An excellent contribution.

Recently I read a book about Champollion (sp), the man who translated Egyptian hieroglyphics. The author mentioned that Champollion's brother, a publisher of a small newspaper, got in trouble with the government for publishing data about the number of French soldiers who were being killed in Bonaparte's campaigns.

It is thought-provoking to realize that the people of France, many of them isolated in villages and small cities, could not get together and determine how many men they had lost. It takes the media to do something like that. And here I was going to get a bumpersticker that said "Smoke free, drug free, media free."

The book also details the horrors of the Egyptian campaign. (The French leadership landed the soldiers in the desert and failed to provide any food or water.) When some Mudcatters start rattling on about Theobald Wolfe Tone and his foray into Ireland with the French, I wonder how many horrors occurred there that we don't get told about.

Peace.