Recommended Reading
[by Mark Safranski, by “zen“]
Top Billing! Pete Turner Afghan Polling and what it Really Means
One last thing about the DoS and it’s polling. My personal experience working near the DoS folks is they lack the ability to know what the “people” think. They usually make decisions in a vacuum and tend to disregard the people they are seeking to serve.
This is a critical statement, but I’ve seen on any number of occasions large scale decisions, assessments and plans being worked without the presence of an Afghan. The “Accountability Ladder” of DoS is culturally ignorant and often times offensive, even dangerous, to the people the DoS seeks to help.
Second, Glevum Associates. How do I say this succinctly? I don’t trust anything they produce. My direct experience with Glevum has shown a serious lack of credible information being collected by this organization. One example should suffice…We requested a survey for the district I was researching. Keep in mind, I had previous experiences with Glevum in Iraq that made me reluctant to use their data. This time, when we received our data, I laughed. Glevum Associates had managed to survey more people than the reported population of the district. Again, they found more people than actually exist in this district.
The Orthosphere – Post-Literacy and the Refusal to Read
….Increasingly students tell me that they “can’t understand” the reading. If they referred to Plato’s Symposium, the confession would be easy to interpret. Abstract argument, syllogisms, and the refutation of syllogisms pose difficulties for inexperienced readers. However, the texts that students tell me they “can’t understand” are The Odyssey or a novel by Hawthorne or Melville or a short story by Ray Bradbury. In the case of The Odyssey, I assign Palmer’s WWI-era prose translation, so as not to traumatize the readership by confronting it with narrative in verse. Students are telling me that they can’t understand stories, where one thing happens which leads to another and so forth. Students give voice to a different, a radical species of incomprehension that bodes ill for the culture, the society, and the polity that they will constitute. Their bafflement harbingers the age of post-literacy.
….The post-literate subject somewhat resembles the oral subject: His world is a purely personal world; he is ego-centered and yet his ego is a strictly limited one in correspondence with his limited intellectual horizon; he does not precisely lack objective standards, but he tends to resent and therefore to reject them as infringements on his libido. Like the oral subject, the post-literate subject communicates through what Ong calls the verbo-motor activity of gestures, body-language, and face-making. He is demonstrative and body-centered. Like the oral subject, the post-literate subject thinks not for himself butwith the group. Like any tribesman or clansman, the post-literate subject is quick to be “offended.” His is not E. R. Dodd’s “guilt culture,” that product of the higher, scriptural religions; his is, rather, Dodd’s “shame culture,” the default ethos of pre-literate societies.
On the other hand, post-literacy is not a relapse into orality, which, in its intact form, has institutions of its own such as folklore and social custom that codify the knowledge essential to living. Post-literacy can draw on no such resources, for these have only been preserved in modern society in literature, and post-literacy has not only lost contact with literature, but also it simply no longer knows how to read in any meaningful sense. It cannot refer to the archive to replenish itself by a study of its own past. Post-literacy is therefore also, to borrow a phrase from Oswald Spengler, history-less.
Hat tip to James Bennett
Oil Review Middle-East (Christopher Gunson) – US shale revolution poses no threat to Middle East market
Many commentators have speculated that this will create a new geopolitical balance, one that will weaken the traditional oil and gas producers of the Middle East, such as Saudi Arabia. But the impact of the shale revolution on the global oil and gas supply chain is misunderstood.
The role of Middle East oil exporters in the global economy remains secure and the direct impact of US shale on the global market is commonly overestimated.
Crude oil comes in different density grades (heavy or light) and with different levels of sulfur. Shale oil is light with little sulfur, yet many US refineries are designed to accommodate heavy sulfur-rich crudes, typically imported from Canada, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. These refineries cannot be easily recalibrated to refine light sweet shale crude oil, which means that heavy high-sulfur crude oil will continue to be imported into the US oil refining and petrochemical supply chain.
Arabian crude oil share predominately exported eastward to Japan, China, and Korea. This supply chain will remain unchanged. Simply put, US shale oil cannot easily offset traditional Arabian oil supplies to Asia — the oil requires different refining capabilities and there is geographic logic in the existing supply chain. The immediate impact of US shale oil production is to reduce imports of light oil from producers such as Nigeria.
War on the Rocks (Adam Elkus) – The Odd Sheikh Out: A Complex Problem
Small Wars Journal – California-Raised Kids vs. Mexico’s Violent Cartel and Recent Santa Muerte Spiritual Conflict Trends
Global Guerrillas- Bossnapping
Daveed Gartenstein-Ross – Interpreting al Qaida
Science News – Thinking hard weighs heavy on the Brain
The Volokh Conspiracy – Ninth Circuit to Hear Challenge to Obamacare’s “Platonic Guardians” January 28
Venkatesh Rao –Consent of the Surveiled
Slightly East of New – Can America Win Wars? and Boyd Conference in San Diego
That’s it!
January 21st, 2014 at 12:44 am
My comment addresses the second article you linked to by the Bunkers — I’d have posted it at SWJ if I’d been able to find the comment box!
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First off, I’d like to express my appreciation to the Bunkers for their continuing monitoring of the situation in Mexico, including the religious aspects.
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I have a few comments about nomenclature, but first I want to say that bringing the attention of the “action-reaction cycle” to the SWJ and Zenpundit readerships is a significant service, and that the concern expressed regarding the “older and more benign form of Santa Muerte” and the current status of its adherents in a sort of limbo is an important one. My grateful thanks.
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As to nomenclature, I’d first like to mention that terms like “spiritual conflict” “spiritual warfare” etc now have three meanings — one relating to the internal combat of the soul, as exemplified by Dom Lorenzo Scupoli’s The Spiritual Combat (1589, now perhaps better known in Orthodox circles) — one used largely in and around the Pentecostal circles associated with C Peter Wagner and the New Apostolic Reformation movement, and meaning prayer campaigns to remove demons stated to overshadow specific cities and geographic areas (eg the Everest and Ephesus “operations”, cf Michael Reid, Strategic Level Spiritual Warfare: A Modern Mythology? p. 154) — and one for cultic clashes such as the Mexican examples the Bunkers describe. The Bunkers’ phrase, “potential spiritual insurgency” nicely avoids any confusion. And there are interesting parallels here with the uses of the word jihad, no?
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Second, I’d like to ask the Bunkers what exactly they mean by the “deification” of narco based Santa Muerte. Do the narcos consider her a saint or a deity — and is there in fact any difference in their minds between the two?
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The issue of heresy and blasphemy is another interesting one, and here I’d note that celebrating the Eucharist in a chapel devoted to Santa Muerte would be a blasphemous desecration, but not a heresy — as I understand it, a heresy is an aberrant theological position or belief, while desecration is an act — and a blasphemy can be either verbal or enacted. Thus “the heresy charge being leveled against Santa Muerte and its worshipers by the Church” makes sense, while “such a mass — potentially what has been labeled a ‘black mass’ in this instance — would be considered a heresy” doesn’t. Furthermore, I suspect “black mass” isn’t a category in Catholic theological terms, though it certainly is in common parlance.
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On the issue of “contaminated” souls of the Templars, Joshua Partlow’s article gives a vernacular significance to his use of the word “contaminated” —
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I hope this hasn’t been too nit-picky — folk religion is none too orderly, while Catholicism is intensely so, so deciphering quite what certain terms mean when used by one or the other, or in communications between them, is a tricky business, albeit analytically worthwhile.
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Thanks again, and please keep us updated.
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Charles