[rescue] More IBM emulation fun

[nate at portents.com]

> good ol' human nachoor...  two of my favorite sage quotes, in i
> imagine the sequence he wrote them, are:
>
> those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it
> 	- santayana
>
> what we learn from history is that we fail to learn from history
> 	- santayana

While I agree with the first saying, the second one is essentially a
fatalistic restatement of the first one.

Like so many aphorisms, the second one needs some expansion:

What those who study history learn from it is that the people who had the
most effect on events that have occurred demonstrated a high likelihood
that they did not study history themselves, at least to the degree that
they understood what mistakes not to repeat, or they lacked the ability to
ascertain when there were new variations on old patterns occuring, and as
a result mistakes that had been made before were repeated, and it is
either unlikely or perhaps intrinsically impossible for a significant
enough portion of the human species to both learn from past mistakes and
identify new variations on old patterns for the cycle to cease.

I'm not sure I agree with that, or that the model it proposes is accurate.

- Nate