History – Page 4 – Spinor Info

Peace on Earth

Dec 242022

This year my simple Christmas wish seems more urgent than before. War is raging in a part of Europe that should have seen the last of its share of trenches and artillery bombardments in 1945; instead, it’s a modern war zone, with innocents killed, infrastructure wantonly destroyed, people displaced, and cruelty reigning, just to satisfy the messianic complex of a deranged tyrant.

And the risk of escalation remains very real: 2023 may not be a good year for many of us.

As always, I cannot think of more appropriate words on December 24 than those uttered by Frank Borman, commander of Apollo 8, the first manned mission to orbit the Moon (and the first vehicle in the history of humanity that carried humans to a spot cut off from all other humans who ever lived, as they disappeared behind the far side of the Moon):

[G]ood night, good luck, a Merry Christmas – and God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth.

Now what?

History, Politics No Responses »

Nov 152022

CNN reports a Russian attack (likely unintentional, but an attack nonetheless) on a Polish farm, killing two.

That’s an attack on the territory of a NATO state.

Forced perspective

History, Hungary No Responses »

Oct 272022

To those who know my city of birth, Budapest, this is an astonishing picture that I came across on Facebook.

In the foreground is Margaret Bridge, spanning the Danube. The kink in the bridge is where it touches Margaret Island. Beyond that, on the Pest side, it’s Saint Stephen’s Boulevard, named after Stephen I, Hungary’s first king. The two small domes on the left are part of the Western (“Nyugati”) railway station building, designed by none other than Gustave Eiffel (yes, that Eiffel).

But then… thanks to the magic of the telephoto lens, in the background we see another major railway station, the Eastern (“Keleti”) station. I never before realized that these two railway stations, which are actually miles apart, line up like this.

Not only that but behind that second railway station, we can even see some housing projects that are quite some distance away, near the terminus of the city’s #2 subway line.

Telephoto lenses are really tricky. By the way, in case anyone wonders, the image is from 1982. There’s plenty of traffic on the bridge, but notice that most of the cars are characteristic East Bloc models: Ladas, Trabants, a Skoda, a Moskvich if I am not mistaken, a Wartburg. The buses are the same Ikarus models that once roamed the streets even here in Ottawa. The streetcars were built by Hungary’s Ganz. That streetcar line is supposedly the world’s busiest, today served by rather nice-looking, very long, high-capacity Siemens trains.

Moore’s Law

Computers, History, Personal No Responses »

Oct 242022

Oh, moments after posting about not having worthwhile subjects to post about, I suddenly remembered something that I have been meaning to post about for some time. That is to say, Moore’s law in computing, the idea that the capabilities of computer technology roughly double every 18-24 months or so.

It has been true for a long while. Gordon Moore made this observation back in 1965, when I was just two years old.

I observed a form of Moore’s law as I was swapping computer hardware over the years. My first major planned upgrade took place in 1992, when I built a really high end desktop computer (it even had a CD-ROM drive!) for many thousands of dollars. Months later, my older desktop machine found a new life as my first ever Linux server, soon to be connected to the Internet using on-demand dial-up.

The new desktop machine I built in ’92 lasted until 1998, when it was time to replace it. For the first time, I now had a computer that could play back DVDs without the help of external hardware. It also had the ability to capture and display video from cable. Ever since, I’ve been watching TV mostly on my computer screen. I watched the disaster unfolding on September 11, 2001 and the tragic end of the space shuttle Columbia on February 1, 2003 on that computer.

Next came 2004, when I executed a planned upgrade of workstation and server, along with some backup hardware. Then, like clockwork, 2010 and finally, 2016, when I built these fine machines, with really decent but low power (hence low thermal stress) Xeon CPUs, three of them.

And now here we are, in late 2022. More than six years have passed. And these computers do not feel the least bit obsolete. Their processors are fast. Their 32 GB of RAM is more than adequate. Sure, the 1 TB SSDs are SATA, but so what? It’s not like they ever felt slow. Video? The main limitation is not age, simply finding fanless video cards of decent capabilities that a) make no noise, b) don’t become a maintenance nightmare with dust-clogged fans.

