The 2,500 year old Pazyryk carpet

I have been buying wonderful carpets and recently turned up two antique ones in the loft that I had forgotten about. I therefore was delighted to learn of the oldest carpet in the world, the Pazyryk carpet, which dates from 500 years before Christ. It was found in the grave of a Scythian nobleman in the Altai Mountains in Kazakhstan in 1949. The carpet was frozen in ice and very well preserved. It may have been made by an Armenian, a Persian or a Turk (in that period living far to the east of what is now Turkey).

It is in the Hermitage in St Petersburg. I wonder if the Kazakhs would like it back.

Three American thoughts

I could go on and on about the failings of Shakespeare and the constitution and Stradivarius violins, and at the bottom of this post I do*, but really I shouldn't need to: the Bayesian priors are pretty damning. About half of the people born since 1600 have been born in the past 100 years, but it gets much worse than that. When Shakespeare wrote almost all of Europeans were busy farming, and very few people attended university; few people were even literate--probably as low as about ten million people. By contrast there are now upwards of a billion literate people in the Western sphere. What are the odds that the greatest writer would have been born in 1564? The Bayesian priors aren't very favorable.

Sam Bankman-Fried, a cultural critic better known as the defendant in a trial taking place now where he is accused of defrauding investors of $10 billion.

Friends are the theatres of our actions

'Your reference group determines as much as 95 percent of your success or failure in life.' 

Dr. David McClelland, an American psychologist of whom I had never heard, noted for his "need for achievement" theory.

Your reference group are the people with whom you habitually associate. He found that changing the reference group completely transforms the way someone thinks.

That seems easy, to me, but for most people it is probably not so easy and not so easy for me, really. 

The actor and raconteur Peter Ustinov said that he thought ones friends are not the people with whom one has most in common but the people who got there first.

Has the Russian offensive collapsed? We shall see

Michael Clarke, Director-General of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) from 2007 to 2015, says the Russian offensive has collapsed.

'All they can do is dig in and play for time, trying not to lose. Come the winter, Ukraine will have to assess its military progress and make political judgements from there.'

Who knows the truth?

Have both sides reached a stalemate? Or is Putin about to attack?

What people think will happen seems always linked to whether they think America is to blame in part at least for the invasion, but why is this?

Michael Clarke said last year that anyone who believes in democracy has to side with Ukraine. I believes in democracy and side with Ukraine, but democracy has nothing to with it - were Ukraine a dictatorship it would be just as wrong for Russia to invade Ukraine. Just as it was very wrong for Nehru to conquer Goa.

I heard him speak in Cluj a few years ago at the festival to mark the centenary if Ion Ratiu's birth. Michael Clarke, I mean, not Nehru. 

I liked him, think he is very intelligent though I disagreed with him on much. He said having Trump as president was like having a New York cab driver as a president, which is true but he said it as if it were a bad thing.

I just withdraw my great esteem and respect for him forever I'm afraid. I just read his penultimate tweet in which he says 

'Modern Russian imperialism is no longer just an academic conceit. And this is not just Putin's war; the present Russian elites really will go on to create Catherine's empire if we just step back from Ukraine.'

If one thing is obvious it is that the Russians are in no position to invade more countries. 

(Catherine's empire of course extended  to the Baltic States and eastern Poland.)

Thank God for Eccles

The sainted Eccles was banned by Twitter for a period, like so many conservative Twitter users, but reinstated before Elon Musk bought it. Some great people who survived the old regime have been removed by the new management. 

Ukrainians and Russians are dying for a few miles of territory - and Ukraine faces destruction.

Does Putin want the war to carry on indefinitely, costing Ukrainian lives and American money? 

I think so.

The Ukrainian population is dwindling fast. Six million Ukrainians have left the country, mostly women many of whom will not return but marry abroad. Russia is much bigger and sustain casualties much more easily - in any case many more Ukrainian men have recently died or been wounded. When peace come who will replace the dead, injured and those who fled?

“When both sides’ gains are added up, Russia now controls nearly 200 square miles more territory in Ukraine compared with the start of the year,” the New York Times reports.

At the same time the Wall Street Journal published an article under the headline “The War in Ukraine Is Also a Giant Arms Fair,” subtitled “Arms makers are getting orders for weapons being put to the test on the battlefield.”

Ukraine cannot win, unfortunately, but the war reminds me of Robert Southey's 'The Battle of Blenheim', which he  wrote before he changed from being a radical to a Tory. In his day, the conservatives were the war party. They were not in Dr Johnson's day and the right is divided now.

"It was the English," Kaspar cried,

"Who put the French to rout;

But what they fought each other for,

I could not well make out;

But everybody said," quoth he,

"That 'twas a famous victory.

Who decides what is disinformation?

“Do you know [who] the greatest propagator of disinformation in the history of the world is? The U.S. government.” 

U.S. Senator Rand Paul of Tennessee (Republican), son of Ron Paul, during a May 2022 Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing.

