This contrarian argument, on the resilience of America’s shale industry in the face of the unfolding OPEC “price war”, is the pretext to host a discussion about a topic that is at once too huge to ignore, and too byzantine to elegantly comprehend. The most obvious complication — bypassed entirely by this article — is the harsher oil geopolitics, shaped by a Saudi-Russian proxy war over developments in the Middle East (and Russian backing of the Assad regime in Damascus, most particularly). I’m not expecting people here to be so ready to leave that aside.

Clearly, though, the attempt to strangle the new tight-oil industry in its cradle is a blatantly telegraphed dimension of the present Saudi oil-pricing strategy, and one conforming to a consistent pattern. If Mullaney’s figures can be trusted, things could get intense:

… data from the state of North Dakota says the average cost per barrel in America’s top oil-producing state is only $42 — to make a 10% return for rig owners. In McKenzie County, which boasts 72 of the state’s 188 oil rigs, the average production cost is just $30, the state says. Another 27 rigs are around $29.

If oil-price chicken is going to be exploring these depths, there’s going to be some exceptional pain among the world’s principal producers. Russia is being economically cornered in a way that is disturbingly reminiscent of policy towards Japan pre-WWII, when oil geopolitics was notoriously translated into military desperation. Venezuela will collapse. Iran is also under obvious pressure.

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This blog has doubtless generated rafts of unreliable predictions. The one that has been nagging, however — ever since Scott Alexander called me out on it in the comment thread there — was advanced in the most recent sub-episode of this series. Quote: “Baghdad will almost certainly have fallen by the end of the year, or early next.” Even if the time horizon for this event is stretched out to the end of March 2015, I have very low confidence in it being realized. The analysis upon which it was based was crucially flawed. I’m getting my crow-eating in early (and even if — by some improbably twist of fortune — ISIS is in control of Baghdad by late March next year, it won’t be any kind of vindication for the narrative I was previously spinning.)

Where did I go wrong (in my own eyes)? Fundamentally, by hugely over-estimating the intelligence of ISIS. The collapse of this inflated opinion is captured by a single word: Kurds.

Just a few months ago, ISIS enjoyed a strategic situation of extraordinary potential. It represented the most militant — and thus authentic — strain of Arab Sunni Jihad, ensuring exceptional morale, flows of volunteers from across the Sunni Muslim world, and funding from the gulf oil-states, based upon impregnable legitimacy. It was able to recruit freely from the only constituency within Iraq with any military competence — the embittered remnants of Saddam’s armed forces, recycled through the insurgency against the American occupation, and then profoundly alienated by the sectarian politics of the new Shia regime. It was also able to draw upon a large, fanatically motivated, Syrian Sunni population, brutalized and hardened by the war against the (Alawite, or quasi-Shia) Assad regime in that country. Both enemy states were radically anathematized throughout the Sunni world, deeply demoralized, incompetent, and patently incapable of asserting their authority throughout their respective countries. In consequence, a re-integrated insurgent Sunni Mesopotamia had arisen, with such historical momentum that it served as a concrete source of inspiration for energetic holy war, and a natural base for the eschatalogically-promised reborn Caliphate.

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Time for another of these. The rule, remember, is that the instance picked upon has to exemplify a laughably mindless meme. Like this:

@JayMan471 @matthewherper @David_Dobbs @jason_pontin @charlesmurray The Bell Curve has been well refuted. I am dismayed that you cite it.

— Karen James (@kejames) December 2, 2014

Politically incorrect research, however solidly established, is especially singled out for this treatment. Some approved (i.e. Leftist) authority somewhere has provided the excuse to dismiss awkward findings, so that the painful stimulus can be suppressed, and — just to be safe — even the pretext for suppressing it is best forgotten, leaving only the permission to be undisturbed in public circulation. All crime-think has been ‘well refuted’ (sociologically a priori) as far as these people are concerned. “It’s been well refuted” means exactly “wouldn’t it be nice if this didn’t exist?” (or “nice people have told us we don’t need to worry about that”).

Refuted where?

@DocCLAR @JayMan471 @pseudoerasmus This is ridiculous. You can google just as well as I can.

— Karen James (@kejames) December 2, 2014

Amused yet?

ADDED: A banquet of ‘well refuted’ science at Slate.

From Erasmus, Moriae Encomium, which can be found here, but adopted in this case as translated by Sir Edmund Whittaker (in his A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricty, Volume I, p.3):

There are innumerable niceties concerning notions, relations, instants, formalities, quiddities, and haecceities, which no-one can pry into, unless he has eyes that can penetrate the thickest darkness, and there can see things that have no existence whatever.

