2 are redundant with respect to spelling. As for objecting to filler words, not really in a position to cavil, innit? (Also, from what I’ve seen on social media, there’s definite confusion over there on your/you’re, and there/their/they’re. Might want to brush up.)

5) I’m willing to accept the point about guns and lawyers; maybe even therapists. But, tell me—how’s that whole “mustn’t grumble” thing working out for you? And your aversion to therapists might be because they're not included in the NHS?

6) Sorry—better include “corkscrew” in there with the vegetable peeler, or the deal’s off. You do not want to mess with Californians who’ve lost access to wine; you just don’t.

7) Yeah, that whole “beer” delta was a thing, wasn’t it? But we now have microbrewers popping up everywhere (including North Dakota, although perhaps not Utah) that out-brew a lot of what gets served in British pubs. (Where, BTW, icy lager is quite the rage and there’s way too much over-priced bottled Bud sloshing around inside the Flower of British Youth for anyone over there to make remarks. People drink it here because it’s cheap; you don’t have that excuse.) And independent brewers are being swallowed up or pushed out by the conglomerates, so I’m thinking you really don’t want to go down this road.

8) Oh, please—there have to be more Brits on American TV and in movies than ever. We can't get enough of you. Throw in the Aussies and Canadians, we're completely stuffed.

9) Uh, which Four Weddings and a Funeral did you watch? The one I saw had MacDowell (the “d” is up; you might want to get your nits right if you’re going to pick them) as Southern American as they come. Did you get confused?

10) OTOH, I’ll give you the fact that that film made me want to hurl, independent of accents.

11) I have two words for you: “Downton Abbey”. I wish we could take back the 8^th Air Force if this is what we got in exchange.

12) I’ll give you the points on football, but are you seriously saying that cricket is more interesting than baseball? They're both unspeakably dire. Someone needs their meds adjusted. Oh, wait—the NHS is probably diluting them to save money.

13) Tea? With china cups and saucers? And biscuits? What freaking century are you talking about?

14) While we’re talking beverages, you should hang your heads in shame at the amount of instant coffee you drink.

And finally—let me just point out that neither you nor anyone else can revoke our independence because no one gave it to us. We took it by force of arms. 

Which, if you check your own history books, was a Big Freakin’ Deal to Britain back then. (When Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, not only was he unable to man up enough to hand his sword in person to Washington, but his band played “The World Turned Upside Down”. For a reason.)

So, for one more time—so amusing, you Brits. Ha-ha. It’s been 13 years; could you please come up with something new?

If not, let me tell the one about Blair being Bush’s poodle. That always cracks me up.

Lives, fortunes & sacred honor

In between the picnics and the fireworks today, give some thought to the basis of the holiday: the Continental Congress approving the Declaration of Independence, authored by Mr. Jefferson of Virginia. It's one of the most beautiful pieces of writing you're going to find anywhere; concise but eloquent.

NPR has printed it for you, but you can also listen to several of their reporters, newscasters and commentators reading it, and it's a document that cries out to be heard.

A beautifully-reasoned and eloquently-stated list of the reasons why--with reluctance—the British colonies along the Atlantic coast feel they need to take the grave step of breaking away from Mother England.

We recognize how serious a move this is, it says; but, given the pattern of abuse by the British monarch, we don't see any way out of it. We know it will cost us both blood and treasure, but it's costing us more if we don't do it.

Here are a couple of clauses that really strike to the heart:

"Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

"We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by the Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States."

And—my very favorite of all:

"And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor."

Imagine, if you will, the current denizens of the US Capitol pledging their lives, their fortunes or their honor to anything.

No, I didn't think so.

So go back to the original and really listen. This is where we came from, and we should remember it.

Three days in a Pennsylvania town

In the summer of 1863, Robert E. Lee was taking the war into the North. Up until June of that year, nothing significant had happened in the East above the Mason-Dixon line. Lee wanted to change that for a number of reasons.

For one, all the slogging around Virginia was wreaking havoc on vital agriculture. He hoped that a swoop through Pennsylvania might give the Old Dominion a rest. At the same time, in the time-honored custom of armies everywhere, he expected to pick up a few things to keep the Army of Northern Virginia going. (There was a shoe factory in nearby Chambersburg, for example.)

Finally, he hoped to convince Northern pols that fighting to keep the South in the union wasn’t an economically or politically viable proposition. Invading Harrisburg or even Philadelphia would give a lot of people pause to think.

And from his experiences with the Army of the Potomac and its various commanders, he reckoned he had a reasonable chance of making that happen.

Well, except he was operating under a couple of handicaps: his most gifted general, Thomas J. Jackson (known as Stonewall from his performance at the first battle of Manassas), had died of wounds inflicted by his own troops at Chancellorsville in May. Lee had considered Jackson his right arm and it was a grievous loss.

The second drawback was that his cavalry commander, J.E.B. Stuart (James Ewell Brown, if you’re asking) had basically disappeared up his own behind. One of the main functions of cavalry was to gather intelligence about the enemy’s movements. After making big splashes in the Peninsula and Maryland campaigns of 1862 by dashing around the Army of the Potomac, he separated his unit from Lee’s main force in late June, leaving Lee with no reliable data on the Army of the Potomac’s whereabouts.

Lee found them, under the command of George G. Meade (of whom it might be said that at least he wasn’t Joe Hooker. Or George B. McClellan. Or Ambrose Burnside), at Gettysburg, a small town with a theological seminary and interesting topography, on 1 July.

The two armies maneuvered some and fought for three days in July heat that you cannot imagine unless you’ve experienced it. Thanks to the actions of cavalry Brigadier General John Buford at the first meeting, Union forces held the high ground, but it can’t have felt like much of an advantage to those who were there.