“So, we’re creating at the U.N. a central capacity to monitor and also have the ability to rapidly react when mis- and disinformation and hate speech is not just threatening our people, our operations, but also, the issues and the causes that we’re working on. But also, we’re going to be gearing up our verified initiative around climate change and developing this U.N. code of conduct on information integrity and digital platforms hoping to set global standards that we can all advocate around so we can collectively work for a more humane internet.”

Melissa Fleming, UN undersecretary-general for Global Communications, at the Nobel Prize Summit in May 2023 in a speech called “Healing Our Troubled Information Ecosystem”.

Change and decay in all around I see but Romania is a refuge

In the western world all the institutions have been wrecked since 1990. The churches, the universities, the armed forces, the legal profession, all professions, the civil services. 

The institution that has failed worst of all is the Catholic Church. 

Even if you are an atheist, as devout Jew David Goodman says, this matters because the Catholic Church is essential to European civilisation. 

After the Church, in a very crowded field indeed the institutions that have failed us most are the mainstream media. 

They are now very untrustworthy political actors who consider suppression of the truth necessary because they are trying to save democracies from the people.

Eastern Europe is horribly corrupt. The press and TV is awful here, the politicians too. A colleague told me yesterday that she felt Western Europe would be a better place for her son to grow up because of the corruption. 

I understand why she feels this. Most Romanian parents do. I told her that Romania was a much better place for him.

This morning

Dâmbovița

 

Bucharest early Saturday morning

Interesting results of Pew polls in 2017 about attitudes in Orthodox countries

Is the US being defeated?

"The United States is being defeated in Ukraine.

"One could say that it is facing defeat — or, more starkly, that it is staring defeat in the face. Neither formulation is appropriate, though. The U.S. doesn’t look reality squarely in the eye. It prefers to look at the world through the distorted lenses of its fantasies. It plunges forward on whatever path it’s chosen while averting its eyes from the topography it is trying to traverse. Its sole guiding light is the glow of a distant mirage. That is its lodestone."

John Simpson anecdote

Once met a British oil exec in Lagos. The day before, he’d been to a disastrous party at a top minister’s house. The invitation said ‘Fancy dress compulsory’. He had no fancy dress, but was an enthusiastic scuba diver and by chance had his gear with him. He dressed up, took a cab to the house, rather surprising the driver, squelched up the drive in wet-suit, mask & fins, climbed the steps, and found himself in the midst of the party. All the men were wearing dinner jackets, since in Nigeria ‘fancy dress’ means ‘black tie’. He fled back down the drive and understandably had problems getting a cab to take him back to his hotel.

The Nord Stream attack was the most important event in the Ukrainian war, but journalists are sublimely incurious

I am shocked at how naïf I am. When I read the news articles blaming Russia for having attacked Nord Stream I did not dismiss them out of hand but half believed them. I don't think anyone thinks so now because the assertion is absurd. But instead it is forgotten.

Only two counties can be responsible - America or Ukraine. Fiona Hill thinks it is Ukraine. Seymour Hersh has a source in the US government who says it was the Americans. Vladimir Putin is sure it was them not the Ukrainians and though he tells whopping lies sometimes he also has an unpoliticianly habit of saying what he thinks.

But this is of enormous importance either way. The explosions were the most significant thing that happened so far in this awful war.

Either America destroyed the pipeline which was an attack on a faithful ally or Ukraine did while receiving money and materiel from Germany. The former is much more likely, I think. Either is outrageous and a huge, huge story, but journalists have a sublime lack of curiosity about it. They have no curiosity about most things that matter these days.

The late Queen died one year and 22 days ago

Telegraph obituaries are the best, wonderfully funny and intentionally the nearest modern equivalent to John Aubrey's Brief Lives, one of my favourite books.

I suppose I read the Daily Telegraph obituary of Queen Elizabeth II or did I? I am reading it now anyway and thought these passages were interesting. 

I knew but had forgotten that Prince Philip was born in a house with the same name as many bungalows in the English home counties, Mon Repos. 

He had wanted his children to bear his name, of course, but to be the House of Edinburgh rather than the House of Mountbatten. I regret that this did not happen.

The future Queen Elizabeth II was born at 17 Bruton Street, off Berkeley Square, the five-storey London house of the Duchess of York’s parents, the 14th Earl of Strathmore and his wife. The child’s parents were then living at White Lodge, Richmond Park, a draughty, neglected royal residence without adequate heating or plumbing, too near London for privacy, too far for convenience. Nor was a maternity home thought suitable for the birth of a princess.

Even a generation later her father, who by then had succeeded to the throne as George VI, declined to undergo an operation on which his life depended except in the familiar but far from aseptic rooms of Buckingham Palace. Pressed by doctors and surgeons to change his mind, he declared: “I have never heard of a king going to a hospital before.”

Liquid modernity

I'd heard of Zygmunt Bauman but he hadn't registered with me until today. I have just read two essays talking about him.


This is from Mark Lilla's essay on Ukraine on November 5, 2022, which I read today:

It seems to me that the ultimate source of democratic erosion is the fact that our societies have become more liquid and less solid, to adopt the terms of the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. Bauman’s use of the term “liquid” was an oblique reference to The Communist Manifesto, in which Marx and Engels declared that under capitalism, “all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned”.