Appealing enough, already, in its light-footed philosophical modernism, it becomes utterly sublime when tackled — inversely — by the method of ‘hyper-literal anagogy’. It then suggests a Miltonic recovery of ancient philosophy, undertaken — with blind irony — by modernity itself.

Does this look like something that’s about to die?

(This is among the few topics that puts my reverence for the Moldgod under serious strain.)

More here:

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(Open thread, links …)

In and around the NRx (highlights): Steel anarchism (and response). This opaque but intriguing stuff is also, probably, relevant. An epic delve into global complexity. The Gutenberg shock. A Watsoned world (background), further comment. The propertarian alternative (more, and more). Democracy on display (plus a reminder).

Race war round-up: between two worlds (more tightrope walking). Integration from the left: “It’s impos­si­ble for a white per­son to believe in cap­i­tal­ism and not believe in racism,” Mal­colm said in a 1964 dis­cus­sion. “You can’t have cap­i­tal­ism with­out racism.” — which simplifies things. Cut the riot shaming. Blame the cops, or Obama, or leftist race politics, or black family breakdown, or befuddlement, or idiots. “The real message of Ferguson: we are [seeing multiculturalism itself] go up in flames. A polity where the Chief Executive has to address the people over a local law enforcement matter is fatally unstable.” Let it burn. The unsaid. The anti-MLK.

America’s half-hidden welfare state. Bubbelology.

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John Michael Greer is a writer with whom, ultimately, I agree on almost nothing. Yet he turns up here a lot, and rarely — if ever — as a target of disparagement. It is understandable if that confuses people. (It is not a phenomenon that is lucidly intelligible even to myself.)

The most obvious reason to return so incessantly to Greer is the sheer consistency of his deep cycle theorizing, which achieves a conceptual elegance rarely seen elsewhere. At some point, the UF series on his historical thinking (1, 2, 2a) will reach some articulate conclusions about this. Still, there’s more to the engagement than that.

A recent Archdruid Report post on the limits of science (and, as always, many other things) added further indications of profound error, from the perspective of this blog. It hinges its overt arguments upon an impregnable fact-value distinction, which is a peculiarly weak and local principle, especially for a mind so disposed to a panoramic cosmic vision. Yet the post is also provocative, and clarifying. Responding to one of his commenters, who suggested that without the prospect of continued scientific and technological advance life loses all meaning, Greer repeats the lines from Dante that have just been hurled against him, and encapsulates them — by explicitly activating their own irony:

“Consider your lineage;
You were not born to live as animals,
But to seek virtue and knowledge.”

It’s a very conventional sentiment. The remarkable thing about this passage, though, is that Dante was not proposing the sentiment as a model for others to follow. Rather, this least conventional of poets put those words in the mouth of Ulysses, who appears in this passage of the Inferno as a damned soul frying in the eighth circle of Hell. Dante has it that after the events of Homer’s poem, Ulysses was so deeply in love with endless voyaging that he put to sea again, and these are the words with which he urged his second crew to sail beyond all known seas — a voyage which took them straight to a miserable death, and sent Ulysses himself tumbling down to eternal damnation.

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If you believe in yourself, you’ll believe in anything. – Nicola Masciandaro

Based – very roughly – on a true story.

[Subsequent content carries a vulgarity and decadence warning, for sensitive readers.]

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[44-year-old Terry Davis, the founder and sole employee of Trivial Solutions has] done this work because God told him to. ​According to the TempleOS charter, it is “God’s official temple. Just like Solomon’s temple, this is a community focal point where offerings are made and God’s oracle is consulted.” God also told Davis that 640×480, 16-color graphics “is a covenant like circumcision,” making it easier for children to make drawings for God. God demands a perfect temple, and Davis says, “For ten years, I worked on programming TempleOS, full time. I finished, basically, and the last year has been tiny touch-ups here and there.”

Within TempleOS he built an oracle called AfterEgypt, which lets users climb Mt. Horeb along with a stick-figure Moses. At the summit, a round scrawl of rapidly changing color comes into sight — the burning bush. Before it you should praise God. You can praise Him for anything, Davis says, including sand castles, snowmen, popcorn, bubbles, isotopes, and sand crabs.

(Link.)

(VPN isn’t working, for some reason, which makes almost everything impossible. No trawling about on the Internet, or twittering, today. In frustration, I’m initiating a new series — it’s ‘Quotes notes’ but decadently devoted to pure style. Feel free to consider it throat-clearing.)

Not necessarily single sentences, but no more than three (as a preliminary rule). First off, from Iain M. Banks’ The Algebraist (p.52):

He cleared his throat and sat more upright, telling himself he wasn’t going to fall asleep. But he must have, because when the screams started, they woke him.