I don’t feel like upgrading at all. Would feel like a waste of money. The only concern I have is that my server runs a still supported, but soon-to-be-obsoleted version of CentOS Linux. My workstation runs Windows 10 but support won’t be an issue there for quite a while.

And then there are the aging SSDs. Perfectly healthy as far as I can tell but should I risk relying on them after more than 6 years? Even high-end SSDs are becoming dirt cheap nowadays, so perhaps it’s time to make a small investment and upgrade?

Moore’s Law was originally about transistor counts, and transistor counts continue to rise. But transistor counts mean nothing unless you’re interested in counting transistors. Things that have meaning include execution speed, memory capacity, bandwidth, etc. And on all these fronts, the hardware that I built back in 2016 does not feel obsolete or limiting. In fact, when I look at what I would presently buy to build new machines, quite surprisingly the specs would only differ marginally from my six year old hardware. Prices aren’t that different either. So then, what’s the point, so long as the old hardware remains reliable?

Winter is coming

History, Politics No Responses »

Sep 232022

I admit that to date, I only viewed the first season of Game of Thrones. One of these days, I’ll watch the rest but there’s so much good television and so little time… I don’t spend much time watching TV, so I am behind even with series that I really like. (Hint: haven’t yet finished the last season of The Sopranos.)

Yet… I get the catch phrase. Winter is coming. And yes, I am filled with a sensation of dread because winter, indeed, is coming. quite possibly the world’s worst winter since… 1914? 1939? 1941? Not sure.

For some reason, I keep thinking about a silly but perhaps relevant analogy: the flight envelope. Move too slow, your airplane falls out of the sky. Move too fast and your airplane is overstressed and disintegrates. The higher your altitude, the smaller the difference between the two, until eventually you run out of options: no matter what you do, you fall out of the sky. That was the tragic fate of AF447 over the Atlantic Ocean 13 years ago.

And I now feel that geopolitics is locked in a very similar pattern. With each and every passing day, our options are becoming more constrained. Take Putin’s nuclear threat, combined with the sham referenda he’s organizing in the occupied Ukrainian territories. He says he’s not bluffing. What if he means it? What are our options if he does deploy a tactical nuke in the battlefield?

There really are no good choices.

If we do nothing, that will only encourage him to go for more. The rest of Ukraine. Moldova. A Kaliningrad corridor. Perhaps the Baltic states since if NATO failed to respond to nukes in Ukraine out of fear of triggering a nuclear world war, he can count on NATO’s restraint in the Baltics, too. Where will he stop? Will he stop?

If we respond tit-for-tat, with a NATO tactical nuke, that risks escalation. The genie is now truly out of the bottle.

The best option I can think of is to use all of NATO’s might to do two things: 1) immediately establish a no-fly zone over all of Ukraine, and 2) use a direct, overwhelming conventional strike to annihilate the unit that launched the nuke.

This still carries the risk of escalation. But at least it would show that the West is not afraid to respond, it just calibrates its response appropriately: to deter, but not to escalate. And of course telegraph this well in advance, to make it clear to Putin that unlike him, the West really isn’t bluffing.

Yet I cannot escape the thought of that flight envelope. When the difference between your minimum speed and your top speed gets reduced to nothing, that means you have no good options left. Whatever you do, you fall out of the sky.

Winter is coming. A winter bringing with it the risk of escalation in Ukraine. A global food crisis as a result of the Ukraine war. An energy crisis (which may be mitigated but cannot be fully averted) in Europe. Growing tensions concerning Taiwan. A democracy crisis throughout the West as right-wing populism prevails and the rule of law suffers.

I am increasingly convinced that October 1962, the Cuban missile crisis, was a pleasant afternoon tea in a kindergarten, surrounded by friendly teddy bears, compared to what we now face, in the fall of 2022.

