Arabian Reflections, by "JD"

The gentleman you see in the photo came each evening onto our power station construction site in Cairo. He was, I think, our night watchman but his main job seemed to be to deter the stray dogs who would probably try to take up residence. I worked for a Spanish company, the lead engineers were American and the boilers were being installed by an Italian company. When this chap realised I wasn't any of those nationalities but a product of good old Blighty he said "Ahhhh!! General Montgomery, very fine man!" That was followed by a display of rifle drill using that cut-off ranging rod he carried and a snappy salute! He had very little English so I couldn't have any conversation with him but he did that every time he saw me. The stray dogs by the way became a bit of a problem and we received an official 'site instruction' to have them all shot. When the girls in the office in Madrid saw the instruction it was all 'oh no, poor little dogs' but you could never be sure if they carried rabies or not. The dogs that is, not the girls.

Working in Dubai in 1976 there was a local in the office whose job was to make the tea and coffee. Again, no English so I learned the words 'chai' - tea, and 'halib' - milk, 'sukkar' - sugar and, of course, 'shukran' for thank you. One morning he was marching up and down the corridor shouting 'very good, very good' and giving the thumbs up to all and sundry. He had one hand over one eye and motioning with the other hand a sort of semi salute. What?

Eventually somebody managed to translate this strange message. It was the day after the hijacked Air France plane was rescued from Entebbe airport. So the hand over one eye was to indicate Moshe Dayan and the strange motion of the other hand was meant to indicate a plane taking off. He was celebrating the rescue of the passengers by the Israeli special forces. That may be hard to believe given the alleged animosity between Jews and Moslems. But it illustrates what I said in a previous post, that the people in the Middle East are tribal above all else and they admire a strong leader who will be the protector and 'father' to the particular tribe or clan whatever you wish to call it. And they will admire and respect a strong leader in a different tribe, clan, nation etc. It is how they have managed to live in relative harmony over thousands of years. Same for the man in Cairo: he admired and respected Montgomery in the same way that Monty and Rommel had a mutual respect.

The tribal idea was evident in other ways. When I had to wander out to workshops or the markets to source materials I would ask about other suppliers or artisans. Very often the answer would be 'Ah, yes he is my cousin'. The tribe is a family in that way.

Another aspect of the same thing is the hospitality and respect for strangers/visitors which is necessary in a desert climate where travellers will camp at an oasis and differing tribes must get on with each other or perish. And that climate can be very harsh and unforgiving. One venturing away from the coastal area of Doha, Qatar it didn't take long to see how harsh the desert can be. The air is so dry it is impossible to breathe. We were all wrapping our heads in towels with mouths covered over just to prevent sweat evaporating and to have the moisture we breathe out retained to assist with breathing in. If you have ever wondered why Arabs are always fully covered from head to toe in such unbearably hot temperatures, that is why.

It was worth it, by the way. The interior of Qatar is spectacular with the wind-carved limestone rock formations:

http://www.qatarliving.com/sightseeing-tourist-attractions/posts/doha-day-trips-visit-zekreet-beach-fort

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Pacific weather weirding and geopolitical manoeuvering

Reposted from The Polynesian Times:

Papua continues to suffer from the worst drought since the late 1990s; so do Micronesia and the Marshall Islands; a number of Pacific nations have declared a state of emergency.

As the United Nations' OCHA explains, this is related to an El Niño event in the eastern Pacific - warming of surface ocean waters leading to changes in weather patterns across the world. While some areas become drier, others will experience higher rainfall leading to flooding and higher sea levels, the latter especially trying for low-lying islands.

But is it proof of "global warming"?

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has historic data of ocean temperature variations in the El Niño-prone region going back to 1950 (1). The 3-month period from last December to February 2016 saw the highest positive variation from mean, ever (2.2 degrees C).

However, sceptics could say (a) there are always difficulties with methodology in measurements like these and (b) 65 years is not long in geological terms.

It also depends on how you sample and present the information. Typically, the highest average surface ocean temperatures are found in the September-November period:

The pattern is similar to that in the first graph, but what happens if we start looking at years, rather than rolling quarter-years?

This year still looks exceptionally warm. Yet take 5-year averages and the picture changes significantly:

On that basis the current El Niño is merely returning us to the average point. And look at the pattern for rolling 10-year averages:

Taken as a whole, the last decade has actually been cooler! In fact, since the decade 1992-2001 the rolling 10-yearly averages have all been on or below the mean. If reversion to the mean is to be expected, we should be anticipating some more years of above-average temperatures as a correction.

This doesn't at all help the nations now in crisis; but help is coming, and as ever it has political implications. In a Radio New Zealand interview on Friday, Mark Adams of the International Organization for Migration stressed the logistical difficulties of assistance from the Philippines and the USA's west coast; yet a couple of weeks ago the Federated States of Micronesia issued a press release reporting a visit by the Chinese Ambassador, who announced a "10 million RMB worth of equipment specifically to address and mitigate the effects of the drought."

