Court Ladies and their Embroidery

Interesting NY Times review of The Waiting Game: The Untold Story of the Women Who Served the Tudor Queens, by Nicola Clark. The position of these women is so strange to us that we have a hard time wrapping our minds around it. On the one hand, their positions and even their survival depended largely on the support of their male relatives, and they had to spend an immense amount of time and effort looking beautiful in the background of courts events. Were they oppressed? Frustrated? Thrilled to be so close to the center of it all? Bored out of their minds?

I personally have a hard time imagining any career I would hate more than to be a court lady, so confined by social rules, familial expectations, and cumbersome clothes, with so little freedom to make meaningful choices or get your hands dirty with real work. Ugh. But the evidence is that hundreds of women fought for these places; is that maybe evidence of how miserable every other kind of life was at the time?

Not that the women had no choices to make, or no power. They endlessly networked and used those connections to benefit their families and their friends. They also had their own kinds of art. I was struck by this: 

The Duchess of Norfolk was forced to abandon a “complex embroidery work” when her husband banished her so he could carry on an affair. The work, described in inventories as “a great pomegranate of gold,” had perhaps been her silent form of protest at the treatment of her queen, as the fruit was Catherine of Aragon’s symbol. 

This connects to what Laurel Thatcher wrote about women's cloth work in colonial North America, which was simultaneously practical, political, and self-expressive. Women said a lot without writing it down.

Afghan "Reconstruction" and the Perils of Politics

John F. Sopko has been the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction since 2012. He spent years trying to convince people in Washington that the war was failing and the Afghan government we supported was a sham, and in this NY Times op-ed he is still bitter about it: 

The collapse of the U.S.-backed government in Afghanistan on Aug. 15, 2021, revealed what little American lives and money had purchased over 20 years there. It also laid bare a gaping disconnect between reality and what senior U.S. officials had been telling Americans for decades: that success was just around the corner.

As the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, my staff and I have audited and investigated U.S. programs and spending to rebuild Afghanistan — a mission that, it was hoped, would turn the theocratic, tribal-based “Graveyard of Empires” into a modern liberal democracy.

In hundreds of reports over the last 12 years, we have detailed a long list of systemic problems: The U.S. government struggled to carry out a coherent strategy, fostered overly ambitious expectations, started unsustainable projects and did not understand the country or its people. American agencies measured success not by what they accomplished, but by dollars spent or checklists of completed tasks. . . .

To win promotions and bigger salaries, military and civilian leaders felt they had to sell their tours of duty, deployments, programs and projects as successes — even when they were not. Leaders tended to report and highlight favorable information while obscuring that which pointed to failure. After all, failures do not lead to an ambassadorship or an elevation to general.

Sopko goes on to detail all the usual failures of American government in action: money spent simply to justify having a bigger budget next year, projects pushed through to completion even though the rationale for them had evaporated. We were supposed to be supporting the development of Afghan security forces, so rosy statistics on the number of soldiers etc. were reported, even though Sopko's office kept reporting that many Afghan soldiers were "ghosts" kept on the books so the officers could pocket their salaries, and so on.

It's worth thinking over how we managed to spend hundreds of billion on this disaster.

It began with the righteous fury that overtook the US after 9-11 and Bush II's war against "evil." I didn't bother to oppose our invasion of Afghanistan because I saw it as inevitable; they were harboring our enemies and we were  not going to stand for that. But I never thought it would end well. I recall posting somewhere the words of a 19th-century British Parliamentarian who said, "the first rule of politics is, don't invade Afghanistan."

Then our wars of retribution got mixed up with a grander set of ideas. The root cause of terrorism, many westerners believed, was the failure of governments across the Middle East to provide decent lives for their citizens. The region was dominated by two forces: vicious authoritarian thugs, and religious reactionaries. In that context, terrorism seemed inevitable and maybe even admirable. What was needed was to reshape these countries toward democracy, capitalism, and hope. So we embarked on our trillion-dollar crusade to reshape the Middle East. We invaded two countries and set up new governments, and various Washington types called for invading more.

There is a very limited sense in which this was successful; after a 15-year nightmare, Iraq has emerged as a better place than it was under Saddam. There is a real Arab movement for democracy and human rights, and some of its proponents have welcomed or defended US intervention. We can hope that maybe the final completion of the Syrian revolt will lead to something better than Assad, although for now it remains only a hope.