Back then, the choices were clear and the major players shared a common goal: avoid global confrontation.

Today? The choices are murky and we have leaders who built cults on the shared belief that they are all victims. That they have no choice but to defend themselves. From what, you ask? Well, how about defending yourself from the rule of law when you want to break it. Defending yourself from a country you attacked and tried to destroy or occupy. Defending yourself from a territory that does not want to live under your one-party totalitarian regime. Of course they do not see things this way. And that’s what make things scary.

And that’s why I worry that winter, indeed, is coming, a kind of winter we have not seen in many generations, if ever.

From the opening scenes of the Fallout 3 computer game:

War. War never changes.
Since the dawn of human kind,
when our ancestors first discovered
the killing power of rock and bone,
blood has been spilled in the name
of everything: from God to justice
to simple, psychotic rage.

Notable quotes

History No Responses »

Sep 182022

In recent weeks, I came across two quotes that are worth recording here.

As I watch Florida’s governor playing cheap board games with the lives of Venezuelan refugees, I recall the words of Italian author and philosopher Umberto Eco:

We need an enemy to give people hope. Someone said that patriotism is the last refuge of cowards: those without moral principles usually wrap a flag around themselves, and the bastards always talk about the purity of the race. National identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed. But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same. Hatred has to be cultivated as a civic passion. The enemy is the friend of the people. You always want someone to hate in order to feel justified in your own misery. Hatred is the primordial passion. It is love that’s abnormal.

The hypocrisy of those who cry the loudest for freedom was already evident two centuries prior, to British author Dr. Samuel Johnson:

How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?

The more times change, the more they remain the same, I guess.

Images from times past

History, Hungary, Personal No Responses »

Sep 172022

One of the many novels by prolific 1930s Hungarian author Jenő Rejtő featured a horrific penal colony somewhere in colonial French Africa. Near the end of the novel, one of the minor protagonists, the military commander of the colony, already in retirement in Rome, recalls the past. As he enjoys the beautiful view from his window, he thinks that “and right now, Bahr el Sudan also exists for sure, and Tiguer, the corporal with the red moustache, is just now hanging a wet blanket, which smells like horses, over the window. This is a strange and unsettling notion.”

Sometimes I feel the same way, not so much with respect to distant places in the present, but distant places in the past.

Take this image, a montage of two photographs taken from a wonderful Hungarian photographic archive that someone just shared on Facebook, showing an intersection in downtown Budapest, not far from where I grew up.

The picture predates us living there but not by much; it was taken in 1961, we moved there in 1967, but everything looked pretty much the same. I know this intersection like the back of my hand: the stores, the buildings, everything.

And when I view this image, it comes to life in my mind. It feels tangibly real. I can even smell the smells: the smell of freshly ground coffee (I even remember the noise made by the electric grinder) in that deli store on the corner, the smell of paint and household solvents permeating the hardware store next door. The sound made by those trolley buses as they rolled down the cobblestoned street (only the intersection was asphalt-paved at the time) as it even rattled our fourth-floor living room windows.

It all feels so real… it is a deeply unsettling thought that I am separated from what is depicted in this image not just by distance but also by time. The view that I am looking at is older than I am, as it was taken 62 years ago.

Elizabeth II, Queen of Canada

Canada, History, Politics No Responses »

Sep 082022

Queen Elizabeth II has died.

Herculaneum loaf, part II

Food, History, Personal No Responses »

Sep 052022

Inspired by the story of that carbonized loaf that survived the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, my beautiful wife surprised us this morning with a loaf of bread, made according to a recreation of the Roman recipe:

It’s yummy. Looks great and tastes great, too. Those pesky Romans knew what they were doing.

Don’t lose that plutonium core

History No Responses »

Aug 302022

I am reading the story of the second atomic bombing, the bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945.

It succeeded against all odds, after almost everything that could possibly go wrong, did.

Like, having a plutonium core bouncing around on the floor of an airplane in turbulence.

