And Still I Persist

Victor Davis Hansen talks about how his graduate work in Classics led to writing about military history — and why military history matters:

Try explaining to a college student that Tet was an American military victory. You’ll provoke not a counterargument — let alone an assent — but a blank stare: Who or what was Tet? Doing interviews about the recent hit movie 300, I encountered similar bewilderment from listeners and hosts. Not only did most of them not know who the 300 were or what Thermopylae was; they seemed clueless about the Persian Wars altogether….

I came to the study of warfare in an odd way, at the age of 24. Without ever taking a class in military history, I naively began writing about war for a Stanford classics dissertation that explored the effects of agricultural devastation in ancient Greece, especially the Spartan ravaging of the Athenian countryside during the Peloponnesian War. The topic fascinated me. Was the strategy effective? Why assume that ancient armies with primitive tools could easily burn or cut trees, vines, and grain on thousands of acres of enemy farms, when on my family farm in Selma, California, it took me almost an hour to fell a mature fruit tree with a sharp modern ax? Yet even if the invaders couldn’t starve civilian populations, was the destruction still harmful psychologically? Did it goad proud agrarians to come out and fight? And what did the practice tell us about the values of the Greeks — and of the generals who persisted in an operation that seemingly brought no tangible results?…

A wartime public illiterate about the conflicts of the past can easily find itself paralyzed in the acrimony of the present. Without standards of historical comparison, it will prove ill equipped to make informed judgments. Neither our politicians nor most of our citizens seem to recall the incompetence and terrible decisions that, in December 1777, December 1941, and November 1950, led to massive American casualties and, for a time, public despair. So it’s no surprise that today so many seem to think that the violence in Iraq is unprecedented in our history. Roughly 3,000 combat dead in Iraq in some four years of fighting is, of course, a terrible thing. And it has provoked national outrage to the point of considering withdrawal and defeat, as we still bicker over up-armored Humvees and proper troop levels. But a previous generation considered Okinawa a stunning American victory, and prepared to follow it with an invasion of the Japanese mainland itself — despite losing, in a little over two months, four times as many Americans as we have lost in Iraq, casualties of faulty intelligence, poor generalship, and suicidal head-on assaults against fortified positions….

Read the whole thing.  ..bruce..

…this is a bit too unnerving:

Hat tip to Defamer (one of my guilty pleasures).

Thanks to a tip I saw somewhere on the net today and the ever-helpful information at Heavens Above, I knew that the International Space Station (ISS) would be passing overhead here in Denver around 9:00 pm MDT. And sure enough, just before 9:00, a very bright dot appeared in the northwest sky, slowly heading toward zenith.

What I did not expect was the second, fainter dot that appeared several “inches” behind it (as measured with my hand fully stretched out towards it) and that chased it across the sky. It was, of course, the Space Shuttle, which I now assume has detached from the ISS and is trailing it by quite some distance.  Sandra and I watched them both until one after another they faded in the southeast sky, slipping out of sunlight.

I was only 16 when we landed on the Moon, some 38 years ago. I was sure that by now we’d have bases on Luna and Mars, with multiple space stations ringing the earth. Who would have thought back then that in 2007 it would take $30 million and months of planning for a tourist to get into space for a few days? Lost dreams, lost days.  ..bruce..

Blackfive is on a role. First, they tracked down, identified, and conducted a phone interview with the USMC Staff Sergeant who did the slam poetry video below. And they did it before the mainstream media could.

Second, they have this link to Military Motivator, a place where individuals use the “do-it-yourself-Demotivator” function at Despair.com to post both humorous and sobering posters about the military. To wit:

When you go to the site, be sure to follow the ‘older posts’ link at the bottom of each page. ..bruce..

I fully anticipated the 2000 Tech Crash, due to the insane spending of dot.com startups with no products and no clear business plan. Having been part of a venture-funded startup in the early 1990s — one that took five years to run through a grand total of $7M of venture capital — I heard big warning bells every time I read about dot.coms that burned through that much each month. I knew things would get ugly, and they did.

That’s not just hindsight speaking; I cashed out all my stocks in February 2000, and I have a long-time acquaintance who still thanks me when he sees me every few years because he did the same based on my concerns, preserving his retirement. And while I’ve seen some rumblings about “Tech Bubble 2.0″ on the net, I haven’t seen that much to get me concerned.

Until now:

VMware, a company recently known only to hard-core technologists, debuted as the darling of Wall Street on Tuesday, with an opening-day surge that exceeded even Google’s historic 2004 launch.Stock of the Palo Alto maker of “virtualization” software soared 76 percent, eclipsing Google’s 18 percent first-day gain. VMware’s value at closing was $19.1 billion - ranking it as Silicon Valley’s third-largest home-grown software company after Oracle and Adobe Systems. It was the largest initial public offering since Google achieved a $27 billion valuation….

The market’s enthusiasm affirmed a Silicon Valley consensus - that VMware, founded in 1998, has pioneered an increasingly significant “virtualization” industry, developing software that dramatically enhances the computing power and flexibility of servers and other technology infrastructure, while controlling costs and energy consumption. VMware derived its name from the term “virtual machines.”

Major corporations have embraced the technology, spurring VMware to dramatic growth. Today, it has more than 3,000 employees worldwide and is on pace to exceed $1 billion in revenue. When EMC bought it 3 1/2 years ago, it had about 370 employees and less than $100 million in revenue.

VMware has nearly doubled in size almost every year since it was founded in 1998, Greene said.

A $19B IPO valuation for VMWare? When Microsoft and Sun, among others, are competing against it? Look, I have my own complaints about Microsoft, and I think they’ve lost a few steps from their more intense posture a decade ago, but I still have to go back to Guy Kawasaki’s classic comment: competing against Microsoft feels like putting your head in a vice and tightening it, then tightening it some more. Operating system software is one of Microsoft’s two core markets, and Microsoft has a long-established and well-deserved reputation for letting others pioneer key technologies and then using its mass and distribution channels to shove them aside. And others are jumping in as well.

My congratulations to the VMWare founders and investors — they’ve won the “Nerd Lottery”, to use Bruce Henderson’s wonderful phrase — but I smell irrational exuberance in the air again for the first time since the end of the last century. And giving the on-going meltdown in the credit markets due to the subprime collapse — which Bruce Henderson has been documenting here for nearly a year — the timing couldn’t be worse.

Now I’m worried. ..bruce..