Back in February 2013 the journal “Nature” ran an article by J. David Hughes exposing the rocky economics on which the shale gas-&-oil revolution in the United States rested. Huge levels of debt are required to fund the matrix of horizontal pipelines and the countless wells that have to be drilled before the black gold starts bubbling. And since the money only comes after the event, an oil shale company has to keep borrowing and investing to secure the oil to pay off the debt. The article was poo-pooed by many US pundits and ‘market experts’. Evidently, though, somebody in Saudi Arabia read it carefully, digested it, pondered and persuaded some else in his country to act, slowly but surely. On the NASDAQ today, a barrel of Brent was changing hands at just over 50 dollars. Many commentators have spoken of the shale oil operators requiring a price of at least 60 dollars to stay afloat. We can assume that many a smaller shale oil extractor is looking anxiously at the display each time his cell rings, worried it may be his bankers….
General
Three Shades of Black
The year 2014 saw Germany celebrate 25 years of unification, the last ten years of it spent with East German born-and-socialized Angela Merkel at its helm. The year also saw Germany celebrate its real return to the arena of world politics, with Russian-speaking Angela Merkel again playing a key role. As the only Western leader able to converse as an equal with Vladimir Putin she carefully helped guide Europe during the Ukraine crisis. Indeed, the Germany that was now enjoying what officialspeak calls ‘unity’ had emerged from the economic and financial crises of the Noughties robust (albeit with its growth rate dented) with the number of jobless down at a long-time low. Having now shouldered a geopolitical role more commensurate with its size, it stepped into 2015 as a big player.
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Ghost land
There are places that are frightening because at just about every corner you can sense oppression, you feel the fear in the air, air that seems thin, as if everyone were suffocating. In such places, people scurry along without looking at one another, words spoken in public are hushed, a world of whispers, where outspokenness is something for a courageous few. There are places where such scenes unfold, as the iron fist of tyranny is manifest at every street corner, the police are a terrifying instrument of maintaining order, not law.
Frangipani
The old guy with the wizened face, his eyes shaded by his baseball cap, has a high voice. He is singing background on Ti’amo in the pool-&-BBQ band that plays for the lunchtime buffet and through the afternoon in the Umubano Hotel in Kigali, Ruanda. Behind the little band stand is a giant frangipani tree, its yellow and white blooms catching the sunlight: Beauty without a fragrance. It doesn’t offer shade either, a tree only for the eye.
Dustville
Cairo is a city that is an architectural and urban design disaster. If the sentence is true that “all Egyptians want to be designers”, as one professor of the applied arts tells me, then it is a pity that this was not the case at least 30 years ago. Cairo is the city of the block, the slab, the monolith. It reflects the nimbus of construction in the country, whose first industrial champion was Arab Contractors, a state corporation that privatized and is now tantamount to a state itself. Having built the Assuan Dam it branched out. And was soon followed by the cement industry, which was in turn followed by the light breeze-brick industry. The slabs are often only two apartment boxes wide, with a single utility shaft for the elevator, stairs and piping. The sides of the building are left bare, no money shelled out for plasterwork – the desert dust will sandblast the red bricks beige soon enough.
Meaning that unless a tenant decides to paint the façade around the balcony, all buildings look alike in terms of dingy color tone, and their shapes differ only depending on whether they are cylindrical (next to the Nile) or a greater or lesser grid of boxes. And each sand-colored building is topped in the same inimitable way: by a crown of satellite dishes, all aligned in the same direction such that if you buzzed the city with a small plane the impression looking down would probably be similar to gazing across an extensive field of mussels all standing in rows reaching up into the water – from the sandy seabed below. Even at 25 storeys in height, it is a matter of 25 layers of identicalness. Difference is a matter of the interiors or the street life at ground level, or the proximity of gardens or parks, of which there are many – despite the excessive price of land that has prompted all these buildings to rush upwards, clamoring for space.
Uniform death
There was a time when battles were fought between groups of men wearing uniforms. While the clothing was in some cases sold to both sides by one and the same company, the uniforms were deliberately different; usually the colors contrasted, so that the soldiers, and as often as not they were mercenaries on the one side could see who it was they needed to kill, on the other side. This form of warfare runs like a red thread through western history from the American War of Independence, through Waterloo, to the Vietnam War. It assumed there was a clear “them” and an even more clear “us”. And things only got complicated if someone put on their outer uniform inside out and thus became a turncoat.
Post-mortem
for Alain
Chronologically and as regards popularity, first came post-modernism. Which is apposite, for it heralded a whole splat of ‘post’-movements that saw or see themselves as representative of contemporary society, which is, after all, the affluent society. Ever since the 1970s, that society has been typified by the shift out of the traditional mode of production that revolved around heavy industry, into what many have called a “post-industrial” economy. That was the first ‘post’ and it marked a social transition, as henceforth the service sector started to play an ever larger role – and industrial production was something done elsewhere. The term ‘post-industrial’ society is a bit of a misnomer, as here the ‘post’ actually means that post has to be sent to other parts of the world with the data for the industrial production there, for example in China.