A misunderstood radio message (that was itself sent in clear violation of the rules of radio silence) that led many on the ground believe that the B-29 carrying the bomb was lost.

A failed rendezvous attempt that caused the airplane, already hindered by a faulty pump, to burn precious fuel.

A bomb that was incorrectly assembled, leading to a late-night repair that involved using a soldering iron, powered by a string of extension cords connecting two an outlet two rooms away, in the presence of high explosives.

And last but definitely not least, a bomb that appeared to arm itself mid-flight, with an ominous, blinking red light, and a crew that was frantically looking for the reason in the manual, until finally they reset some switches to the appropriate positions.

Yes, it was wartime. Things don’t always go as planned in wartime. And in the end, the bomb was delivered, Japan surrendered, and WW2 ended without additional bombs, without an invasion that would have been incredibly costly in terms of human lives. And the crew managed to make it to a safe (albeit scary) landing in Okinawa, flying on fumes.

More than 77 years later, August 9, 1945 still marks the last time (for now) when a nuclear weapon was used in anger. When I was a child, I daresay no sane adult believed that we’d live to see, never mind 2022, the year 2000 without nuclear Armageddon. Yet here we are. So maybe there’s hope for us yet.

A loaf of bread

Food, History 1 Response »

Aug 292022

Almost two thousand years ago, on August 24, 79 AD, in the fine town of Herculaneum, Celer, slave of Quintus Granius Verus had a loaf of bread baked. The loaf never left the oven and they never had a chance to eat any of it. They were interrupted by the catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

Celer is known to have survived the cataclysm, as his name later appears on a list of freed slaves. The bread also survived, albeit not in edible form. The carbonized loaf was discovered by archeologists in 1930.

To think… a loaf of bread, intact, in such good shape, the stamp of its owner is clearly visible and legible. And it speaks volumes of a highly organized society, in which such stamped loafs of bread were regularly prepared at communal bakeries.

Darnit, it must have been tasty, too. There are modern recipes attempting to recover the flavor and texture of the original. One of these days, we ought to give it a try.

The alternative is tyranny

History, Politics No Responses »

Jun 172022

Let’s not mince worlds: the alternative to liberal democracy is tyranny.

Oh, did I say “liberal”? Note the small-l. This has nothing to do with the ideological battles of the day. It’s not about woke nonsense in math textbooks or the number of gender pronouns you need to use to avoid being called a somethingophobe. (Hint: If you are a public figure concerned about being canceled, check every day. The list might change.)

For what does “liberal” (again, small-l) really mean? It means rule of law. It means civil liberties. It means freedom of enterprise. It means political freedoms and limited government.

As for democracy, the Greek roots of the word say it all: power derived from the will of the people.

The alternatives are varied. A regime can be liberal but undemocratic: e.g., a hereditary kingdom that adheres to the values of classical liberalism.

A totalitarian regime is neither liberal nor democratic: power is based on might, an oppressive security apparatus, and liberal values are rejected. I know what it’s like: I grew up in one (albeit a relatively mild case, the “goulash” version of totalitarian communism.)

But then, there is “illiberal democracy”: power derived from the will of the people, but used to suppress liberal values. This has been in vogue lately. Orban of Hungary proudly proclaimed that Hungary is now an “illiberal democracy”. Trump’s America was heading in this direction, as does Johnson’s Britain.

But Russia, especially of late, really shows us the true nature of illiberal democracy, which we appear to have forgotten during the golden era of the past 70-odd years. For “illiberal democracy” is just a euphemism. A euphemism for, let us call a spade a spade, fascism.

To be sure, there are degrees of fascism. Franco’s Spain, for instance, was arguably a great deal more liberal than Hitler’s Third Reich. Perhaps even more liberal than Italy under Il Duce, though I wouldn’t know; I am not well-acquainted with the details of daily life in either regime. And no, I certainly do not mean to suggest that Orban’s Hungary is comparable.

