QED cascade

In particle-physics news: QED cascades and the Parton. QED means quantum electrodynamics. Parton has nothing to do with chesty singers of para-country muzak. Anyway both press-releases come (ultimately) from our Department of Energy.

QED cascades are presently thought to be expensive, the purview of large hardon hadron colliders. The Princeton Plasma Physics Lab now has a process which might cut down that cost - firing a laser-beam and an electron-beam toward one another. Quod erat creandum a QED plasma.

As for DoE Dolly: that's Argonne. Richard Feynman pictured the proton travelling at near the speed of light as a beam carrying an infinite number of quarks and gluons moving in the same direction. This was, previously, dealt with by quantum chromo dynamics (QCD). The claim is that this couldn't tell a fast-moving parton from a slow-moving one. But ... weren't they all traveling relativistically?

Argonne's aim is to improve our knowledge of the structure of a relativistic proton. Like we recently got from a (slower) neutron.

I don't pretend to know much of either; except, these seem more engineering advances than anything to do with theory. We do need the engineering, though. The processes cost a lot and our theorists have been hitting their limits of late.

Towing ice

The Sauds appointed one rather enthusiastic prince to see to providing fresh water to Arabia's new Gulf ports. He got sacked and then went about telling people that desalination wasn't going to work, and the Arabs should just ship Antarctic ice up the Indian Ocean to the Gulf instead.

Relevant to my interests, bulk transportation is getting cheaper... but so is desalination.

Anyway that prince's idea is terrible for the Gulf, which is famously shallow. You won't get an iceberg in there. I suppose you could bring it to Muscat, shatter it, and ship the smaller 'bergs but that seems wasteful.

Might it not be practical for western Australia or northern Chile, however...? There are a few islands north of Antarctic that nobody much wants: Kerguelen, Tierra del Fuego, Falklands, South Georgia. Tug the 'bergs there and shelter them over the summer.

When the book is too long

Since it was a work day I didn't read much more of House of Saud than I have already. I did locate some reviews.

And, er... I found the whole book. Google hid this in the third page of its results. I swear I wasn't looking for it - why would I; I have the green thing in my possession. But if you want to follow along, dig in.

It may be that it's worth about that much. I find this review to be a fair one. The tome is, indeed, "undigested" - or, for Simpsons viewers, it is just a bunch of stuff that happened. There are themes that run through the narrative - family being important - but the book doesn't structure itself around them. All this makes the book, at times, a chore to read.

House of Saud is one of those manuscripts one finds here and there - like Suliman Bashear's Arabs and Others - which flat aren't finished as of the time of publication. In Holden's case, I get the impression he'd compiled a Silmarillion which could have spawned the real book, or even books, when he had the time and a patient editor. In Johns, Holden's MS ended up with a flustered editor.

What this book's topics (not to say, "subjects") deserve is a book about Ibn Saud, and then another book about the Saudide family.

Spillover

I had some harsh words against official anti-Judaism in Faisal's kingdom. None of this is to let the Jewish State off the hook. Although we have to nuance this with the anti-Jewish international fanclub... and the Palestinian people, picking the wrong horse since probably AD 635.

I might date the collapse of Lebanon to the middle 1970s, when what was passing for its government decided, or failed to decide, on what to do with the refugees from the south.

Lebanon - being in spirit more French than Arabic at the top - had allowed not just political Palestinians to direct operations, but militants. These were secular militants at the time, since it was the 1970s; they had a lot of help from bored scions of Third World millionaires, like Ilich "Carlos" Sanchez, posing as "Marxists". Rather to the embarrassment of Brezhnev, himself; although I suspect over in China Jiang Qing approved.

Anyway Israel flew over some 'planes, as one does when one is making a point, and went further: bombing the parties doing the plotting. I cannot but see that this point had been made: Lebanon was Israel's b!tch now.

I cannot say what will happen to the "Republic Of China In Exile". Holden and Johns can report on what happened to Lebanon in 1975: the Christians and the Muslims there disagreed what to do with their Palestinians. The Christians, I take it, decided they were the minority in this Pan Arab Unity; and (h/t) "sheltered the Jew". To that end Pierre Gemayel hit the Palestinians, next.

The rest is history. So's Lebanon.

The oil weapon

Another irony is that the Saudiya kept trying to keep oil prices down.