Elon Musk

"Like Gulliver, tied down by thousands of of little strings, we lose our freedom one regulation at a time."

"This is how civilizations decline. They quit taking risks. And when they quit taking risks, their arteries harden. Every year there are more referees and fewer doers.” That’s why America could no longer build things like high-speed rail or rockets that go to the moon. “When you’ve had success for too long, you lose the desire to take risks.”

Disinformation comes from above

 

Glenn Greenwald

@ggreenwald

·

Sep 26

Nobody spreads "disinformation" more destructively than US corporate media. Those who said Saddam had WMDs; Putin blackmailed Trump with sex tapes; the Hunter laptop was "Russian disinformation": Have *no credibility* to accuse others of disinformation and conspiracy theories.

Yaroslav Hunka, war criminal or patriot or both?

When German forces invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 they were greeted, understandably, as liberators. 

Millions of Ukrainians, Russians and Balts welcomed them and large numbers of soldiers willingly surrendered to the Germans. 

At the end of the war those in areas occupied by the British and Americans were given to Stalin.

Soviet citizens and emigres from Communism made up as much as a fifth of the German forces in the Soviet Union. About half of them were ethnic Russians. 

From Douglas Murray's wonderful piece about Teen Vogue

'Even earlier this year, in April, Teen Vogue published an article headlined “What ‘Capitalism’ Is And How It Affects People“. It was an explicitly anti-capitalist piece written by a campaigning anti-capitalist called Kim Kelly. On social media, the publication promoted this piece under the heading “Everything you need to know about capitalism”. A surprising claim, and – some might say – presumptuous. After all, is it really possible to write everything that people might need to know about capitalism in one article? And if so would the likely source of such an article really be Teen Vogue?' 

The BBC news is insufferable - and full of spin

John Simpson is shown in a clip every hour on the BBC World Service saying the BBC presents the news with 'absolutely no spin', but tweeted this, which he later deleted. 

Suella Braverman, who went to my college, seems to be a good thing

Twitter, now lamely X, sends me tweets (now Xes) unbidden and always ones expressing establishment views. I was presented with these two at the top of my feed this morning. 

Hugo Rifkind (is also on Threads as @hugorif)

@hugorifkind

Remarkable to hear Braverman say multiculturalism has failed. She's a British Home Secretary descended from Goan Indians from Mauritius and Kenya, married to a Jewish husband, in a government headed by Britain's first Hindu PM. What would successful multiculturalism look like?

Jon Sopel

@jonsopel

·

14h

‘Multiculturalism has failed’ says Suella Braverman who is from Kenyan and Mauritian background and married to a Jew, serving as Home Secretary in a govt led by someone whose family came from India. Wonder what multicultural success looks like…..

The Home Secretary is provoking outrage (allegedly) whereas Lawrence Fox inadvertently threw away his acting career (his agent refused to represent him) when he denied, on the BBC TV programme Question Time, that Britain is a racist country. 'We're a lovely country' were his words and they have not been forgiven. 

Advice

“I think unemployment is the great affliction of man. Even people with jobs are unemployed. In fact, most people with jobs are unemployed.”

Leonard Cohen

“The true secret of happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life.” 

William Morris

"My advice to myself: Be yourself; there is no other you. Don't perform and achieve in order to accept and be happy with yourself. Accept and be happy with yourself and let your performance flow out of that self-acceptance and happiness. Don't hold yourself to an imaginary standard; the standard is you."

Michael Rectenwald

Tidying up my desktop, I found these

 

Rameses II was Ozymandias

The past is another country. They do things differently there.

I refer to 2020-21. I went to Bodrum for a week in October 2020 and stayed for six months to avoid Covid nonsense, but finally and reluctantly returned to Bucharest to get vaccinated. I then had to go to Egypt in May to escape being confined to my Bucharest flat for a fortnight. 

I was a digital nomad but also had great adventures.

Everywhere in Egypt was empty and the guides at the Great Temple of Luxor disconsolately rested against monuments. I took Moses and he showed me round the sights jumping onto a bus or hailing down the most cranky taxi I ever saw. 

He took me of course to the Colosseum of Memnon and the Ramesseum early in the morning, before the heat became unbearable by half past 9. 

I only discovered after I returned that Ozymandias is the Greek version of Rameses and that Shelley wrote his poem after the British Museum announced that it had acquired a large fragment of a statue of Rameses from the Italian Belzoni.

Yanis Varoufakis's new book

"Imagine the following scene straight out of the science fiction storybook. You are beamed into a town full of people going about their business, trading in gadgets, clothes, shoes, books, songs, games and movies. At first everything looks normal. Until you begin to notice something odd. It turns out all the shops, indeed every building, belongs to a chap called Jeff. What’s more, everyone walks down different streets, and sees different stores because everything is intermediated by his algorithm… an algorithm that dances to Jeff’s tune.”

Varoufakis says that Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon, doesn’t produce capital but charges rent, which isn’t capitalism but feudalism. Here he is interviewed by one of my least favourite writers Carol Cadwalladr, who owed a lot of money after lying about Aaron Banks and who repeats the CIA or MI6 line on Assange.