Robert R. Reilly on the nature of Saudi power

I am currently reading The Closing of the Muslim Mind, by Robert R. Reilly, with a view to reviewing it for Samizdata. Brilliant. For as long as I’ve been reading this book, finishing reading it has been my number one concern. Shoving up brilliant stuff here has … not. Some Facebook friends of mine have been choosing the books that have most influenced their thinking, and this book looks like it will be added to my list.

Here is a typically illuminating paragraph from this book (on page 144 of my paperback edition – which I am happy to note is towards the end of it):

The enormous influence of Saudi Arabia today in the Muslim world is often thought by Westerners to be almost completely due to its oil wealth – petro-Islam. However, this discounts the fact that many Muslims, including in countries like Egypt, which are traditionally opposed to Saudi Arabia, see this wealth as a direct gift from Allah. Can it be only an accident that these treasures are under the sands of this particular country? No, they must be there as a reward to the Saudis for following the true path. Why else would the oil be there? – a question that has to be answered not by geologists, but within the understanding that God has directly placed the oil there as He directly does all things. The presence of petroleum gives credence to the Saudi claim that its Wahhabi form of Islam is the legitimate one. It is because of the oil that other Muslims are willing to give this claim consideration. This is why Wahhabism has spread so significantly, even in parts of the world like Indonesia that would seem, from their cultural backgrounds, to have little sympathy with its radical literalism. Therefore, it is not only through Saudi oil largess but also because of where the oil is that Wahhabism enjoys such prominence.

For the sort of Muslim Reilly is writing about (and that’s a hell of a lot of them), what we in the West refer to as “reality” is continuously created by Allah, in a succession of miraculous whims. Even to study the laws of nature is to presume to place limits on what Allah might choose to do, and is accordingly a blasphemy. Whatever happens was done by Allah, and is accordingly right. Might is right.

And if the Saudis have most of the financial clout in the Muslim world, that means Allah must be on their side.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Another go at Bartok – and two competitions

I was summoned to Chateau Samizdata (which is in South Kensington these days) for lunch today, which meant that when I walked past that Bartok statue at lunchtime today, the light was behind me, rather than in front of me and behind Bartok.

So I was able to have another go at photoing him:

But with rather mixed results. The change in lighting made a lot less difference than I had been hoping.

I spent the late afternoon and the evening (a) doing stuff at home, and (b) keeping track of the climaxes of two competitions, this one, which was won by pianist Eric Lu, and this one, which was won by the Worcestershire cricket team. Which means Worcestershire have had a mixed season, having also been relegated from Division One of the County Championship. It was like them winning the FA cup but also getting relegated from the Premier League. However, getting relegated from Division One of the Country Championship makes far less financial difference than dropping out of the Premier League. So Worcester are probably now pretty happy. Counties doing well in one format but badly in another is quite frequent. They all say that, of course, they want to win everything. But in reality, they prioritise this and neglect that.

Tonight, Radio 3 played the last two Leeds Piano Competition concerto performances, the three others having been played last night. I will be checking out the performance of Beethoven 1 from last night, because, while they were waiting for them to pick the various prize winners, they played part of a chamber music performance by the guy who had played Beethoven 1, which sounded excellent. Also, this guy came second in the overall competition, so he’s pretty good.

Tonight’s Beethoven 4, from winner Lu, was excellent, albeit somewhat more subdued than I think Beethoven had in mind when he composed this piece. Lu’s was a very “private” performance of what was actually, I think, written as a rather public piece (about private feelings). But that’s very much a matter of (my) opinion. Given what Lu was doing, he did it very well. Besides which, who would want all concerto performances to sound the same? Beethoven might have been surprised by Lu’s delicate and subtle performance, but that doesn’t mean he’d have minded. On the contrary, he would probably be amazed and delighted that people were still playing the thing at all.

Tonight’s other concerto, the Schumann, was similar in artistic intention to Lu’s Beethoven 4, but to my ear it involved a few too many wrong notes. The Radio 3 commentators didn’t mention these wrong notes, but I don’t think I imagined them. I think they chose to ignore them.

Bartok wrote three Piano Concertos, each very fine in their contrasting ways. None of these were played in the final of the Leeds Piano Competition.

LATER: I’ve just been listening to another county game, just started on Sept 18th, and I realise that the piece I linked to about Worcester getting relegated was dated 2015. Theoretically, they could still avoid relegation this year. But they’re not going to. They’ve just been bowled out for 94 by Essex, and they are about thirty points shy of safety, with Yorks and Lancs both having to cock it up big time for them to escape. As it is, Worcs and Lancs both look doomed to the trop. But, in theory, Worcs are still in with a chance of avoiding this.

I am very sorry to have misled you, in the unlikely event that I did, and that you care.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

A noisy anteater

Last Sunday morning I was trying to have a good old lie-in, but instead I got woken up early by a giant anteater.

Yes. Having been woken up, I looked out my window towards where all the din seemed to be coming from, and this was the scene I beheld:

At first I thought the culprit might be that refuse lorry in the foreground, but it soon because clear that the noise had been coming from that red lorry with the crane-like thing attached to it.