The Hasa side of the Gulf was not the only oilspot in the Arab and Muslim world... but it was the most productive, even given the bottlenecks in port capacity. Algeria and Libya had some oil, and more natural-gas; but if prices were low everyone just bought the crude from Hasa, ran it around Aden (or pipelined to Jeddah), and passed it up the Suez. TL;DR - low prices = Saudi monopoly; high prices = more countries compete. Although, yes; the Sauds get more vig too but - read on.

Over the late 1960s and especially the 1970s, the Muslims and Arabs figured out that they could use the production of oil as a weapon. Although, I suspect, the "weapon" was more an excuse. On the leadup to 1973, newly-liberated Algeria - or so I read - egged on Qaddafi that newly-promoted Libyan colonel to vote its way in the OPEC cartel. The Saudis didn't want to use the weapon, and they had little interest in improving the lot of the Maghreb; but they also didn't want to lose the Hijaz to excitable Moslems. So an embargo it was.

Higher oil prices also meant more money for Saudi, which wasn't the blessing it sounds like. Inflation was a problem given the appalling backwardness of the indigenous economy. All this cash but - what to spend it on? More motive for king Faisal to apply the brakes . . .

Bless those who bless you

The Sauds, as Nejdis, are Children of Adnan. They claim to be from Ishmael. They did not, as of 1975, like the Children of Israel very much despite Moses being one of them. Or maybe that's just the Yahud.

Holden and Johns are full of little ironies, such as the Sauds being - effectively - American clients on the level of 1970s-era Hungary under the Warsaw Pact. By the late 1960s Israel had become also an American client. But King Faisal hated Jews and his (nominal) successor Khaled had been a Schiklgruber fanboi in 1938. (By then I think ol' Addie had abandoned the NSDAP's earlier flirtation with Zionism.)

Faisal seems to have had the right instincts overall, and Fahd and Abdullah certainly did. They needed to put more Saudis in school and they needed to diversify the economy. The Saudi court ensured that their princes got an education, preferably overseas although some universities were founded in Arabia's major cities as well.

As noted earlier today not all Arabians or even Arabian princes could benefit by a foreign education, although many did. So the Sauds brought in foreigners- many, many foreigners. With an exception: they didn't want no Jooos. Which cost them a lot of support from American universities.

What also might have worked is a pipeline from Aqaba through the Negev to independent, Arabic, maybe Lebanon-themed Gaza.

Arabian interests would have been MUCH better served by a Gilbert Achcar perspective - host Jewish-Quarters here and there, and pretend these Jews weren't Zionists. Squaring that with official Hanbalite (or even Shi'ite) kerygma would take some work. I think this has only really been done in the past decade.

The Saud mafia

Still reading House of Saud. Like Jerusalem we get firehosed with information to the extent picking out a specific theme presents a challenge. One impression I get is that (up to King Khaled) the place is a family concern. This has its blessings and its curses.

On the blessing side, the (enormous) family found a clique of princes who could band together, each with his own complementary abilities. This became important under Ibn Saud's successor, confusingly named King Saud, who was terrible at his job (and a sot, and eventually a traitor). The important three are Faisal the ruler, Fahd the diplomat, and Abdullah the - I am unsure exactly, but a moderating force on Fahd, anyway. I grew up when Fahd was king and Abdullah increasingly regent.

On the minus side, sometimes a prince would go abroad and make a scene, like Fahd when he gambled away a chunk of the treasury on the Riviera. And then there was the prince who came right here to the Boulder area, I think, and got busted selling lysergic to the students. Like they needed more excuse to be nutters.

That latter prince ended up an unemployable wanker like so many others; abandoned Islam, and shot king Faisal in the throat. Because it was the King's fault he'd almost caused an international incident by being a drug pusher in a (then) highly conservative state. (Whatever.) There were lots of conspiracy-theories that the CIA or the Joooos did it, or maybe the commies; but Holden and Johns agree that the Saudis had created their own Lee Harvey Oswald, a loser with unfortunately a rural Coloradan's sense of aim.

If this was a political assassination, this one was retarded. Fahd and Abdullah had already agreed upon the royal succession, the rather-undistinguished Khaled. All this because Faisal was already in his seventies and, observably, on his way out, one way or another. His predecessor had resigned, involuntarily; Faisal very-possibly was headed the way of his eventual successor Fahd, retaining a titular crown only.