But ultimately, whether it is the Proud Boys in the US trying to hang Mike Pence for not granting their orange Leader a second term in the White House, the Freedom Convoy here in Ottawa trying to have sexual intercourse with the Prime Minister, Johnson’s lot trying to deport asylum-seekers to Rwanda (and then in a plot twist, blaming Winston Churchill’s brainchild, the ECHR—established to prevent a recurrence of fascism in Europe, which is especially ironic considering the case—when they are temporarily prevented from doing so) or Putin indiscriminately bombing the hell out of Ukraine, it is the same theme. The leaders are populists who act in the name of their followers, using slogans of nationalism and freedom, but inciting fear, anger and hate, ultimately acting in their own self-interests, for power, for wealth, for influence.

Those who do not remember history are destined to repeat its mistakes. I am not looking forward to this cheap, Hollywood-style remake or reimagining of the 1930s, but it seems to be happening anyway.

Things I wish I could unlearn

History, Personal, Science No Responses »

Jun 102022

There are a few things in life that I heard about and wish I didn’t. I’m going to mention some of them here, but without links or pictures. If you want to find them, Google them. But I am mindful of those who value their sanity.

In a famous experiment, a researcher subjected rats to drowning. Rats that were previously rescued tried to stay afloat and took longer to die than those who weren’t. Hope changed their behavior.
There was an old Chinese method of execution: literally cutting the condemned in half at the waist.
Japan’s wartime bioweapons and chemical warfare research facility, the famous Unit 731, was so horrific, Auschwitz-Birkenau is probably like a happy summer camp in comparison (and not because Mengele was nice).
Touch a tiny fraction of a milligram of dimethylmercury for more than a few seconds even while wearing a latex glove, and you will almost certainly die a horrible death months later, as your body and mind irreversibly deteriorate. (Someone once said that the very existence of something evil like Hg(CH₃)₂ is proof that there’s no God, or at least not a benevolent one.)

There may be a few other similarly unpleasant tidbits, but I can’t recall them right now, and that’s good. Mercifully, our human memory is imperfect so perhaps it is possible to unlearn things after all. (Or, perhaps I am hoping in vain, like those unfortunate rats.)

General average

History, Legal No Responses »

Jun 022022

So the other day, I was reading about this maritime legal concept, “general average“: the idea that when parts of a ship or its cargo are sacrificed to save the rest, all cargo owners share the loss.

The concept makes sense, since sailors cannot (and should not) try to pick and choose when it comes to deciding what they save or toss overboard; they should focus on saving as much of the ship and its cargo as possible.

What astonished me is that the roots of this legal concept, which, incidentally, also represents the foundation of the modern concept of insurance, go all the way back to the code of Hammurabi, almost 4000 years ago.

It’s at moments like that that I realize that our magnificent civilization, our Magna Civitas as it was called in Walter M. Miller Jr’s unforgettable A Canticle for Leibowitz, is really much older than we often think.

No, Ukraine is not about peace vs. justice

History, Politics No Responses »

May 312022

Apparently, a growing number of people are framing the question concerning Russia’s war in Ukraine in terms of peace vs. justice. Peace would mean some kind of a settlement to end the fighting now, even if it means granting, e.g., territorial concessions to Russia to avoid humiliating Putin. In contrast, continuing to fight for Ukraine’s liberation is about justice.

In my view, it is dangerously wrong to present Russia’s war of aggression in these terms. Peace without justice is simply not possible. Believing otherwise amounts to repeating the tragic errors of 1938: When Britain’s Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, triumphantly returned from the Munich conference carrying a document with Hitler’s signature, declaring that he brought “peace for our time”.

We all know how long “our time” lasted. The grand total of 11 months.

That’s what peace without justice looks like. A despot like Putin is only encouraged by what he sees as weakness, signs of the cowardly decadence of the West. And just as he has now done repeatedly (!) in the past, he will happily ignore any agreement he signs today once he sees an opportunity, once he thinks that conditions are in his favor.