To a certain extent fighting blindly (Stuart showed up on 2 July, but didn’t have much in the way of intel to share), Lee issued uncharacteristically ambiguous orders to Lt. General James Longstreet on the 2^nd, and then sent Maj. General George Pickett’s division up Cemetery Ridge on the 3^rd, resulting in utter carnage.

(In Ken Burns’ seminal documentary, The Civil War, historian Shelby Foote made a comment on Pickett’s charge that has stuck with me. It was something to the effect that, if he’d been a soldier given the order to cross that open space and run up the hill in the face of massed Yankee fire, he’d have said, “Lieutenant—I don’t think so.” That comment came back to me when I stood at Colleville-sur-Mer and looked down from the cliff onto Omaha Beach. I don’t know how either the Georgians or the GIs of the 29^th Infantry Division took those steps.)

After three days of this, the armies faced each other in heavy rain on the 4^th; then Lee withdrew. Meade did not pursue. The Union held the ground, but the Army of Northern Virginia (what was left of it) was able to return to Virginia and regroup.

Up until then, Lee had believed in the invincibility of his army—he’d asked it to do impossible things so many times, and it had. At Gettysburg, he was heard to repeat, “It is all my fault.”

Combined with the surrender on 4 July of Vicksburg to U.S. Grant (breaking the lines of communication for the Confederacy in the West), Gettysburg basically was the point at which it became clear that the North was never going to quit, and the South was never going to win.

But the war would continue for another 22 months, with Grant taking command of the Army of the Potomac steadily grinding down Lee’s armies, and Sherman implementing the concept of total war through Georgia and the Carolinas.

Gettysburg was the tipping point, 150 years ago today.

A day at the Somme

The first week of July has a lot of historical significance if you’re a military historian. I’ll have more to say about some of the domestic bits later, but today I want to remind you of one of the most amazing stories of command idiocy in the annals of British history.

On 1 July 1916, the British Expeditionary Force impaled itself upon the idea that if you only throw more men at entrenched machine gun emplacements, you’ll achieve a breakthrough in a war of stagnation.

The first day of the Battle of the Somme cost the Brits 58,000 casualties (almost 20,000 of them dead), but won no breakthrough. Neither did it break through the dense crania of the British generals. The new commander, Sir Douglas Haig, remained boneheaded to his death, which unfortunately came long after the Armistice in 1918.

(Generals typically were not in danger of injuries, unless they fell off their polo ponies or slipped on the floor of the officers’ mess.)

No, wave after wave of Tommies went over the top from 1 July to 18 November without enough land to grow a crop of wheat changing hands. The ground was churned to sludge by unbelievable numbers of artillery bombardments; farmers are still turning up unexploded shells as they tend their fields. In the end the butcher’s bill ran to 420,000 British, 200,000 French and 500,000 Germans dead, missing and wounded.

So pause a moment and think of the day when the sun truly began to set on the British Empire; and consider the tens of thousands of men who’ve rested along the battle line for the past 97 years.

Gratitude Monday: O, Canada

Gratitude Monday—and it’s Canada Day. So I’m thinking about how great the Canadians are, individually and collectively.

I could get silly and talk about Leslie Nielsen or one of my favorite TV shows of all time, Due South. But I’ve already done that.

And Canadians are way more than wacky comedians and upright Mounties in a cynical American city. They’re even more than mail-order pharmacies and refuges for cabernet-toting discontents fleeing whichever administration gets into office down here.

They are pretty much in every way the kind of neighbor you’d like to have on your street. They don’t throw loud parties, or park huge SUVs in their driveway, or toss their clapped-out washing machines in their weed-infested front yard.

They quietly go about their lives as conscientious citizens of the world, picking up the trash they find (and disposing of it responsibly) and pitching in whenever asked to help set the worst things to rights. They define the term “stand-up guys”.

Two things in particular I’m thinking about:

Teheran, 1979. In the midst of the chaos of the overthrow of the Shah, six American diplomats were given shelter in the Canadian embassy for 79 days, until they could be extracted by a joint Canadian-CIA mission. It was an act of both neighborly kindness and extreme courage for the Canadians to hide the Americans, especially at a time when it was clear that “diplomatic courtesies” didn’t rate high on the Iranian revolutionary priority list.

The Canadians risked personal safety and national policy to help out six Americans, who’d probably been trash-talking hockey teams right up until the embassy takeover. They didn’t hesitate and they didn’t flinch.

My second example of Canadian rectitude is Lt. Gen. Roméo A. Dallaire. Dallaire had just about the worst job of the 1990s: Force Commander of United Nations Assistance Mission Rwanda (UNAMIR), from 1993 to 1996. During the worst genocide of the second half of the 20^th Century, Dallaire commanded forces without resources, with limited remit and  no backing from his political masters. I cannot believe the fortitude of a man who still managed to save thousands of the people under his care.

Although at a terrible, terrible cost. Washington Post reporter Ken Ringle told the story much better than I could, so I’ll let him do it. It was an impossible command, an impossible remit and an impossible expectation. But Dallaire took it on.

I can just picture most American generals after that posting—speaking engagements, management consulting, appearances on talk shows. Dallaire went back to Canada, where PTSD led him to a suicide attempt. His big public outing has been to testify at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda against Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, who was subsequently convicted of war crimes. He also advocated for children affected by war—something he’s an expert in.

I cannot express my admiration for the country that produced people like this. You don’t think of them a lot, because good neighbors don’t get in your face. But you’re always really, really glad they’re there.