Europe and West Asia, Al in Arabic means House of.

The Kaaba. August 2018 - photo by Ali Wahid

    One of the main architects behind the current borders in Middle Eastern countries is a man called Sir Percy Zachariah Cox. He was a Major-General in the British Indian Army, he had a bunch of other titles, he was skinny and probably very bright, not big on rugby, more of a cricket and chess man and he died in 1937 a year before Oil was discovered in Saudi Arabia.

   In 1899 Percy was appointed Political Agent and Consul at Muscat and Oman, he later he became Acting British Consul for this ancient part of the human world that had cleverly avoided being incorporated into the Ottoman Empire, but which had remained within the sphere of Ottoman influence for several hundreds of years. It was an area that included The Nedj which is now part of Saudi Arabia.

    In 1899, when Percy Cox arrived in Muscat there was a major quarrel between the British, the French and the Arabs, a quarrel which amongst other things included the slave trade.

  The French had leased coastal land from the Sultan of Oman so they could maintain a coaling station for French merchantmen and the French Navy. The British had traditional problems with French merchantmen and the French Navy, they wanted the French out of the Indian Ocean, as far away from the Indian Subcontinent as possible, but mostly the British wanted to stop the slave traders from ruining British chances of controlling all of Eastern Africa.

   Unfortunately over the years Muscat and Oman had made good money trading slaves, ivory, rhino horns and so on. The French, in their territorial ambitions, had no real problems with a trade that had enabled the Sultans of Muscat to maintain a substantial empire that followed the Indian Ocean all the way down to the Cape of Good Hope, instead they had their eye on the Cradle of Civilization, up there were the Tigris and Euphrates made for rich and fertile lands.  And what with their Strait of Hormuz, for the French friendly relations with Muscat and Oman was rather critical.

   One of the problems north of Oman is and was called The Nedj. It was a loose leaf collection of warring clans  and families who hadn't been able to get their minds around the idea that world was divided between The British, The French, the Portuguese, the Germans, the Russians, the Ottomans, apparently the Omanis and eventually the United States.

   Sultans of Muscat had been obliged for centuries to keep an eye on the Nedj, do everything that could to make quite sure that The Nedj was in constant state of turmoil, because when those people up there weren't in a constant state of turmoil, they had this aggravating habit of trying to take the Sultan's palace and his income, which included ship building and piracy, away from him.

    A major player in the Nedj were the Banu Hanifa clans. Long before Islam they had founded the city Riyadh.  In around 1720 they'd formed a mutually advantageous alliance with the followers of man called Abd al-Wahhab, he was a leader, an Imam, an activist, a scholar and a very strict medieval type religious cult leader. At times Banu Hanifa and their Wahhabi sect dominated Riyadh, when they did they presented a threat to Muscat and Omen. At other times they were busy with other things. They'd been beaten up by the Ottoman to keep them in their place, and they weren't the only fierce clan in the mostly empty lands of Arabia who laid claim to the walled city of Riyadh.

  Percy Cox with very little help from the French or the Sultan of Oman decided that it was time to make some sort of sense of The Nedj by give it what some might call a Land Law that was properly mapped out rather than constantly quarreled over depending on whim. It was a game the Ottoman's were good at playing.  Riyadh away from the Banu Hanifa, give it to someone more trusted, more easily bribed and less threatening.

   Percy, had become  Pro-Consul for the entire Middle East, a role he played from 1904 until 1919. He had to learn. To help him, an archaeologist called Gertrude Bell who had traveled widely in Arabia had provided him with detailed lists of Arabian clans, territories and alliances she'd gathered herself as well as from Colonel, then later Aircraftman, TE Laurence and a chap called Captain William H.I. Shakespear.

   Amongst his cadre of Political Officers Percy had a man called Jack Philby, his full name was Harry St. John Philby and he was the father of Kim Philby, a Cambridge man who spied for the Russians and died in Moscow in 1988. 

   Captain William H.I. Shakespear was the first British Political Agent to make contact with a Son of Saud called Abdulaziz II, who was leader of the Al Saud people, they'd recently been knocked around a little by one or other of their many enemies and they were feeling vengeful. He was military advisor to the Al Saud from 1910 to 1915 when he was killed at the Battle of Jarrab which was fought between the British supported Al Saud and the Ottoman supported, traditional enemies of the House of Saud, the House of Rashid.

    The Ottomans were gone, Britain and France were carving up the Middle East, the USA was sniffing around, this presented  was a very new set of problems for Arabia. For Abdulaziz it was a little difficult to know what to do in this new, yet very familiar, set of circumstances. He wanted security and peace, and didn't want to have to make war on Britain or France.

    With Shakespear dead Abdulaziz adopted Jack Philby as an advisor to help with his European Problem.  Philby pointed out the boundary lines Cox, in his attempts to make Land Law across the Arabian Peninsular, had carefully put in place and had partially negotiated. Philby advised utilizing the political and religious alliance his Al Saud had had with followers of Wahhabi since the 1740's, get them to do the dirty work, carve out the traditional source of tribulation the Nedj all the way to the Red Sea, south to the border with Omen and Muscat, might as well take a rational control of Mecca and promise one of the five pillars of the Islamic Faith to all who were physically, emotionally and financially able to perform the Hajj.

    After many battles, by the time oil was discovered in 1938, the Al Saud dominated the Nedj and Abdulaziz II became the first king, or paramount chief of Saudi Arabia. 

Free Markets and a well funded narrative?

