Pre-Dating Rome

Ancient warrior's skeleton found near Rome - Marta Falconi, Washington Post

Rome was only founded, by some accounts, in 1,000 BC, so this is really old. It's also pretty incredible to be found.

Books and Exploration

I'm finishing The Tipping Point right now, and then I'm moving on to Humboldt's Cosmos, by Gerard Helferich, which I'm quite excited to read. I stumbled upon Humboldt while doing research on William Dampier, in the spring of last year. He is an explorer who, by all impressions, is one of the more important and influential ever, but does not get nearly the creedence he deserves. My theory is because he didn't sail anywhere.

In primary school, or at least my experience with it, was that exploration was a small portion of history - ie, get past it to move on to the more important stuff. The explorers we learned about (other than Lewis and Clark) were Columbus, Cook, Hudson, de Champlain - guys who found out the limits of the new continent and sailed. Humboldt and Dampier, whose most valuable contributions to exploration were based on their voyages on land, get overlooked.

I have a rendezvous with death

A New War With Echoes of Old Sorrow – Alan Cowell

My favorite War Poem is Alan Seeger’s Rendezvous With Death, which is kind of like saying your favorite Beatles song is Hey Jude. The first time I ever heard it read gave me chills; reading it myself later did nothing to banish them.

The poets of World War I left for a war planned to be over by Christmas; those who managed to survive in the trenches were quickly disillusioned. It was another war of ‘fight them there so you don’t have to here’ – or at the least protect the free from the Huns. The same motto is repeated today, but its not the same concept. As the America nation-state grows up…there is nobody who is fighting us conventionally in the next 15 years, meaning true nation-state war is not top priority. I just finished an article I had saved from a few years back, Learning About Counterinsurgency by Lt. General Sir John Kiszely, which discussed the relative educational empowerment of those junior officers, to be able to fight an insurgency which decries the warrior ethos because the soldier can’t hate his or her enemy.

It’s almost a full circle. The JOs and civilians bear a lot of the brunt, but they are also learning more through their own experience and through the study of theory and history. Leaves me to wonder about how educated JOs are compared to civil society.