But the price has been very, very high: US politics has been corrupted, and the elites that supported the interventions discredited, leading to the rise of Trump and other angry outsiders. Across the region, hundreds of thousands of deaths. The Arab Spring began with high hopes but spawned mostly reaction and repression, with the Egyptian middle classes hurriedly abandoning their own call for democracy. 

After Bush we got Obama, who continued the Afghan war for other reasons. He campaigned as a moderate who opposed, not all wars, but only "dumb wars," so it was crucial to his positioning that while he withdrew from Iraq he supported trying to tame Afghanistan. It was his administration that saw most of the lies and rose-tinged forecasts that so annoy Sopko.

So it was not until Trump that we had a president willing to abandon Afghanistan, and it may be (opinions differ on this) that he accepted an absurdly long withdrawal timeline from the Pentagon because he wanted to put anything that smacked of defeat off until after the 2020 election. So it was left to Biden to bite the bullet.

Linsk 3 January 2024

Eye Idols from Bronze Age Syria

The Japanese myth of Amaterasu and the founding of the imperial dynasty is bonkers.

Kevin Drum has some data on AI progress in recent years: performance here, the cost of training here, and business use here. 

Retired GOP congressman expects a "shit show" in the next session.

Is the expansion of the universe really accelerating? Major new paper says no. (News article, 7-minute video, original paper)

Weird article about "the neural conundrum behind the slowness of human behavior. The information throughput of a human being is about 10 bits/s. In comparison, our sensory systems gather data at ~10^9 bits/s." Via Marginal Revolution.

A lot was made at the time over how much the "investors" in Bernie Madoff's ponzi scheme lost, but in the end about 90% of the money was recovered. All the huge numbers about tens of billions is losses come from using as the baseline, not the amount paid in, but the amount that Madoff promised. About $1.7 billion of the recovered money came in a settlement paid by JPMorgan Chase, after a court found they knew about the scheme and did not alert authorities. I looked into this after reading a novel (The Glass Hotel by Emily Saint John Mandel) in which a clone of Madoff features prominently; until then Madoff had vanished from my consciousness.

Excellent Scott Siskind piece on H1N5 flu. His conclusion is that the chance of a dangerous pandemic in the next year is not much more than usual.

With the use of coins in decline, Britain's Royal Mint is shifting its focus to recycling circuit boards and other electronic parts, making the recovered gold into jewelry. (NY Times, Royal Mint, BBC) Awesome idea, but I wonder about the economics.

New paper estimates productivity growth in England was zero until 1600 but then averaged 2% across the 1600s and 1700s. A variety of studies are pointing to the 1600s – a great era of globalization and trade – as the period when modern economic growth began. Change was not as rapid as in the 1800s, when productivity growth averaged 4%, but it was real and significant. People noticed, and by the 1690s we had early "economists" writing about growth and rising wealth.

The real-life pet detective.

Americans can't stop fighting about the health effects of alcohol. Heavy drinking is bad for you. But light to moderate drinking has complex effects, apparently causing some cancers (although this all but impossible to prove) but reducing deaths from heart disease (although nobody knows if that is a chemical effect of alcohol or just because people who drink moderately have happier lives and more friends). Scolds who hate fun are determined to prove that drinking, like all vices, is inherently bad, and want the government to weigh in heavily against it, but the science does not support that. (NY Times)

Virginia man arrested with a cache of pipe bombs was into an online thing called "No Lives Matter," which seems to the the nihilist endpoint of ring-wing apocalypticism. (NY Times, Homeland Security bulletin) One of their most widely circulated posts says, "Societal standards should not exist. They are to be crushed by any means possible." But the song by Tom MacDonald gets a lot more Google hits.

The hard problem of long-term digital storage. I recently tried to recover something 15-years-old from an "archival" cd and it was hopelessly corrupted.

Daniel Defoe's Tour of Britain.

US military is worried that the intensity of battlefield drones will prevent helicopter evacuation of wounded soldiers and lead to more deaths in future wars.

Speaking of which, Ukraine claims its naval drones shot down two Russian helicopters.

Past post from 2013 that seems relevant, Nelson Mandela, George Washington, and Timothy McVeigh.