It has been said that the Chinese ideogram for "crisis" is a combination of elements representing "danger" and "opportunity". Even if its meaning is more correctly explained as "critical point," the notion may have relevance for Western geopolitical analysts looking at the Pacific region.
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(1) http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/ensostuff/ensoyears.shtml



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AUSTRALIA: thwarted love

Reposted from The Polynesian Times

Bill Harney on a love triangle in 1940s Arnhem Land:

I have found that native tradition, with its prohibitions and fixed customs, really eliminates those things we know as sin and morals...

Some people tried to break down this code, but it always brought trouble in its wake. I well remember an aboriginal couple who were married 'Christian way in church'. The woman was not aware that the union was a fixed one - not as in the tribe, where the people can become divorced by mutual consent.

The marriage irked her so much that she decided to break it up and take to herself another man of the tribe. Her method was simple and ingenious.

She became the friend of another native man I knew and, unknown to him, used him as a means of arousing her husband to such a jealous madness that he crept upon the man, who he thought was his wife's lover, and killed him with a spear.

I found it all out too late, and even then I could not stop the self-satisfied smile on the real killer's face, as her husband went to jail whilst she returned to her true lover.

"Life Among The Aborigines" by W. E. Harney, Robert Hale Limited (1957) - pp. 15, 31-32

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A novel in which the ego is the hero

Theseus and the Minotaur

Below is a typically profound passage from Santayana. He says we cannot be scientific about our own thought processes and he is right. Worth dwelling on in a world obsessed with narratives.

Philosophy fell into the same snare when in modern times it ceased to be the art of thinking and tried to become that impossible thing, the science of thought.

Thought can be found only by being enacted. I may therefore guide my thoughts according to some prudent rule, and appeal as often as I like to experience for a new starting-point or a controlling perception in my thinking; but I cannot by any possibility make experience or mental discourse at large the object of investigation: it is invisible, it is past, it is nowhere. I can only surmise what it might have been, and rehearse it imaginatively in my own fancy. It is an object of literary psychology.

The whole of British and German philosophy is only literature. In its deepest reaches it simply appeals to what a man says to himself when he surveys his adventures, re-pictures his perspectives, analyses his curious ideas, guesses at their origin, and imagines the varied experience which he would like to possess, cumulative and dramatically unified.

The universe is a novel of which the ego is the hero; and the sweep of the fiction (when the ego is learned and omnivorous) does not contradict its poetic essence. The composition is perhaps pedantic, or jejune, or overloaded; but on the other hand it is sometimes most honest and appealing, like the autobiography of a saint; and taken as the confessions of a romantic scepticism trying to shake itself loose from the harness of convention and of words, it may have a great dramatic interest and profundity. But not one term, not one conclusion in it has the least scientific value, and it is only when this philosophy is good literature that it is good for anything.

George Santayana - Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923)

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Parliament to reconvene re steel crisis

Fooled you!

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An extraordinary light painting

An artwork by photographer Darren Pearson

This is a composite photograph with added effects - but very striking.

Pearson's website is http://www.dariustwin.com/.

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VANUATU: Trouble in Babel

Reposted from The Polynesian Times:

Map: Google

"Florence Lengkon led a march through town and up to Parliament in which nearly a thousand people demonstrated their desire to see an end to violence against women," reported the Vanuatu Daily Post yesterday.

The trigger for this was an abduction and beating Lengkon received at the hands of bus and taxi drivers nearly a fortnight ago, following critical remarks she had posted on a community page on Facebook. She had called them arrogant and unprofessional for the way they had squabbled among themselves when trying to get business from visiting tourists (and for stoning a tour bus). Lengkon herself runs a helicopter business in Port Vila.

There are many facets to this story: risks in social media discussions, attitudes to women, the poverty that tempts men to misbehave when the chance to make some money presents itself, the great disparity between them and rich Westerners passing by in their floating castle, tourism itself in the form of a brief condescending gawp at other cultures, the question of how small Pacific nations should develop and sustain themselves, what will happen to them if there is a long global recession, etc.

For those who aren't involved, one aspect of the story that pops out is the fact that Lengkon's comments were written in Bislama, one of the three official languages of the Republic.

Bislama is a kind of pidgin English widely used there because the country has over 100 different languages and dialects: "Vanuatu is considered to be the country with the highest density of languages per capita in the world, with an average of about 2,000 speakers for each indigenous language; only Papua New Guinea comes close," says Wikipedia.

There is probably a connection to PNG: Vanuatu may have been colonised by Autronesian speakers as early as 4,000 - 6,000 years ago in the eastward expansion from what is now Papua, which itself saw the arrival of humans some 60,000 years ago, together with other movement into Australia.

Many languages of small communities are considered "endangered" - there was a UNESCO conference about this in 2008. But perhaps preserving them is a futile, Canute-like attempt.

Not to worry; in the far future, when our current energy-rich civilisations are forgotten, there will be isolation and cultural-linguistic variation again, just as island wildlife mutates to take advantage of local niche opportunities.

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