Day: March 18, 2004

MIT and Cambridge (the other Cambridge)

Good article in the Times today about MIT’s program to bring the culture of entrepreneurship to the UK via a partnership with Cambridge University. They focus on the biotech context; I know that in general the Entrepreneurship Center has been active in this effort regardless of discipline.

It is kind of funny to see an article about entrepreneurship at MIT without hearing about the Sloan School. The PR agent must be slipping. (For the record, my management track at Sloan was in New Product and Venture Development.)

Lies and lying liars?

I’ve tried to tone down a bit of my rhetoric against the administration recently, mostly because I now know there are people out there who do a far better job of calling them on their fouls than I do. I even winced a little when I saw the title of Al Franken’s book again recently. Lies and the Lying Liars That Tell Them is, shall we say, a little inflammatory.

Then I was strengthened in my resolve by two ads:

  1. As pointed out by Greg Greene, someone who says that his opponent wants to hurt individual soldiers, but who himself sends reservists to Iraq in inadequate body armor, floats the prospect of cutting the pay of soldiers in live combat, and interferes with the health care benefits of veterans, active duty troops, National Guardsmen, and reservists, can hardly be called anything but a liar. Unless it’s two faced hypocrite.
  2. The recent understated ad at MoveOn.org that lets Donald Rumsfeld hang himself with his own words. In a discussion on CBS’s Face the Nation, Rumsfeld claimed that no one in the administration had ever called Iraq an “imminent threat,” that someone in the press had made up the phrase and was floating it to aggravate the WMD issue. Being hoist on a petard made of your own statements before and during the war about the imminentness of the Iraqi threat: priceless. (thanks Josh)

One is tempted to ask, with I.F. Stone, “is it necessary to repeat after 2,000 years all the things you people learned in Sunday school?! How — how absent-minded — how forgetful!”