No. We must categorically reject such compromise. Much as we desire peace, we must not confuse lasting, robust peace with an armistice that only allows the despot to regroup, learn from his lessons, and start his aggression anew at the first viable opportunity. And his success might encourage other nations to resort to armed aggression, knowing that the West is too weak, too divided to stand up against them.

It is an unfortunate fact of human history that sometimes the shortest, surest route to “peace for our time” is through the battlefield. I wish the war stopped right now, with no more suffering, no more destruction, no more killing. But if the price we will likely pay is a greater, deadlier war tomorrow, I’d rather we do what it takes to avoid it.

And yes, I recognize that it’s easy for me to say these things from the comfort of an armchair in a peaceful city many thousands of miles away from Ukraine. But you know what? It’s also easy to speculate about these things in Washington or Brussels. How about we ask the Ukrainians? Do they want peace now, even with concessions? Or do they prefer to liberate their homeland and ensure that the Russians will be in no mood to attack again anytime soon?

Because this, after all, is the other lesson of 1938. Nobody asked the Czechs. The decision was made by the great powers without consulting those who would actually be paying the price in blood.

This is just the beginning

History, Politics No Responses »

May 262022

News on CNN: Apparently hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are now in “filtration camps” in Russia. That is to say, concentration camps.

Make no mistake about it, this is just the beginning of evil. As the West continues to flirt with various forms of authoritarianism or illiberalism, Russia has gone full-blown Nazi, with a war of conquest, severe oppression at home, an idolized leader and a national ideology of predestined greatness held back only by some evil international conspiracy.

Our only hope… ONLY hope is that they remain as incompetent and as corrupt as they are, with an ill-prepared military using substandard training and equipment as monies have been syphoned away to finance the oligarchs’ superyachts, and with a Ukrainian nation more capable of defending itself against this horrific aggression than anyone thought possible.

But so long as we have elder statesmen like Kissinger advocating a Munich-style appeasement, the world remains in danger. Bullies cannot be appeased; it just encourages them to come back and ask for more. Kissinger, of all people, should be intimately aware of this lesson of history.

And even if escalation is avoided, the fallout of the conflict, especially the looming global food crisis, can be devastating.

All it takes is a couple of generations to forget the lessons of history and start anew. So we keep making the same mistakes over and over again.

Dear Russia

History, Politics No Responses »

May 122022

Dear Russia,

In the wake of Finland’s imminent decision to join NATO, you threaten again. You present yourself as the victim of aggression by Nazis.

So let’s take stock. Who did what in Europe since 1945?

In 1953, you used your military force to crush an uprising against hardline communist tyranny in East Germany.

In 1956, you did the same thing in Budapest, inflicting severe damage on my city of birth, still recovering from the devastations of WW2.

In 1968, you crushed the Prague Spring with tanks.

Kudos to you: You refrained from the direct use of military force in Poland in 1980, though you supported the regime that imposed martial law.

After the Soviet collapse, as the newly independent Russian Federation you supported separatists in the Transnistria region of Moldova.

You waged not one but two wars in Chechnya in the 1990s, with tens of thousands killed and cities like Grozny leveled.

In 2008, you launched a war against Georgia, seizing territory and creating two phony mini-republics.

In 2014, you launched another war, against Ukraine, seizing the Crimea and parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, creating a permanent war zone, even shooting down a civilian airliner that flew over the area on a scheduled route.

And now you attempted a full-scale war, hoping to decapitate Ukraine, Blitzkrieg-style, and resorting to horrific, genocidal tactics of purposefully targeting civilians when your ineptitude and Ukrainian resistance thwarted your plans.

But you are the good guys. I get it. Meanwhile, what did evil, imperialist, Nazi NATO do? How many times were you attacked by NATO nations? What territories were seized by NATO?

Oh, I get it. NATO bombed Belgrade. Never mind that the goal was not to seize territory or even change a regime, simply to stop the (now well-documented) ongoing genocide in Kosovo. Because, I get it, that’s what Nazis do: they stop genocide. And you, the good guys?