Let’s move in closer:

By the time this photo had been photoed, the big red lorry had lifted its nozzle out of that hole in the pavement on the right there, which I subsequently learned had been dug in connection with electric cables. Evidently there was muck in the hole which needed to be got out, in a hurry. Sometimes technology really sucks.

I was intrigued, and at first greatly puzzled, by picture on the side of the red lorry, and it took me quite a while to work it out. It is a giant anteater. It looks like at least two creatures, pointing in opposite directions, but the “other creature” is, or so I believe, the giant anteater’s giant tail. That tail being a lot of what makes the anteater a giant.

Wikipedia tells us what an actual giant anteater looks like:

I can see why an anteater would have a very long nose. But why the enormous tail? Balance, perhaps? The answer offered here says balance, and also maybe to cover itself when sleeping. It seems to be mixed up with the anteater having a low body temperature, the tail being there partly to keep heat out. So, perhaps also some kind of fan? I couldn’t find a confident answer.

As for the gizmo deployed at the back of the lorry, note how this time, a bendy arm with a tube in it does make use of a bendy tube, unlike that machine for squirting concrete that I mentioned here earlier. Guess: not so much pressure this time, not least because the material itself being sucked up (this time) is not so heavy and bulky. Some pressure, but not so much.

That phone number of the side of the lorry got me to the enterprise that supplied this equipment. But follow that link and you’ll find no mention of any red lorries with anteaters on the side. By which I mean, I didn’t.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Street lamp in front of crane

Today I was in Bermondsey, seeing a man about a blog, and instead of going straight home again, I got out at Southwark and walked to Parliament Square. Then I tubed to Victoria, and did some quite strenuous shopping. All that, plus I am getting old. So, I am now knackered, and am in need of an early night..

Here, picked out almost at random, is a photo I took on my travels, in Lower Marsh.

When photoing this photo, I of course had no idea that part of the blurry crane in the background would be visible, less blurrily, at a weird angle, in the street lamp. Like I always say, my camera has better eyesight than I do, and what with me (see above) getting old, that gap has been growing.

London street lamps are rather fine, I think. In the middle of London. Not so sure about the outskirts.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

The man from Glint

Earlier this evening, I attended a fascinating Libertarian Home talk given by Jason Cozens, one of the founders and bosses of Glint. (Scroll down there a bit, and I think you will see why I think I smell yet another two-man team.) Glint enables those who think that currency ought to be gold-backed to get there hands on just such a currency, thereby personally reversing, as it were, the decision by President Nixon, in 1971, to take the US dollar off the gold standard.

This talk was excellent, and was clearly saturated in Austrianism. In the highly unlikely event that Jason Cozens has not met up with a conversed with Detlev Schlichter, he should.

Here is a photo I took of Mr Cozens waving an ancient gold coin from Roman era Britain, which he had come by in some way that he did describe but which I immediately forgot:

And here is that coin, and him holding it, somewhat closer up:

Glint, however, does not deploy actual gold coins. Any gold it arranges for you to own stays in a vault in Switzerland. You get yourself a Glint account, with whatever combination of gold or other popular currencies in it that you want, and you can buy stuff with your card, which looks and works like any other credit/debit card.

Glint would appear to be well worth investigating.

I also found the evening very advantageous on a more personal level. I was able to solidify no less than two future Brian’s Last Fridays talks, and was able to woo two other potential future speakers of great interestingness. Others present seemed equally busy making connections of their own. Which is a lot of the point of such meetings, and which is all part of why I believe in organising a steady stream of them.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Imperfectly hidden scaffolding

If you step outside Sloane Square tube station, and immediately look to your left, you see this:

This is one of those phenomena which doesn’t photo very informatively. By which I mean that if you are there, it is far easier to see what is going on. So let me now tell you what is going on. This is the inside of a new building, but covered up, while they’re completing the building, with a sheet. This sheet has another building painted on it. And there is light coming at the sheet from behind. When what is behind the sheet completely blocks out light, we see the picture on the surface of the sheet. But when light comes at us from beyond the sheet, the picture on the sheet is overwhelmed, and we observe either light, or any shapes (in this case steel structure and scaffolding) in silhouette.

What I like about this effect is both its temporariness, and the fact that it ends up looking so much more interesting that it was intended to look. The idea was that we would only see the picture on the sheet. What we actually see is a whole lot more diverting.

Here is another photo I took of the same thing, this time including a bit more context:

It’s a little more clear, in that photo, that there is a picture on a surface as well as all kinds of excitements behind it, on account of the sheet consisting of surfaces at an angle to one another.

Best of all, you can now see that one of the excitements behind the sheet – to be more exact, one of the structures behind the sheet – is a crane.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Battersea rollerblader

If someone is doing this …:

… is it okay to photo them and stick the photo up on the internet, somewhere like here? I feel that it is okay, because, albeit in a very good way, the guy is making something of a spectacle of himself. He is doing something very individual, in public, in a way that people are bound to notice. Therefore, he doesn’t mind them noticing, or he wouldn’t do it. Therefore, he won’t mind me noticing it.

