climbing Montblanc - The Monday Morning Memo

They were climbing Montblanc when they decided to take this photo more than 130 years ago. Do an image search on Google and you’ll see it on lots of websites, though most of them don’t list a date for the photo.

One claims the photo was made in 1820 which, if you know the history of photography, is clearly impossible.

A second website says 1870. A third website says 1890. Those dates sound about right to me.

Here are my questions: Who took the photo and where were they standing? And who decided it would be a good idea to lug one of those big, wooden box cameras up the side of an icy mountain?

– Indy Beagle

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“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”
– Elon Musk

“The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.”
– Hannah Arendt

“In my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trails) I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”
– Captain G. M. Gilbert, the Army psychologist assigned to watching the defendants at the Nuremberg trails (1945-1949).”

- That Elon quote smelled to me like it could be propaganda created by an Elon-hater. But the Muskrat did, in fact, say it during a 3-hour interview with Joe Rogan that was released on February 28, 2025. Google "Hannah Arendt" (1906-1975) and you will se that was a German and American historian and philosopher. – RHW

They were climbing Montblanc when they decided to take this photo more than 130 years ago. Do an image search on Google and you’ll see it on lots of websites, though most of them don’t list a date for the photo.

One claims the photo was made in 1820 which, if you know the history of photography, is clearly impossible.

A second website says 1870. A third website says 1890. Those dates sound about right to me.

Here are my questions: Who took the photo and where were they standing? And who decided it would be a good idea to lug one of those big, wooden box cameras up the side of an icy mountain?

– Indy Beagle

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