Ethel the Blog

There are three monstrous compilations of the records of early travelers and explorers available via Google Books.  Starting from the earliest, the first is Richard Hakluyt’s “The principall navigations, voyages, traffiques, and discoveries of the English nation, made by sea or over-land to the remote and farthest distant quarters of the earth at any time within the compasse of these 1600 years.”  Hakluyt (1552-1616) was an Englishman who become interested in such things while at Oxford.  He found and read all he could on the topic, and after 10 years began to publish what he had found.  The first version of his monsterpiece was pubished in 1582 in 3 volumes, and the final 12-volume version was published under the auspices of the Hakluyt Society - founded in 1846 to perpetuate the labors of Hakluyt and his spiritual successors - in 1903-1905.  All 12 volumes are currently available in PDF format.

The second of the compilations was put together by Samuel Purchas, a near contemporary of Hakluyt’s who based it in part on manuscripts left by Hakluyt and further included explorations of all nations.  All 20 volumes of Purchas’s “Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes, Contayning a History of the World in Sea Voyages and Land Travells by Englishmen and others” are also available in PDF format.

The last of the great compilations was John Pinkerton’s “General collection of the best and most interesting voyages and travels in all parts of the world, many of which are now first translated into English“, which was first published from 1808-1814.  Of the 17 volumes in this series, all are available except for nos. 1 and 9.  Pinkerton, an unexploded Scotsman, compiled the largest collection to that date which includes rare voyages not included in the earlier collections.

Unfortunately, the least useful feature of all three series is the ancillary material, and by “least useful” I mean that it’s for the most part nonexistent.  If I ever get a round tuit (ho ho), I’ll add all three to my obscure books listing along with tables of contents.

Addendum:  Well, we’re part of the way there.

Historically speaking, Afghanistan has been invaded and occupied - at least temporarily - by every superpower in history.  They’ve learned a valuable lesson that various radical groups in the US never quite figured out in the 1960s:  You don’t fight the power, you game it - at least if you value breathing more than martyrdom.  In this context, it’s fairly easy to figure out the reality concerning claims that 100,000 or more Afghan troops have been trained and are battle-ready.  Ann Jones asks the simple question “Where are they?” and supplies some explanations for their ephemeral nature.

What is there to show for all this remarkably expensive training? Although in Washington they may talk about the 90,000 soldiers in the Afghan National Army, no one has reported actually seeing such an army anywhere in Afghanistan. When 4,000 U.S. Marines were sent into Helmand Province in July to take on the Taliban in what is considered one of its strongholds, accompanying them were only about 600 Afghan security forces, some of whom were police. Why, you might ask, didn’t the ANA, 90,000 strong after eight years of training and mentoring, handle Helmand on its own? No explanation has been offered. American and NATO officers often complain that Afghan army units are simply not ready to “operate independently,” but no one ever speaks to the simple question: Where are they?

My educated guess is that such an army simply does not exist. It may well be true that Afghan men have gone through some version of “Basic Warrior Training” 90,000 times or more. When I was teaching in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2006, I knew men who repeatedly went through ANA training to get the promised Kalashnikov and the pay. Then they went home for a while and often returned some weeks later to enlist again under a different name.

In a country where 40% of men are unemployed, joining the ANA for 10 weeks is the best game in town. It relieves the poverty of many families every time the man of the family goes back to basic training, but it’s a needlessly complicated way to unintentionally deliver such minimal humanitarian aid. Some of these circulating soldiers are aging former mujahidin — the Islamist fundamentalists the U.S. once paid to fight the Soviets — and many are undoubtedly Taliban.

American trainers have taken careful note of the fact that, when ANA soldiers were given leave after basic training to return home with their pay, they generally didn’t come back. To foil paycheck scams and decrease soaring rates of desertion, they recently devised a money-transfer system that allows the soldiers to send pay home without ever leaving their base. That sounds like a good idea, but like many expensive American solutions to Afghan problems, it misses the point. It’s not just the money the soldier wants to transfer home, it’s himself as well.