This video speaks for itself.

Still wondering why Finland is keen on joining NATO?

They don’t want to end up like this hapless car dealership owner and his security guard.

Killed by Putler’s Russist thugs.

Twenty years later

History, Internet, Personal No Responses »

May 092022

It’s now Monday, May 9, 2022. And it is an anniversary of sorts.

No I am not talking about Putin and his planned “victory” parade, as he is busy desecrating the legacy of the Soviet Union’s heroic fight in the Great Patriotic War against a genocidal enemy.

I am referring to something much more personal. This sentence:

I watched The Matrix, for the first time. I’ve seen Dark City, and I loved it. I have heard all sorts of bad things about The Matrix, so I had low expectations. I was pleasantly surprised. Maybe not as well done as Dark City, it was nevertheless a surprisingly intelligent movie for a blockbuster.

Not very profound or insightful, is it.

But it happens to be my first ever blog entry, written when I still refused to call a blog a “blog”, calling it instead my “Day Book”, in the tradition of the late Jerry Pournelle.

So there. Will I be around twenty years from now? Perhaps more pertinently, will the world as we know it still be around?

What can I say? I am looking forward to marking the 40th anniversary of my blog on May 9, 2042, with another blog entry, hopefully celebrating a decent, prosperous, safe, mostly peaceful world.

Oh, those Romans…

History No Responses »

May 072022

There are things I am learning about the Roman Empire that I never knew. What a magnificent society it really was.

For instance, the Romans were not only master builders of sewers and roads, but also invented traffic management. Julius Caesar restricted the use of private vehicles to the last two hours of daylight. Business deliveries had to be made at night.

The Embattled Driver in Ancient Rome

What blew me away, however, was their use of… plumbing? I mean, aqueducts are one thing, but to have bona fide valves, water faucets in businesses and homes? Now that blew me away.

And speaking of sewers, the Romans might have been master sewer builders but it appears some form of a sewer system may have existed almost ten thousand (!!!) years earlier in a settlement in Anatolia. That’s just… wow.

Maybe it’s 1904 all over again?

History, Politics No Responses »

Apr 142022

I’ve been finding parallels between the events in Ukraine and 1914 (when Austria-Hungary attacked Serbia), 1938 (when the Western world acquiesced to Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland in the hope that it would bring “peace for our times”, to use Chamberlain’s words), 1939 (Hitler’s attack on Poland) and 1943 (Hitler’s historic defeat at Stalingrad.)

But perhaps it’s 1904-1905, when the Russian Empire waged a naval war against the Japanese Empire.

The specifics are different (for starters, the Russo-Japanese war was started by Japan), but the similarities abound: The general expectation was that a major European power, Russia, will easily prevail over the perceived inferiority of an “Asiatic” empire. Instead, Russia was humiliated, and the political backlash directly led to the 1905 revolution, itself a precursor to the 1917 Bolshevik revolution.

And here we are, in 2022, with Russia humiliated again by an enemy that was widely perceived as inferior. Beyond the tactical defeats, the strategic, political blunders are palpable: threats of Russian aggression have not only breathed fresh life into the NATO alliance, but also prompted traditionally (and fiercely) neutral Sweden and Finland to take concrete steps towards NATO membership.

And now, the Moskva. I am not sure but I am beginning to think that this 12,500 ton guided missile cruiser is the largest warship sank by enemy action since WW2. I mean, if this does not reek criminal recklessness and incompetence on behalf of the Russian leadership, both political and military, I don’t know what does.

Does this mean that a revolution is in the works? Are Putin’s days numbered? Perhaps, but I wouldn’t bet on it. And the nuclear wildcard is… there. Perhaps Putin will resort to nukes if all other options fail. Or perhaps a palace revolution widens into civil war, and the world may yet witness the consequences of the first ever nuclear civil war. Whatever happens, I doubt it will be pretty.

Older Entries Newer Entries