Monthly Archives: August 2016

Forsaking the Wall Street Journal Review section and John Batchelor Show

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It is with a heavy heart that I must forsake the Saturday pleasure of reading the Review section from the Wall Street Journal and listening to the John Batchelor Show on podcast. It is not that they have been corrupting my politics, I’ve been a conservative by temperament since at least high school when I discovered that I had greater appreciation the Hamiltonian side of the Jefferson-Hamilton debates. Rather it is that they have been feeding my bibliomania.

Bibliomania is a psychological disorder first described by Reverend Thomas Frognall Dibdin in 1809. It is that malady that affects men (and it is almost always men) who are unable to pass a book monger without buying another book. There are several problems that arise when one suffers from bibliomania. One is the continual lack of bookshelf space. This adds to another: complaints from the spouse on the clutter of volumes in the house. It can do tremendous damage to the household finances as well. The greatest issue with bibliomania is that the bibliomaniac reads at an arithmetic rate while the volumes accumulate at a geometric rate.

It used to be that book stores were the great enabler of bibliomania. Particular offenders were Chaucer’s in Santa Barbara, Printer’s Inc. in Palo Alto (RIP), Holmes Books in Oakland (RIP). While Chaucer’s is still in business, Darwinian competition from the Internet has replaced book stores with Amazon.com and Books-a-million.com. Furthermore, unless you lived in a great international city like New York, London, or Amsterdam, it was difficult to find a concentration of specialty and antiquarian book vendors. The Internet and the dreaded addall.com search aggregator has opened up the world of specialty book vendors to my bibliomania. I can now find and acquire a copy of Paul Karge’s Raphaim from the late 19th century from a book seller in Amsterdam, and a long out of print volume on epee fencing from Berlin, from the comfort of my living room.

I am inquisitive my nature and am prone towards studying a subject monomaniacally for a period before moving on to another field to study. Walking my book-lined walls is evidence of this. Here are the 40 volumes of Freud, Jung, and Adler. There are the 60 volumes on the Deuteronomistic History (Joshua-2 Kings). Here are the collected works of Ray Bradbury. There are the 16 books by 19th and 20th century explores and hunters in Africa. Here is the complete works of Ian Fleming. There are the 50 volumes on Jewish mysticism.

The WSJ Review section is responsible for my longest running monomania to date. I read a lengthy cover essay by the diplomat Charles Hill on the value of the humanities to the practice of grand strategy, which sent me down a multi-year study of grand strategy based on the reading list and supplementary reading for the Brady Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale, and more recently the acquisition of a Masters degree in International Relations at Troy University.

While engaged in a particular monomania, I am likely to be distracted by book reviews for books outside my area of study. Most recently, I bought a copy of Douglas Starr’s The Kill of Little Shepherds: A True Crime Story and the Birth of Forensic Science based on an interview with the author on the John Batchelor Show. When will I read this book about the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes? Maybe I will get around to reading it a decade from now (that whole arithmetic-geometric rate problem again). Therefore, it has come time to cut ties with the book reviews.

AKP and GM Competing Theologies

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The always iconoclastic Edward Luttwak had an article in Foreign Policy on the Gulen Movement (GM) coup in Turkey. He cites the reason for the failure of the alliance between the AKP and the GM is competing visions of Islam and Islamism.

In 2013 the alliance between the AKP and GM was dissolved. Luttwak accurately describes the theological difference between the AKP and GM is over the issue of pluralism. The GM is theologically pluralist. It is willing to accept that the world is not Sunni Muslim: however much the GM is about raising a “Golden Generation” of exemplars to humanity, it is not about coercion.

Luttwak is perceptive in identifying the class differences between the GM and average AKP supporter. The GM is an educated elite, and served to staff the technocracy of the government and military. The AKP’s base of support has always been the lower-classes/peasantry of Anatolia. There was utility in an alliance with the GM when the AKP came to power, because it was a cadre of educated islamists which could form a functional islamist bureaucracy. He writes:

So when Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) won the 2002 elections, it was able to govern Turkey successfully, remaining in power until now, instead of being forced out or dissolved by military order, as with all previous attempts at forming Islamist governments. It was not Erdogan’s brawlers and provincials who implemented the AKP’s economic policies but rather Gulen’s competent technocrats, achieving good results that dissuaded a military intervention, along with obdurate European pressures in the name of democracy, and the vigilance of disguised Gulenists within the officer corps.

This was doubly true after the secularists were purged from the government and military by the Islamists in the Ergenekon (2008) and Sledgehammer (2010) arrests and trials.

Now that the AKP is fully entrenched in the machineries of government, it is now in the business of purging the heretics of the GM from government, and precipitated a failed coup. Analysis to date has focused on a competition for power between two rival patronage networks. This is the standard explanation of Third World politics, but that is intellectually lazy. Luttwak has gotten to a deeper ideological (theological) understanding. Read the whole thing.

Beware the Fracklog

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If Saudi Arabia intentionally crashed the price of oil in order to strangle the infant U.S. fracking industry, it didn’t work. In the world of Nietzsche: that which does not kill us makes us stronger. It spurred innovation and culled marginal players from the industry rather than killing the industry.

It isn’t entirely clear that the U.S. fracking industry was the prime target, Russia, Saudi Arabia’s adversary in Syria, and Iran, Saudi Arabia’s adversary in control of the Persian Gulf, may have also been targets as well.

As detailed in this article by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, what Saudi Arabia did succeed in doing is destabilizing undercapitalized petro states around the globe like Nigeria and Venezuela. The destruction of offshore production projects may have an effect in the future since they require years to come on line, and supplies may be tight a decade from now, but for now petro states need to beware the fracklog. To quote AE-P:

Worse yet for Opec, consultants Rystad Energy say that 90pc of the 3,900 drilled but uncompleted wells – so-called ‘DUCs’ – are profitable at $50. This implies an overhang of easy supply waiting to hit the market.

If it is true that the majority of the world’s petro states need an oil price above $100/barrel, then political instability is only going to get worse. Imagine the Saudi regime failing or Iran’s perpetual revolution slipping into civil war.