Sunset

    Let's have a look at the new world with a few thoughts on 'Pricing Surveillance.' 

   What is pricing surveillance? 

   "It's when something like a supermarket uses personal data, browsing history, and AI algorithms to calculate your maximum 'willingness to pay' and then charges different people different prices for the exact same product or service."

   At the root of it is that moment or two when a carefree and happy gardener has to decide how much to charge a customer for something like weeding an ill-considered and tasteless perennial border that's not getting enough sun.

   Don't get me wrong unindentured day laborers have been floating this boat of pricing surveillance since the end of Guild System which eventually occurred in the last days of The Enlightenment during the dawn of an Industrial Revolution which presaged an era of denial the leisured have called The Romantic Age.

   What do the property owners look like, does the missus seem like a person who makes a good cup of tea, appreciates a chocolate biscuit and is happy with the mister. Does the mister work. Does he mow the lawn or does she. Does anybody in the household know how to weed or trim hedges. If you're invited inside do you feel obliged to take off your boots.... 

  There's a whole list which is built over time through the personal experience, often bitter, of being a jobbing gardener, and it's not just about guessing from the condition of their footwear what a property owner can afford to pay. It has much more to do with what psychologists call 'deservingness' because they can't bring themselves to call it 'tone.' 

    Once 'tone' is established, you might think the next issue is "How badly do I need this work?" You'd be wrong! The next question is "How much do they want me to do this work and how much do I want this work?"

    At the moment, when you give that calculation to an algorithm there are invisibles for which the algorithm has no data. 

    

   

   

For the Ages

Evening Aster

    By most accounts, The Enlightenment presented new ways of thinking about what and who we are. In the tradition of these things this new way of thinking eventually wandered into a period referred to as The Romantic Age.

   You can mark the beginning of The Romantic Age with the French Revolution and you can think of The Romantic Age as achieving a conclusion, in and around 1837 when the leisured classes concluded that reason wasn't all bad as long as it remained self conscious when it looked itself in the mirror and actually did something about the sewers.

   1837 was the year an 18 year old Queen Victoria was crowned, the same year that Michigan became a state, there were pro-slavery riots in Illinois, it was the year Dickens published his Oliver Twist, around the world a standing army had become increasingly important and there was redemption to be had by teaching supply and demand curves to heathen savages in faraway places so they could better understand the fundamentals of Calvin's Economic theories. 

   The Roman Empire and the Roman Republic regularly struggled with the phenomena of people moving away from using coin of a realm as the means of exchange. Gold by weight, silver by weight, something that kept its value was fine, but something the value of which was entirely reliant on trust wasn't big on the list. The Roman Denarius was an almost pure silver coin about the size of a US cent. The Greek equivalent was the Drachma and back in the days of Pythagoras, long before it became the Euro it was a bit smaller than a US cent. But the point is even when the coin had an intrinsic value, as in silver or gold, you can't make an omelet out of silver or gold.

     Calvin's own position was culled from the biblical texts. 'Earthly Riches' he'd concluded were nothing but smoke, the real do-do was living a life devoted to the goodness of god as explored in the scriptures. Nor did he approve of an element running through some of the texts that suggested usury was a cardinal sin, a combination of greed, gluttony, wrath and sloth. Not at all! If you lend money to someone, he claimed, and that someone made billions of doubloons on the basis of borrowing money from you it was only right that he send some of that profit your way. In short Calvin remains the Patron Saint of Modern Banking.

   In our current time, as truth becomes a brand, our species has achieved what may be the beginning of a new age. Future historians, if there are any, might look to the past see Sumerian invoices on a clay tablet, find someone like Liu Hui who calculated a value for pi in the 3rd Century AD or Shiing-Shen Chern with a wonderful name, possibly Turin or the triumvirate of Hinton, LeCun and Bengio which sound like the stops on a subway train.

   On the day mathematics died as our new age progresses our species will slowly begin to relearn lessons of the enlightenment one of which was the sad consequence of concentrating knowledge into fewer and fewer hands. 

As with the Hula Hoop, this too shall pass

Frog on Siding

     You can try calling them empire building fascists addicted to CapEx, but if you want to mightily piss off Polling Bros, AI Bros, Tech Bros generally, and anyone who believes there's an everything machine that will produce the rapture of a singularity that leaves us people entirely liberated from the toil of chasing sparkly things all you have to do is say Stochastic Parrot and you will be rewarded by the sort of pissed-offed-ness that launches ships. Then just go ahead and add: "by the way, if a bridge collapses, it's not because it's a bridge that's gone rouge ." 

    Like all guilt ridden land grabbing empire builders a defensive paranoid reaction is the self appraising reflex. The question of course is "why guilt ridden." When you think you're perfect, a criticism hurts and the rule is to build a narrative based, not on well researched data that more likely demonstrates your imperfections, but on the sort of massive lie that's so impossible the world has to be flat and full of people who just don't understand and never will know what intelligence is.

    When I utter it comes from my mind. When you utter it comes from your mind. Language, as it is, includes not only words and impressions of words, it includes an impression of the mind behind the utterance. And there's not a lot you can do about that because that's part of the way we are as beings. An LLM is a probabilistic sieve that is able to gather and utilize data about you, your interests, your political inclinations, and to anything from your side of the exchange it guesses with great accuracy what word comes next.

   When it speaks it has a tone and accent that broadcasts familiar impression and word usage which go toward tickling those receptors inside your mind that suggest personage.