Earlier this year, the U.S. training program became slightly more compelling with the introduction of a U.S.-made weapon, the M-16 rifle, which was phased in over four months as a replacement for the venerable Kalashnikov. Even U.S. trainers admit that, in Afghanistan, the Kalashnikov is actually the superior weapon. Light and accurate, it requires no cleaning even in the dust of the high desert, and every man and boy already knows it well. The strange and sensitive M-16, on the other hand, may be more accurate at slightly greater distances, but only if a soldier can keep it clean, while managing to adjust and readjust its notoriously sensitive sights. The struggling soldiers of the ANA may not ace that test, but now that the U.S. military has generously passed on its old M-16s to Afghans, it can buy new ones at taxpayer expense, a prospect certain to gladden the heart of any arms manufacturer. (Incidentally, thanks must go to the Illinois National Guard for risking their lives to make possible such handsome corporate profits.)

The M-16s that don’t work nearly as well as the Kalashnikovs in Afghanistan will most likely be sold on the black market, adding the underground weapons suppliers to those enjoying the win-win synergies here.

Satyajit Das provides a couple of quotes for the day.  First, in regards to the derivatives scammers, er, industry we have:

The industry will argue for self-regulation, which bears the same relationship to regulation that self importance does to importance.

and then a heartwarming anecdote about investment bankers:

Warren Buffet once described bankers in the following terms: “Wall Street never voluntarily abandons a highly profitable field. Years ago… a fellow down on Wall Street…was talking about the evils of drugs…he ranted on for 15 or 20 minutes to a small crowd…then…he said: “Do you have any questions?” One bright investment banking type said to him: “yeah, who makes the needles?

Three weeks and a day into a “sure, we’ll get all this done in a week or so” job, we can see a photon or two from the other end of the tunnel.  Sure, the contractor’s subcontractor showed up on Friday after 9 days of complete inaction without informing us and starting putting the fairly toxic sealer on the floor with the dogs in the house, after I’d told the the contractor 9 times - yes, I kept count - that it was very important that we be told when the toxic stuff was going to be applied so we could get the dogs out of the house.  And the subcontractor is also apparently a pathological liar.  Around noon yesterday, he applied what he said was the first coat of supposedly three acrylic finish coats, and said they were going to put two more on at 2-3 hour intervals.  We left and come back in about three hours, and there was no sign of him until he returned this morning.  I asked him how many more coats he had applied yesterday.  “Oh, this one we’re putting on is the fourth.”  I told him when we’d returned yesterday and that we’d not seen him the rest of the day, and asked when the supposed second and third coats were applied.  “Oh, we came by last night and put on one of them.”  I carefully explained how we’d been there last night and had seen nobody all evening.  “Oh, we put two on yesterday morning.”  I mentioned how he’d told me the day before that the coat applied around noon was the first one.  “Oh, the one we’re putting on now is the fourth one.”  At this point I just left rather than deal further with this spiritual descendant of Chico Marx, before he started asking me if I had two twenties for a ten.  I’d actually seen two coats applied, and will check again at noon when they’ll supposedly be installing the granite countertops after the “fourth” coat has dried.

Those would be the granite countertops that the contractor had said would be installed in the first couple of days back when the job started in the Cretaceous Era - when the granite was still being formed via natural geological processes.  Another of the things Chico had told me yesterday - right after I’d barely escaped buying the Brooklyn Bridge from him - was that after they’d applied all the acrylic coats to the floor they’d come in and install the countertops, working late into the evening if they had to.  That was the point at which I began to suspect that I was slipping into a black-and-white comedy film from the 1930s, and started looking around to see if someone wearing a fright wig and carrying a bicycle horn was roaming around looking for the silverware.

At this point anger is futile and, to be blunt, I’m just too bloody tired to work up a proper homicidal rage.  I’ll be deliriously happy if the Marx Brothers are out and finished by Thanksgiving.