Behind our self-transporter, we can just about make out the towers of Battersea Power Station. Well, I can, because I know that’s what it is, because that’s where I took the above photo, this afternoon. At the time, I was busy photoing the road, because in my opinion it is a very interesting road. For reasons which I may, or may not, explain, here, some other time.

Meanwhile, I miss Transport Blog.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

This actually did get my attention

Photoed by me, this afternoon, just outside Acton Central London Overground station:

Time was when I would have completely trusted a blog posting like this one, which says good things about this enterprise. Now I merely trust this blog posting enough to link to it, and enough to hope that what it says is true. I’ve no reason to think that it isn’t, apart from the fact it’s on the internet.

I know what you’re thinking. How can you be sure that I am for real? I am, but I would say that, wouldn’t I?

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

“Attention” that isn’t

This morning, I was half attending to the Test Match. And I was switching back and forth between the Cricinfo page that showed the latest few deliveries with written ball-by-ball commentary (“live”), and the version that showed the complete England scorecard (“scorecard”). I was doing this because I was trying to track how the England stand in progress, being accomplished by Jos Buttler and Stuart Broad, compared to other stands in the innings, and also how Buttler’s personal score compared to other personal scores in the England innings. In the end, the Buttler/Broad stand was the biggest in the England innings, and Buttler was the top individual England scorer. Following a terrible evening yesterday, England had a very good morning this morning.

But this is not a posting only about cricket, it is mostly a posting about internet advertising, and about what I suspect is deliberate deception in the matter of how effective internet advertising actually is.

I know, I know, if I’m not paying, I’m not watching the product; I am the product. But I suspect that I, the product, am being lied about.

Every time I performed one of the above switches, from the “live” version of the Cricinfo test match page to the “scorecard” version, a noisy video advert cranked itself up at my new destination. Silencing such video adverts can be difficult. You tell them to shut up but they just ignore you and carry on shouting, like they own the site, which they sort of do. However, I have discovered a way to silence these adverts. Click on them, and immediately close the window that this click opens. The advert feels that its job is done, and it stops shouting. Its job is to get “clicks” to whatever the hell it was advertising.

But what were my clicks? Were they attempts to learn more about the product in question. No. They were simply me getting the advert to shut the hell up. I paid no attention to the adverts.

How many others have discovered this trick? I can’t be the only one. So, you stick your annoying advert on a popular website. People click on the advert, close the window as soon as it opens, but the people who placed this advert assure the purveyor of the product that the advert got “attention”, from me and all the others who clicked purely to shut the advert up. Because, look how many people clicked on the noisy bloody advert! I did it half a dozen times for several different adverts, every time I switched from one version of that Cricinfo page to the other, which I did a lot. That’s a lot of attention!

No it isn’t. It is a small amount of contempt, for bad-mannered tradesmen shouting at me in my kitchen.

What’s that you say? I’m a libertarian? Yes I am. So, why am I complaining about capitalism?

Try reading my piece for Samizdata entitled “The overheating Samsung S24F356 – and thoughts about why there are so many complaints about capitalism“.

That link there hasn’t been shouting at you all the time you’ve been reading this posting. This is a link with manners. You can follow this link, in silence. Or you can ignore it, in silence. You are welcome.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

A concrete pump?

Earlier in the week, on my way to St James’s Park tube, and again on my way back home from St James’s Park tube, I photoed what I described to Google as a “concrete pump”.

This concrete pump was helping to build a clutch of apartment blocks where the old New Scotland Yard used to be, before New Scotland Yard moved to a new New Scotland Yard, back where the original Scotland Yard used once to be.

I got enough images to suggest that a “concrete pump” is indeed what this extraordinary contraption is, but not enough to suggest that I had named the contraption correctly, using the preferred words of those who deploy it.

Nevertheless, enjoy. I did, especially the close-ups of the joints.

All this, just to be able to squirt concrete from a lorry into a hole. (I’m guessing, from the invisibility of building action behind all the solid fences, that his concrete was for the foundations. This being where concrete, as opposed to steel on its own, still seems to be essential.) And with a big long arm like that one, with all its joints, I’m guessing it can reach all sorts of complicated and out-of-the-way spots. (If you guess that I do a lot of guessing when I see something like this, then you guess right.)

There must be a reason why they don’t use a flexible tube, but have to make do with a rigid tube, but with the occasional rotating joint. So elaborate are those joints that they end up looking biological rather than merely mechanical. So, as with the previous posting, also about technology rather than biology, I have categorised this posting as, among other things, “other creatures”. (I’ve also added “sculpture” to the category list. Does regular sculpture come any better than this? Sometimes maybe, but not very often.)

The concrete itself must be a marvel of blending and general wonderfulness. Able to travel as a near-liquid along this elaborate pipe, under (guess) great pressure (another guess: that’s why the pipe has to be made of metal rather than of something bendier), but then able, at exactly the right time, to solidify in the deep cylindrical holes into which it is squirted. At which point it has to stay solid for ever. (Is something added, at the critical moment, to make it solidify?)

There is much that is very wrong with the world. This sort of stuff is what is very right with the world.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog